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I think it was proctor gamble that zeroed out their $200 million yearly adtech spend and saw zero impact to their sales from it. There’s a good possibility we’re making everything terrible just so that Zuckerberg and friends can keep getting richer to nobody else’s actual benefit.
I lived in a country where people don’t speak English. There’s a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn’t understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn’t figure even that absolutely critical detail out.
This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.
If the ad companies can’t even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.
It works well enough to get returns on ad spend.
It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance
The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
I think “surveillance” doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. “Surveillance” sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
that’s right, those lucky strike ads in 50s mags? Government surveilance.
Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since
Everyone likes to think the ads don’t work.
The ads absolutely work.
They work on you as well.
People: Ads don’t work
Also people: Everyone knows what Raid Shadow Legends is
Ah fuck I actually don’t have an argument for this one I’ve heard friends and family quote that shit
I’m still curious what kinda scam that perpetually-screaming-dude-in-armor ads are pushing. I don’t even know what the title of the game is, but that annoying shit must work on a lot of people I guess.
The person in the image also is overestimating how many people use adblockers. Most people i know watch youtube on their cellphones or tvs infested with ads.
Really? You mean the ads I’m shown in a language that I don’t speak work on me? How is that? Do they emit mind-control rays or something?
Ads aren’t just verbal, they are also visual. A “strong brand” would be instantly recognizable even if you don’t know the language at all.
E.g. you probably almost immediately know what this is, without even knowing the alphabet:
That’s kind of the point, advertisements are intentionally designed as brain worms which interact with deep parts of your brain and get you to instinctively associate them with something (ideally positive, but even general awareness is beneficial).
The “algorithms” are also dumb as fuck. For example on a large retailer site you spend a couple of hours browsing for a particular kind of item. You are comparing different kinds, looking up reviews and issues, watching YouTube videos about them. And finally you pull the trigger and but the thing. Then for the next 3 months that site (and others that picked up on the research) will go: Hey here are some more of that thing you like, you really liked it right? Would you like to compare some more items? Uhm no, I actually bought said thing, you made the sale. All of that “targeted” advertisement is just wasted, I have zero interest anymore since the need has been filled.
It’s either that or stuff I can’t afford (like memory or graphic cards) or really weird stuff I have no idea why it’s being shown to me. Sometimes very alarmingly so. Just recently I got an ad that said “Popular in your region” and it was for illegal Nazi dogwhistle flags, “self defense knifes”, baseball bats and tracksuits. That’s a bit scary. On the other hand the same site gave me an ad for an “easy to conceal” blowjob machine sex toy. Like holy shit what kind of people are living in my region?
Targeted ads have been terrible for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I ever bought anything through an ad or hardly ever even clicked on them. Only time I click on them is because the site and my adblocker are fighting and when I try to click somewhere on the page, it inserts an ad the last millisecond, shifts the entire page so I accidentally click on it.
Amazon thought I was a toilet seat collector for 3-6 months after I bought a 3-pack. No amount of not clicking on those promoted items could convince them otherwise.
It thought I was a transvestite for lime a year after a Christmas where I bought my my mom a sweater, and my girlfriend jewelery.
Like full on recommending me panties and lingerie in my mens size 32 waist.
well that’s the problem. people usually buy one
I bought a used school bus on eBay a few years ago (to turn into a skoolie) and since then I’ve been bombarded with ads for used school buses. I can assure anyone interested that one is more than enough. Yes, there are school districts and companies that maintain large fleets of school buses, but they do not buy them on fucking eBay.
One of the parts that gets me is there is a good opportunity for more sales there (if that should happen is another debate I don’t have the energy for). A few years ago I bought an electric kettle. So cue months of ads for electric kettles. It’s a kettle, you only need one. Now if I had been shown different teas or coffees, stuff I would use the kettle to make, they would have absolutely hooked me easily. I had a new toy, I was excited to use it, I would have loved trying new teas with it. I still did, but they were all ones I chose.
Yup! Bought an android phone on Amazon. I got a bunch of ads for phones or incompatible accessories. Amazon… You know I bought a android phone, why are you selling me a lightning cable? You know it was a pixel phone, why are you selling me a phone case for a Samsung s series phone?
I’ll piss off a bunch of lemmy users with this but… I don’t mind ads. I hate useless ads. As you said, ads about teas or coffees would of been useful for you. 99% of the time if I buy something I don’t need more of that, maybe some associated stuff but not that. If I buy a video card yesterday I don’t need another one. Sell me the latest games. Sell me da monitor with high fps/resolution to show off what the video card can do. I buy a clothes washer, I don’t need another one. Sell me detergent. Sell me fabric softener.
How have all the advertising companies missed this?
True. If I buy a fridge try selling me other kitchen appliances because I might be remodeling. Don’t try to sell me more fridges. This is ludicrous!
I still get recommended tampons because my ex-gf bought some with my Amazon account 5+ years ago. Peak recommendation brilliance.
can you imagine being a transman post hysterectomy?
FUCKING NO! I don’t use those anymore!
I always just assumed I was too weird to effectively algorithmicly advertise to. I’m far away from the average American by a lot of measures and my interests are very niche.
When I get suggestions or ads they feel like they are for someone else a lot (I like your blowjob machine example, many ads assume I’m male and lonely even though I’m a woman. Maybe that demographic is so lucrative and I’m so hard to sell to that I get those ads)
I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there’s like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?
Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.
They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the fist ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn’t realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I’ve been calling it Dropshipmas.
Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.
How did you find out? Did you talk about it?
They were pretty happy to volunteer the info. He still gave me the duplicate!
You think that’s an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That’s where the insane money is. That’s the long game. 🤢🥲
Middlemen make the most money of any profession.
Market Makers. Insurance. Everyone involved in the mortgage world. Research publications. Mid-level managers.
I’m a mid-level manager. I do make a good amount of money.
Was about to comment similarly 🤪
I’m going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.
A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.
But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with “autootymization”, so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad “back in a day”. Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.
Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.
I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.
We are fucked.
I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.
I think it’s different if you consider ads as a way to maintain the status quo.
Like, there’s an ad I keep seeing on TV where 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago plays as parents struggle to keep up with the parenting responsibilities of their toddlers. It’s an ad for Amazon. And thank god for Amazon for being available to help these parents.
And like…everybody knows about Amazon. Nobody is going to suddenly sign up for a Prime account after seeing this ad. However, parents or expecting parents who already have Prime accounts are going to relate to the people in the ad and not even consider other options for their parenting needs.
Maybe a very specific example, and their are certainly ads just telling you to buy chicken nuggets, but I’m seeing it more and more.
Edit: Or hell, look at detergents. Do you really think Tide has innovated anything in the past 30 years?
It’s about being in your mind-space, even days later in the shop. Which works 50/50 on some people and not at all on the others. But that’s good enough to bother all of humanity i guess.
Which means ads follow the same rules as so-called “pick up artists.” No wonder they annoy me so much.
Yeah like McD reminding you about their big Mac and fries. They know you know about it but they want to think about food because you might be slightly hungry and could eat. They are not ads but subliminal messages.
And you’ll remember the ad when you drive by a Makkers a few days later
Not once, even when I was a little kid, have I been convinced to want a product more because of an ad like that. People know about McDonald’s, they know about Coca-Cola, they know about Hilton, they know about Disney+, the only real reason they have to advertise is to tell us about their new products that some of them have once in a while, or a deal of some kind. I can understand Dreamworks advertising a new movie for about a week, after that, the public probably knows. Same thing for Chick-Fil-A’s new sandwiches and whatnot. But they never stop. They go for a month and a half, two even. Other brands, like Marriott, nothing’s changed. We know that we can buy a hotel room and get free breakfast, we know, we’ll pay for it if/when we need it, but we’re not getting a room just for the “experience”. These ads must be working, they’ve been dumping money into them for over a century at this point, maybe I’m just too autistic to understand how.
It’s not about convincing people to buy the product. It’s about keeping the brand in the public consciousness. For example, they want Coca-Cola to be synonymous with carbonated soft drinks, so that when you want to buy a soda, the first option you think of is Coke, and not Pepsi or some other brand.
It’s very much this. They aren’t trying to introduce you to this thing that’s been an institution for longer then any of us have been alive. They’re advertising to take up the limited realestate in our conscious minds.
If I were a crackpot theorist, which I am not but I dabble, I would say I wouldn’t be surprised if ads serve as a medium of population control.
It’s not about the ads to buy things. That’s part of it for sure, but it’s more than that.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. want your data, your habits, routines, opinions, etc, so they can influence the way you think and behave and understand the world.
There’s a clip I saw recently of Peter Thiel saying they could never get people to vote for the things they want to do, so instead they are using technology to change things.
Even if you block ads, if you still use platforms owned by tech mega-corps, they have your data. Sure you might not see the targeted ads, and so you think you’re coming out ahead, but you don’t realize that every piece of content you see between the ads you’ve blocked is being filtered to influence the way you think about the world.
I mean I think that it does work on most people. I have a few people in my life who just don’t block ads. Some of them do not even change their radio frequency when ads play through it. They think that they can choose for it to not affect them, but that’s not really how propaganda works.
Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who’d never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, “Fuck it, let’s just _____”
I have friends who don’t use adblockers (!) but I have never heard anyone say that they bought something they saw in an ad.
I will admit I have looked into products (not clicked-through) shown in apps where ads were targeted and fed in, and couldn’t be bypassed in a simple way (e.g. instagram). It’s how I eventually found a decent mattress. But this is a 1 in a million instance given how many ads they show.
Do you mean specifically from online advertising? Because unless they live in an impoverished country and never buy commercially purchased products they almost certainly have purchased something they’ve seen in an ad. Many people think they aren’t influenced by advertising, because they haven’t seen an ad for Coca-Cola and then immediately gone out and purchased a bottle of Coke, but advertising can be very influential in subtle ways that many people don’t even notice.
I, for one, specifically go out of my way to not purchase things that have been advertised to me, but I also only see about one ad per year on average, because ads are a known malware vector and not blocking ads is just bad security hygiene. Not having to constantly be force-fed capitalism slop is just a nice side benefit.
But yeah, my particular 'tism mostly manifests as spite in this case, and from what I’ve heard tell from other Lemmings I’m in pretty good company in that regard with this group. We just need to figure out how to export that spite to the common man.
Obviously I mean no one has gone oh I saw x in an ad on Facebook and went to buy it and not I bought a Coca Cola.
That’s because you misunderstand the purpose of ads.
The coke ad doesn’t expect you to run out and buy a coke, the point is next time you stand in the isle for cola you’re “spontaneously” gonna grab some coke and not some other brand you haven’t heard of
I am aware of the purpose of ads, but thank you
I still get ads on Youtube on my TV, and it’s mindboggling how bad they are. Google literally has years of my search history (before I switched to DDG), and it still doesn’t understand that I’m vegan and not interested in any products that are not vegan. Putting on my tinfoil hat, I think it’s just a massive data collection ruse masked as “personalized ads”.
There was a small window around 2010 when Google’s targeted Ads is actually kinda good (which is to say, not annoying and somewhat relevant).
Then everything enshittified.
I think hotwords worked the best on me because I thought it was a link to something in the article. But then the law changed and they had to put “ad” on the links and it killed them. Laws work, some what.
Most people don’t use adblockers
You have to remember we’re the minority.
There’s already enough effort put into sabotaging AD blockers. If everyone used AD blockers, there wouldn’t be enough effort on Earth to keep corporations from destroying them left and right.
Our safe-haven of an AD-free internet only exists precisely because most people just put up with it.
Having said that, I don’t like things like Sponsor-block. I’m perfectly fine with the mega-corporation not getting my money, but I absolutely do want to make sure the creators who are putting cool things out there are getting paid.
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