Microblog Memes

I find it so funny how I use Spotify daily*, and the account is linked** to my google account that I use a lot, and in the past I made sure to downvote any ads that don’t fit my interests at all, so basically giving as much aminition to give some good targeted ads to me.

Turns out, after all that, I get rubbish collection ads, face mask ads and wastewater management ads, even though I have truly never thought about any of those nor have shown interest in them, AND I’ve shown tons of interest in only technology.

i think advertising purposes are just a front. They use it for something, but ads is just an afterthought/excuse for public.

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.

Everyone likes to think the ads don't work.

The ads absolutely work.

They work on you as well.

It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance

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.

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?

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?