
Do customers benefit from highly targeted online ads? - okket
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/pedro-gardete-real-price-cheap-talk
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rygine
My limited experience with "targeted" ads comes from Amazon as they have
access to my extensive purchase history. However, they are completely useless
to me. I'm not sure why the system tries to advertise the same product (or
type of product) that I just purchased. This is the extent of the ads.

I would actually like to receive more relevant ads. "Hey, we saw that you
recently purchased a trash can, check out these garbage bags." There are so
many supportive or related products that would be relevant to things I've
bought. It's a no-brainer. Yes, I know there are "related" and "customers who
bought this..." on each product page. I'm talking about after the fact in the
days and weeks that follow the purchase.

And how about the option to say "No thanks, I'm not interested in these types
of products right now." or "I already have this."? Is this really a difficult
thing to implement?

Maybe I'm missing something.

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carb
Actually, a lot of ads (on Facebook at least) have the "I already have this"
option.

The type of Facebook ads that are heavily leveraged by Amazon are called "re-
targeting ads". True to their name, they target you again for something you've
already looked at. Usually, they serve to remind person being served the ad
about a product they looked at previously and _didn 't_ purchase. They're
actually very effective (which is why Amazon and others continue to use them,
despite how "creepy" they feel). The fact that you're shown re-targeted ads
after already purchasing an item points to a bug in Amazon's system and how it
interacts with Facebook.

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roywiggins
Facebook showed me an ad about an artist that I "Like" on Facebook- they had a
concert coming up near me in a couple weeks. This was a band I liked, but
hadn't been following closely, and wouldn't have known about their concert
otherwise- they had never toured anywhere near me before! Bought a ticket and
attended a great show.

This is the one and only time a targeted ad really was useful to me, but it
sure was useful.

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wernercd
Do customers benefit from targeted ads? Of course, otherwise why would Google
and Yahoo sell them to businesses...

Assuming you mean "customers" as in businesses... because you and me? We
aren't the customers... we are the products.

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ktRolster
If I could get ads that only showed me information I was interested in, they
would be great; but ads don't do that, not even close.

It's closer 10,000 useless ads for every ad I'm interested in, plus the
occasional malware thrown in.

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Overtonwindow
I think human nature is to ignore advertising, and block it out. Quick: What's
the last ad you saw before going to this website? I think most won't be able
to recall. Targeted or not, viewers are blocking ads from their sensory inputs
as a matter of course. The problem is that companies don't want to accept this
and continue to beat the dead horse of advertising, despite mountains of
evidence it doesn't work, and consumers hate it.

~~~
darpa_escapee
Unfortunately, nobody is above the psychological mechanisms that advertising
exploits.

It is manipulation that sidesteps rationality and hijacks a supposedly 'free
actor'. This is why it must be eliminated.

~~~
Theo59
If it weren't for a Facebook ad I probably wouldn't have had a skin condition
checked out that turned out to be incurable without medication. This is the
opposite of exploitation.

After this experience I began to trust this form of targeting but still think
'retargetting' is annoying (I publicly stumped one of the execs at Adroll when
I asked 'why do we need retargetting?')

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visarga
Instead of the advertisers collecting information on me and targeting ads to
me, I'd rather block all ads except a few. I'd collect my own profile data and
only allow to pass a few ads related to my interests. If there were no more
than one ad per hour, on a topic I want to see, then I wouldn't mind so much.

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ikeboy
1\. This does not test its assumptions, no data was collected as far as I can
tell

2\. This appears to assume that consumers are rational

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ktRolster
The purpose of the paper (as I see it) is to draw attention to some older
research that is relevant to problems we have today. In that sense, it seems
like a reasonable contribution.

