> A drop in advertiser spending is likely to occur from small or medium-sized advertisers, Kasamias believes, as they are clients "where cost efficiency is paramount and there is a physical footprint, as targeting the right user at the right time will become more difficult."
Frankly, what a load of horse shit.
The reason for the drop in spend isn't the lack of targeting potential. Ad companies talk about this, because it sounds less creepy than what's really going on. What marketing departments in companies want from location data, is the ability to attribute sales to campaigns. They carpet bomb everyone they can with ads, and then if someone coincidentally even brushes past a store on their commute, they claim that the customer visited a store.
It's absolute arcane crap. They have no incentive to make targeting better if tracking is pervasive, because they can wildly gesticulate at one datapoint that slimily suggests the customer was effected by the ad. Losing location tracking data reduces the effectiveness of attribution, for huge enterprises, who target everyone.
I have noticed that after I buy something I start seeing ads for the exact item, which I have never seen before. These aren’t things you buy more than once.
I always thought it was pretty dumb if you are serving ads for something someone just bought... but maybe they do it because some small % of people will click on it and they can claim the ad was associated with the sale in some hand-wavy way. Or maybe people are just more likely to click on these post-sale ads, and that’s all that matters.
This is a function of Marketing departments wanting to create large audiences. Large audiences mean more chance to attribute a sale, and also more impressive sounding campaigns.
The technical and time cost of implementing something that removes people who have made purchases from the audience (probably 0.001% of an audience) is much higher than simply adding someone who visited your website (lets say 5% of the audience) to the audience. If your product is reasonably ok, your largest group of customers is often your previous customers, so attributing the ads those previous customers see to their next purchase is logical for marketers.
I shifted my career into web dev, and got a bit more picky with the companies I applied to work for. I feel much better about my work now. You'll find something!!!
Ad Tech company X needs to only appear more effective than Y. Location data enables increased attribution, making X appear more effective. X may or may not have done anything that had a greater impact on the targets.
Frankly, what a load of horse shit.
The reason for the drop in spend isn't the lack of targeting potential. Ad companies talk about this, because it sounds less creepy than what's really going on. What marketing departments in companies want from location data, is the ability to attribute sales to campaigns. They carpet bomb everyone they can with ads, and then if someone coincidentally even brushes past a store on their commute, they claim that the customer visited a store.
It's absolute arcane crap. They have no incentive to make targeting better if tracking is pervasive, because they can wildly gesticulate at one datapoint that slimily suggests the customer was effected by the ad. Losing location tracking data reduces the effectiveness of attribution, for huge enterprises, who target everyone.
ed: I wrote a little blog about this in June - https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.htm...