I'm too lazy to run ad blockers. So I see plenty of advertising on the internet. Here's the thing: all the ads seem to be for things that I already bought. After I placed an order with Select Blinds, I started getting relentless Select Blinds ads on YouTube. After I made some charitable donations to Mercy Ships and Heifer International, their ads started following me around everywhere. My wife recently got on a new immunosuppressant medication, and now I see ads for that all the time. Great job targeting! But I already spent the money? So what is the point of all this?
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I’ve posted this comment before, but:
1. It’s hard to tell when someone has bought a product. You buy it at a reseller and the brand will never know. Or you buy it on mobile, but have researched the brand on desktop. Or you purchased it at work, but were researching it at home. Advertisers suppress known buyers but they don’t perfectly match you to all of your devices.
2. Just like there are not so good developers and not so good code, there are not so good marketers who aren’t that great at their job. Or they have too much work and didn’t set it up correctly. DSPs are extremely extremely complicated, so it’s to make mistakes.
3. Retention and advertising to previous purchasers drives more additional purchases. Maybe you only purchased blinds for the main floor of your house but not the basement.
How about, "I've literally got it in my last-day purchase history on eBay and they keep showing me the same thing and a bunch of related stuff to the item that hasn't even arrived yet, but that they've taken my money for"?
... and then eBay follows me around showing the same stuff on other sites. The thing I've purchased. From eBay. At least, they did, until I got more aggressive blocking ads and started using the internet a ton less.
Like, I’m the opposite of interested in buying it, I’m trying to get rid of it.
I've often bought stuff that didn't work for some reason. It was broken, or it had something that was bothering me. Maybe the power adapter was annoyingly loud (looking at you, Kyocera).
So I sent it back. But before I managed to go to the postal office a few days later I was already searching for a replacement online.
If I buy a TV set, I have indicated that I need/want a TV set. The rate of returns is broadly known (and maybe even specifically for me the return rate is known).
So Amazon et. al. do well to recommend similar stuff or things from the exact same product category to me.
Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will.
Or maybe the new TV turns out to be great, and I realize it would be nice to have a second one in my sleeping room, and why not buy a third one for the bathroom? ;-)
For example, sometimes for suppression brands literally just export a csv of customers and upload it to google. If your marketing guy does it once a week..
I’d assume eBay’s doesn’t work like that, but it’s possible. Also possible they just don’t suppress recently bought items !
There are zero incentives for anyone to figure this out and fix it within corporate structures. I'd be thankful it makes advertising easy to spot, and less effective in real life. ;-)
Imagine if you're in the middle management of Google and you realize that target ads don't work, and the results to this point are just luck. You'd want to do something like "Improve your advertising spend" by making the ads "more efficient", and selling targeted ads to people that you know have already purchased, but the advertiser doesn't.
Eventually you could advertise that your ads are measured to be more than 80% correlated with a rise in sales. (Leaving out the reversed causality).
If this IS the case... shhhhhh... don't tell anyone. It would crash Google's stock price. Nah, who am I kidding, the market stays irrational for decades. ;-)
Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
The VP of marketing of ebay realized that the keyword for which they spent the most money was "eBay". He thought this was nonsense and that people who looked for eBay should know how to get to their website, so he decided to save some marketing money and stopped putting money on they keyword. Result: no changes in the amount of visit to the website. However, the click-through rate, which is the metric by which marketing department was measured, decreased significantly. So the VP was fired and they even increased the money spent on the keyword.
We see this in the software industry all the time. Large organizations act inefficiently or against their own interests because large organizations don't actually have consciousness, instead their decisions emerge from the sum of a lot of little decisions and actions, each of which might be individually reasonable.
As an aside, I believe that's how large organizations can come to be evil even if the vast majority of members are not evil.
The book Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang does a good job covering this! (It is a solid bear case for fb,g,etc as well :p)
Nobody is confusing correlation and causation. These are rigorous studies completed by literal data scientists and statisticians. They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study, and showing positive outcomes where they do not occur would be hugely detrimental to their business.
And to your point, realizing advertising does not work happens all the fucking time. I see it literally all the time. It’s why you run studies. Then you take your budget, move it somewhere else, and run a test to see if it’s effective. Every major brand does it this way.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
Markets are imperfect and irrational, but you really don't think that there is a trillion dollar misunderstanding about the efficacy of the practice? Idk jack about advertising but it seems unlikely to me.
And in case of doubt ... they found that it is more advantageous to them to just keep bothering you.
The thing is, they're all wrong. Advertising is a trillion-dollar business because it works. The human mind is susceptible to suggestion, and it's been demonstrated over and over again for basically as long as we've had civilization.
What is ALSO true, however, is that ad dollars are exceeeeeedingly inefficiently deployed. Which is why you experience things like weird retargeting on things you've already boight. I experience this too -- there are several brands that for which I'm a happy paying customer and I still see their ads 1-2 times a day.
All you've said is "A big industry does this. Therefore it works on everyone".
Which doesn't follow at all. The industry doesn't have to work on everyone to be profitable, and could operate effectively even knowing that. Whether they'd be able to take peoples' money as effectively if they said "our ads work on 73% of people, making them 0.45% more likely to buy the advertised product"... doesn't matter.
The existence of whales on the online gaming market suggests a counter-strategy might be more effective: some people are very, very susceptible to ads. Targetting them is likely to be both cheaper and more effective than trying to get the attention of people who are minimally affected by ads.
It's hardly shocking news that the advertising industry might lie, though. To the clients as well as their targets.
* where I can. I still struggle with "sponsored" content, or fake review sites. It's becoming harder and harder to figure out what isn't an ad, and I hate it. If I see a good review, I don't know if it isn't an ad. If I see a bad review, I don't know it's not a competitor's doing.
I don't doubt that advertising works on me at some level. This is all the more reason to limit my own exposure to it. I'm one of those people who reacts with surprise and revulsion when we see what the Web looks like with ads.
>>> Which is why you experience things like weird retargeting on things you've already boight.
My favorites so far are the e-mails I get from online vendors, that say things like:
"People who bought shoes have also bought these items..."
"Here are some things to go with your batteries..."
>Advertising is a trillion-dollar business because it works
How many months in the corporate world did you spend before figuring out that money = results and substance takes precedence over appearance?
a) Someone recently bought blinds
b) Someone bought blinds 5 years ago
c) Someone hasn't bought blinds ever (maybe they're renting, or just tape newspaper to their windows)
Turns out, on average, the answer is a. Either because you're returning blinds you don't like and are in the market for replacements, or because you're doing a home remodel and once you fix up one window you'll need blinds for the next one. Even if most people who bought blinds won't be buying new ones in the next week, those are still better odds than advertising to someone who will never buy blinds in their entire life.
The fact is, online ads are super cheap.
What do you think if you included the option d) Someone recently made a search that included the word "blinds" ?
To answer your initial question, it works and it works really well. As advertisers, we see a significant difference in sales when we don't advertise online. This is especially true for search advertising and retargeting. ToFu first touch display advertising doesn't necessarily work as a sale generator. It's the subsequent advertising / display retargeting we do afterwards that works. Unfortunately for advertisers, the days of doing the way we do things will come to an end with third party cookies essentially going away. It'll be interesting to see how digital advertising changes (specifically for open garden platforms like Google ads) without the third-party cookies.
I have a list of authors I follow on amazon.com. It would be a better use of everyone's time if they just picked a random book from any of my favorite authors, made sure I hadn't already purchased it through amazon, and only then show it to me. It's like they're not even trying.
Maybe you do. I'm subscribed to Asimov's and SF&F electronic editions digitally via the Kindle store. Not even once have I noticed an ad for scifi/fantasy books on my Kindle. Most of the time it's fluffy bestsellers.
All I'll say is that they used pretty low down ways to get to people, one example that sticks out was the amount of targeting that went on late Friday, late Saturday night in APAC when folks would stumble home drunk and go online.
Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at these people, and it often resulted in multi thousand dollar sales, including a few automobiles!
- if the buyer was intoxicated, isn't that sale invalid?
- how is that in any way ethical?
However, it's massively, objectively, unequivocally unethical, and part of the reason I quit that place. And for the record, selling crap to drunk people in APAC was probably the least morally suspect tactic this company got up too.
Under what law? Am I not allowed to drunkenly order food at a restaurant? What's the threshold for a purchase that should be invalid?
Sadly, we don't hold capitalism to consent standards
Buyer’s remorse and post-purchase confirmation: You’re seeing ads for products you bought because the brand or marketing team decided to spend some more money to have you avoid buyer’s remorse and to reaffirm to yourself that the purchase was a good one.
This may or may not work, depending on the person and the product, but some of these things are probably not measured well enough to decide who should see the same ad and who doesn’t need to.
They have everything on me: my age, sex, social state and circles, location, life habits, profession, work hours, sleep hours, movie and porn preferences, which non-entertainment topics I’m interested in, which medical issues I have, and probably 50 more properties I never thought about.
But I never clicked on any nonsense they tried to advertise to me. I see nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing relevant to my life in ads. None of my new interests ever came from these flashy boxes.