Why can targeted advertising be smart enough to show me ads at home for something I searched on my PC at work, but not smart enough to not show me the same ad 10x in a row or for services for which I’ve already subscribed?
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Here’s the thing about the ad industry: almost all information we have on how effective an ad campaign is comes from the person selling the ads. Research about effectiveness? Funded by the ad industry. At one point, you could easily get a free subscription to any magazine you wanted because magazines got higher ad rates if their circulation went up. They thought they were fooling the advertising companies. But the best places to find free subscriptions were from advertising agencies, because the higher that magazine’s circulation the more people they could say their ads reach. It’s an incestuous cycle.
So like other people are saying, targeted advertising works by gathering what it can about you. It’s easy to get your name, gender, age, race, location, what you’re buying at Wal-Mart, if you’re having a period, if you have cancer, and a handful of other things about you.
Unfortunately it’s not easy to tell if you’re a Hulu subscriber unless you voluntarily give up that information. Hulu may sell information, but they *anonymize* it because they’d rather use their valuable data about you to advertise to you than give it up to someone else. In general, people just don’t take ad surveys.
Could they give you a button to say “I’m already subscribed, stop!” Sure. But the advertising agency doesn’t care. You are a person who fits a group Hulu paid to advertise to, and that’s all anyone in the equation cares about. Some number of people will see the ad and sign up, and the advertising agency will pat Hulu on the back and say, “See how well that worked? How about you pay us for another campaign?”
Could Hulu pay less to get the same number of subscribers? Absolutely. But the only people who have the data that could prove it are the people selling ads. That’s why they don’t track how many people they’re “wasting” ad impressions on: it’s bad for their business to be honest.
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