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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same ad 10 times in a row, just means they paid more for the type of people group they chose. they don’t want to oversaturate you with the same information, that just what happens ad algorithms have a strict impressions(views per time) to chase after and a limited pool of ads to choose from.
Ads are “smart” enough nowadays that your profile follows you from work to home.
You see the same ads a lot because the advertisers pay a lot to keep their brand in your mind.
You see ads for services you subscribe to because your profile matches people who use those services.
Here’s how advertisement works for me:
I research and purchase thing independently
ads start appearing for thing I already purchased
My eyes glaze over and I start mentally checking out during all other advertisements because i assume its not relevant to me.
Advertising doesnt get me to buy anything, it just pesters me about a thing long after I have purchased said thing
The advertisers don’t know if you’ve subscribed or not. They only know that you were considering subscribing, because Google tracked your browsing history but not your purchase history.
The one thing that people are missing in the answers here is repetition. Marketers know that repeated exposure to their adds increases the odds you’re going to click/purchase/act. In other words, they want you to see the same add 10x.
There are different levels of targeting. Some things are directed at you specifically because of your search and purchasing habits. Other things are directed at you more generally based on your demographic information.
For example, if you look for a bike part, you’ll get a bunch of ads for more bike related things because you’ve identified yourself as a person who buys bike things.
If you’re a woman in her twenties/thirties, you’re going to get a bunch of advertising related to pregnancy and having children, regardless of whether or not you have or want children, because you are in the prime “going to have a child” demographic. The same is true for other goods and services—the company identifies what their target customer looks like and the ad servicer shows those ads to people who fit that profile.
It’s not really about being “smart” enough to target you, it’s about the level of targeting. Plus, streaming services often have an ad free option, so they really don’t have much incentive to make your ad experience pleasant/nonrepetitive. If you get annoyed enough, you’ll pay them more to have the ad free tier.
That’s not how advertising works. Let’s use google as the advertiser in this example:
* Advertiser retrieves all the data points it has on you: Gender, age, race, location, recent searches, etc.
* Advertiser identifies what kind of an ad to display: audio or video, 15-second skippable, 30-second required, etc.
* Then the advertiser goes to all of the applicable ads with your data points and asks “Who will pay the most money to advertise to this target?”
* Whoever pays the most gets the spot.
Until a time when advertisers care about viewer fatigue or brand damage through over-saturation enough for it to affect advertisers’ bottom line, advertisers will probably not address this, as the status quo results in the most money possible for them.
Most brands use a media agency / ad agency to run their campaigns. Often they are more interested in who should get their ads than those who shouldn’t – and the media agency, and publishing platforms (e.g. google) that are running the campaigns are interested in pushing more ads to get more money from the brands running the ads. So if the advertiser hasn’t defined any exclusion rules (e.g. existing customers, people that reached a certain “thank-you-page”, etc) then you can bet your hat that the media agency is going to keep pushing ads.
To the first part of your question, it takes 5-7 brand impressions to produce awareness & recall, and that’s the absolute minimum. Marketers know this and simply structure their campaigns as such — although the smart ones use frequency caps which will limit the number of times you see an add in a given timeframe, which saves money and helps to not piss the user off as much.
Regarding why you’re seeing ads for products/services you already own/subscribe to… the main reason is most ad algorithms/platforms simply don’t know you’re a customer. That is considered backend info and lives behind the walls of the advertisers systems/CRM. There are some integrations between those and ad systems, for example using suppression lists (to address this very issue), but they are limited and can get thrown off easily (I.e. switch from laptop to phone or Chrome to Safari, and it loses the data point that associates you with being a customer and bam.. more ads).
Finally, at the end of the day it’s a #’s game and ad budgets are huge (in the multi millions of dollar range as a standard). Marketers know a certain % of their ad spend will be wasted on advertising to ppl who will never buy, existing customers, bots, etc. but the upside from the ads that do reach the target audience is so big that it makes it worthwhile.
Ad companies get paid money for showing you ads.
They only have to convince the ad buyer (not you, the company wanting to sell you something) that you are a potential customer.
You are not the target of the ad company. The business selling stuff is their customer.
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