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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Some advertisers insist on a “frequency cap” but many advertisers do not. The publisher selling the ad space would rather sell more impressions than fewer because when they sell more, they make more money. So if the advertiser didn’t ask for a frequency cap, the publisher won’t voluntarily implement one.
As for why more advertisers don’t ask for frequency caps — sometimes there is a middle layer between the advertiser and the publisher called an agency. The agency will be often be judged by the advertiser based on how cheaply they are able to buy each ad impression and since publishers want to sell more impressions than fewer, they give a discount when more impressions are bought at once. Because the agency wants to pay as little as possible for each impression and the publisher wants to sell as many impressions as possible the agency and publisher may decide not to use a frequency cap so more impressions can be part of the buy.
Even if the advertiser doesn’t work with an agency, they may also want to pay as little as possible for each impression. And some advertisers may believe or even have data which shows that showing their ad to the same person over and over is best.
They don’t know you already have it. They have access to a lot of information, but not details like whether you already have or use a product. I often get league of legends ads when watching league of legends videos, they don’t know that I already play because that is not something they account for, they just know I fit the demographic.
Because the first is the job of the adserver, the second is the job of a media planner who doesn’t know how to manage capping.
Two reasons. One is that the publishers that push out the ads aren’t privy to when a sale takes place on a companies site. They see conversions through the lens of clicks and since you already visited the site you are deemed more likely to click again. The next reason is that the team working with the publisher hasn’t instituted frequency capping which is why you see the same ad consistently with seemingly no limit.
the ads you’re seeing for products that you’ve already subscribed is the *advertisers* (the company doing the advertising on the platform) fault – they haven’t excluded their own customers from their targeting.
super common amateur mistake a lot of advertisers do.
Ad “technology” is not “smart”. I hate the way everything nowadays is called a “smart” something-or-other, just to sound in-vogue. The cool word used to be ‘formula’, then ‘algorithm’, then ‘smart’, and now its moving to ‘AI’. None of these things are anything more than coding. Coding with some bullsh1t marketing to fool people.
On that note. Why do I suddenly get ads for vacuums after buying a vacuum. Despite never seeing a vacuum ad before.
Like you know I just bought this. I don’t need a vacuum now. Why show me ads for vacuum’s?
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.
It is smart enough, but the operators might not be.
The same way they can specify an audience of interests, or upload a bunch of existing customer profiles and ask for lookalikes, they can also upload recent registrations as a ‘negative’ audience to exclude
But it’s extra work, more skill, and assumes incentives are aligned right with ad departments and agencies, which is probably not the case.
oh they know, but they’ll get sued if they admit to it.
the algorithmn knows things about you that you may not even know, but they can’t tip their hand or we’ll actually try and get our privacy back. thats bad for business.
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