Its also just bad salesmanship.

There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up.

So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact things I looked at will follow me around for the next several weeks. Dumber still, it will show me ads for an expensive item I already bought. Telegraphing my purchase history.

If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.

But this is Amazons engineering culture. Don’t reason about anything. Just try it and see. It’s amoral most of the time (but refusing to address ethics is itself immoral).

They are basically a giant factory for throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. I think all they can do is get more parasitic until people say no.

Wait. What does retargeting have to do with Amazon’s Engineering culture? Seems like a large leap in logic. Couldn’t it just as easily say “well, that’s Facebook’s caching layer not updating fast enough to remove finished campaigns?”

Its a casualty of their philosophy on code. If the numbers look good it doesn’t matter whose idea it was or how crazy it sounded. They tell you this pretty much at the top of the indoctrination material.

It certainly keeps them out of analysis paralysis, no question. But any armchair psychologist can tell you this is essentially numbing. Not listening to your fears or emotions can be as unhealthy as dwelling on them. Zero is not the only alternative to Too Much. These things take balance.

I just don't think this is true. There's plenty of shady and scummy stuff that Amazon can do (and other online retailers do) which Amazon doesn't do. It's far more straightforward at building customer loyalty by getting them stuff more cheaply than other retails, much faster, with free shipping by squeezing their own margins.

I haven't even interviewed with Amazon, but I'm still curious: outside of "office politics" bullshit, why should an idea ever be judged by who made it or its _a priori_ "apparent craziness", let alone given that it has been tested?

(regardless of the test results; if they were negative then any other concerns are redundant)

The behaviour you described is a bug. The "throw everything at the wall" advertising technique - also known as the contextual multi-armed bandit problem - should adapt to changes in the context, such as when an expensive TV set has been bought. It's part of the reinforcement learning subfield, which is the spearhead of AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Contextual_...

> If someone just bought a new TV, then showing then TV ads is pretty much the dumbest move you can make. The target is at an all time low for probability of purchasing that item. And worse, you risk triggering buyer’s remorse. Repeatedly.

While I agree with your subjective experience -- right after buying product X I'm done, I wanna look at other stuff -- from a marketing/advertising perspective repeated ad exposures right after purchase actually do a lot to eliminate buyers remorse and reinforce our decision making. We're creatures of emotion first, logic second.

Seeing car ads after buying a car, unless it's the same model for less money, make you feel better about your purchase. I don't think that's why it happens online, but that's no small part of it in print and TV.