I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups.
Twitter claims I:
* Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't)
* Have between $100k- $999k liquid investible assets (I don't)
* Have a net worth between $1 and $1m (cool - I own *something*)
* Am highly affluent (/shrug)
* Am a high spender (okay...)
* Am a frugal spender (...but how can I be both a high spender AND frugal)
* Own a house (I don't)
* Have multiple families (I don't)
This is expected. It's not desirable, but it is expected.
The problem is your comparing it to an absolute. I.e. to perfect.
If advertisers had that choice, they would love it. They generally don't. Remarketing is kinda close, but limits the scale.
Rather, the only other scalable options are far worse. Think about it. What are the marketers other choices?
The one that should come to mind, and the one they spend most of their money: TV.
With TV you pick up a huge amount of waste. Say you buy a spot on Big Bang because you want people thinking of buying a new iPhone. Not a big stretch, right? At the same time thinking of all the other people they have to buy, who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste.
And that waste is huge relative to what you're talking about above.
So you're asking the wrong question here. It's not how good is the targeting in terms of precision/recall. The question is what's better?
The waste here is generally known & its priced accordingly.
> I was very disappointed that the Google and Facebook data exports don't contain this data.
It's in my Facebook export. Under "Information About You" did you uncheck "Ads"?
That's where the information is contained & it's checked by default.
You can also view it here for both FB & Google, as well as opt of both:
Is it really worse than "this article is about X, Y is related, let's show some ads for Y"?
I bet from the point of view of the advertisement middlemen it is not. Because they capitalize mostly on showing ads of products that people already decided to buy or are very near deciding. But that is yet another racquet that only decreases the value of the industry. My question is, from the point of view of the real advertisers (the ones selling something), is it really worse?
So you'll end up having to try to monetize something that has little no no related things that are profitable to advertise.
Advertise on a tech site, 80+% will be interested in tech.
Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...
Far better than what, 5% ? This isn't rocket science, we sold everyones integrity for pennies.
> who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste.
No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.
That would probably target dog enthusiasts or dog hobbyists or dog fanatics, which are all subsets of dog owners.
I think that one of the things that makes social media ad targeting so attractive to advertisers is that they can target the dog owners, instead of just the enthusiasts/hobbyists/fanatics.
Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety.
But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach?
> No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.
What? Sure, they have campaigns running for awareness, recall, perception.
But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.
> But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.
When is the best time to sell the brand? When your flagship is a year old and still costs as much as on launch day and when the competition has surpassed you? Hardly.
If you buy ads, you want them displayed to the non-fanatics that is not influenced by experience and vulnerable to brand exposure.
But the only one who cares is the middleman. They are the only ones that benefit from the scale.
Give me a list of dog community site to target 1 millions dog owners.
Now tell me how expensive it would be to show ads on theses websites.
Plenty of dog owners are on Facebook, much easier to target 1 millions dog owner there instead.
Did I forget to mentions that it's for a dog shop in Montreal? Good luck!
Again, I guess this is because Twitter sucks at advertising.
All the things FB has done to extract things like resturant data etc are product development they undertook. Twitter spent 10 years moving form 140 characters to 280 instead.
There is no reason why Twitter couldn't have done the same 5 years ago. And no reason that they can't do it now.
(Also people are just as likely to follow and talk about things like tv shows and music and politics on Twitter as FB)
IOW, Twitter followers may be total strangers to many IRL, unlike Facebook followers.
I think advertisers have been chasing a chimera via targeting, because not only doesn't it work well, but there is a trade-off to maintaining a brand.
I try to buy quality goods because cheap stuff doesn't last. That means spending more up front to spend less in the long run. So frugal, but also maybe high spender?
My mom always says: if you're poor, you can't afford to buy cheap.
I don't think they pay off long term, at least it seems heavily dependent on the product type. That's because we are playing a lottery game, even if this product breaks in 0.1% cases vs 5% cases for a much cheaper product, we're not buying large numbers of them, we're buying just one and while the probability to break on me is smaller it can still happen and the monetary loss would be much larger than if I were to buy the cheaper product. That is, the warranty doesn't scale with the price (the expensive top quality TV is $2000 and the cheaper one is $500 and both have 1 year of warranty), for the same money I can buy 4 of those $500 TVs and would last at least 4 years (but very likely to find at least one that will work much longer, since I'm buying up to 4 of them).
* Your age bracket;
* The fact that your net worth is positive (not deep in debt);
* Whether you live in a city / suburb / countryside;
* Which part of country is that;
* Your gender;
* Your race / ethnicity, broadly?
* Yes, but the age bracket for me is _very_ wide (it says "alive and not in need of new knees yet probably", but not much more)
* They didn't have this info
* This was wrong
* No, they didn't have this (although the country itself was correct)
* Wrong
* They did not have this
It's a bubble!
I think it is an intentional stretching the interests way to far to look better for advertisers.
In more details: https://levashov.biz/can-trust-facebook-audience-interests/
Maybe it was all the clicking on CafeMom.com (mommy blog with tons of trackers and ads) while I was testing the Pi-Hole set up. :-)
Facebook has it available, if not in their Download Your Information tool. Go to Settings -> Ads -> Your Information -> Categories.
But interesting page. Looking at the "advertisers who have added your details to their targeting list" it again shows how bullshit this industry is:
* Playstation in 19 countries
* Musicians which I definitely don't listen to, like Keith Urban, Post Malone, Jack White, YBN Nahmir, and Ziggy Marley, whoever these people are.
* Pages like "Top Kickstarter Watches" and "Top Kickstarter Inventions"
* A bunch of restaurants that I've never been to, but are in the same complex that I used to live in (thanks whoever sold/'shared' my email, literally probably my former real estate agent)I also see a lot of PlayStation related ads on my news feed... I haven't used a PlayStation since I got an Xbox one!
Also, one can be high spender and frugal. A person who buy one pair of very expensive shoes and wear them for 10 years rather than buying 10 pairs of inexpensive ones would be such person.
Facebook does have demographics and targeting data. Go to Setting -> Ads -> Your Information -> Your Categories. I haven't found a way to export it.
On the categorization side, Facebook does a half decent job considering I don't upload anything on FB or any other sister sites.
Twitter on the other hand might be running algorithm which tries to extrapolate too much from the available data.
Twitter is just entirely incompetent at everything, so no surprise they get their advertising product wrong too.
The fact that you choose to purchase certain items over other equally suitable items is largely because of advertising.
If that's true, it's not because ad tech doesn't work, it's that most advertisers don't use it properly. A large percentage of my company's revenue comes from performance marketing (running paid traffic to affiliate offers) and it works very well for us. You just have to know what you're doing, make sure you're not getting too much bot/junk traffic, and bid the appropriate amounts. We've written software that handles all of this automatically, and our paid traffic campaigns do amazingly well. Show me another investment in which you can reliably and consistently achieve 30%+ ROI weekly with a fair amount of scalability.
Ironically, native ad networks like Taboola and Revcontent will flourish in the new GDPR world. Since they target ads based mostly on nothing more than the topic of the content that the user is viewing, these ads are effective enough for smart performance marketers to make money with, and GDPR doesn't fundamentally change anything about their model. EU advertisers will flock to native and abandon other forms of advertising that were based on more invasive targeting.
I can't believe nobody is making a profit. I just suspect most of the trick is in generating demand, not finding it. That or diversifying offerings.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. But generally we get about a 30-50% ROI on our native ad campaigns once they are optimized, and most affiliate networks pay weekly if you produce significant revenue. We do better than most because I wrote some clever stuff to identify sites that were sending us mostly bots/bad traffic and automatically blacklist them from showing our ads. There are a ton of these in the native ad space.
I just suspect most of the trick is in generating demand, not finding it.
There are evergreen affiliate niches such as weight loss, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, etc. Aging, bad genetics, and poor lifestyle choices generate the demand for us. Making money in these niches is generally as simple as placing ads on sites where people that belong to certain known demographic groups visit, and reducing fraudulent traffic by as much as possible.
That said, the niches you describe sounds like snake oil markets. :(
EDIT: reminds me of that one story about A/B testing, which pretty much directly told us how adtech companies are bullshitting their own customers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359
I highlighted the more interesting parts back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226.
In it E. Ann Hollier and Tim Ambler make a strong case for what has been known from the start about branding: that mass media do it best, without performing at the personal levewl. One corollary for their case might be, "Not everything you value can be measured, and not everything you can measure has value."
Because digital advertising can be both targeted and measured, the whole advertising business decided that ads perform only when they are targeted and measured. But that's not advertising, really. That's direct marketing, which -- as I say in that post -- is descended from junk mail and a cousin of spam.
It's no accident that the $trillion or more spent on adtech hasn't produced a single brand known to the world.
The unanswered question is the one raised in The Problem With Targeting (https://www.dotcoma.it/2015/06/22/the-problem-with-targeting...), and pretty much everything Don Marti and Bof Hoffman (look them up) have been writing as well: is it possible for online advertising to brand products the way offline print and broadcast media could, and still do?
I suspect the answer is no. But my mind is open on the matter.
Compared to what?
It may be easy to provide evidence for:
* Time and resource intensive prebiased word of mouth has a higher conversion rate.
* Conversion rates for mass advertising are very low numbers.
It is also easy to provide numbers for:
* Conversion rates for targeted advertising are significantly higher than non-targeted advertising.
* Having a non-existent marketing strategy for scale markets has a high probability of failure.
What is your position exactly?
Consider also some of what is implied throughout the article, that changes implied may price smaller companies out of the market. This doesn't bode well for competition, particularly for less funded competition. Small p&l organizations typically need to market to drive revenue, they're rarely in a position to push brand marketing strategies alone. Indeed this is a common huge difference between fine and coarse targeted platforms - when did you last see a small p&l trying to advertise on cable? What about on fine target platforms such as Facebook? Do you want such companies to become competitors to brand giants?
I test drove a car and after I got almost a dozen follow up calls while I was busy with other stuff, I blocked the dealership number. They kept calling me from other numbers, which I also blocked (with the new Android spam filter on my phone). But the amusing thing was that I started seeing ads for the dealership online promoting their "low pressure" sales team!
I made fun of a company called Salsify for naming their business after oyster plant, a root vegetable I can't stand, and now I see ads for them all the time.
That sounds like a statement from someone not very familiar with advertising.
Minimally it's contrary to the agency model & its incentives. A lot spend (the majority?) goes through that model, and it's not likely to change any time soon. And if anything GDPR, will increase it.
That said, even as measurement & attribution improves, the reality is that the effect will be shift to spend around. The better an advertiser can identify waste, they better they can redeploy that spend. Because that improves the ROI, the less it hurts the margin, and the more it makes sense for them to spend.
If that was true, Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't exist.
McDonald's is a funny one. They really don't seem any worse than most other fast food to me. I suspect they saw more expansion from their franchise methods than anything else, though.
Which is not to say the marketing isn't important. I just don't think it deserves the full victory.
- Coke: their branding, market research, and consumer strategy got them where they are today. All are marketing functions.
- McDonald's: franchise go-to-market strategy, branding, consistency of product. All are marketing functions.
Whether or not paid advertising helped them is a whole different argument (and one I'd argue, as when 'tis the season, it's always the real thing...)
Might as well debate that "business" is responsible.
Especially if the success is not repeatable. Which, most early practices of large companies today are not repeatable by smaller companies.
The "business" defines the problem-space and strategic direction (in these cases, food/drink), marketing defines how you address the space (specifics of the products from research and evaluation, market positioning, promotion to audiences), operations executes on the above (supply chain, training, maintenance), and then customer support feeds into all three of the above.
This GCSE Bitesize piece (revision material for UK exams students take at 16) outlines why marketing is more than simply advertising and promotion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/business/marketing...
Advertising is a subset of marketing, but marketing is a broad term, and is often mistakenly limited in how it's used in arguments (usually to belittle the role of it).
Consider, as well, that the engineering department is also responsible for the Product. In large, they are also influential in the Price. Yet, I think it would also be unfair to give engineering full credit for a successful product. Even if it was well engineered or poorly marketed.
Which is to further my point that I was not trying to dismiss marketing as a valid area that a company should invest in. I just don't think it should deserve full credit for Coke and McDonald's existing. :)
There is no reason to expect that ad spending will drop in total, because ads never worked very well in any medium, but they worked well enough that it's worth investing in them. The portion of ad spending in TV has not changed significantly the past decades, what has happened is spending has shifted from newspapers to online. but the overall the volume keeps increasing in all media
[1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...
I saw a similar up-ending of an ad-dependent industry 15 years ago with newspapers. Advertisers for years assumed a certain value based on the circulation numbers as reported by ABC. There was no real way to directly measure that value other than inferred activity within a geographic region that could arguably be tied to newspaper advertising. With the internet advertisers began to be able to track specific value for ad campaigns based on click-thrus, cost-per-action, etc. Those values were lower than the assumed value of newspaper advertising, which began a shift in where money was spent. Combine that with the fact that ABC numbers started to show that they were far less accurate than originally assumed, due in part to gaming by the papers themselves, and revenue started seriously shrinking. The last firewall that newspaper had was classified, which quickly folded in the face of job and real estate sites and of course craigslist.
Internet advertising has been suffering the same game-playing by sites that newspapers pulled with ABC circ numbers, and as advertisers gather more and better performance data about the value of ads and campaigns they're realizing that value is less than they thought and seems to be trending down.
Regardless of whether there's more or less privacy for users/consumers, the indications are that advertising is becoming less and less valuable.
I don't see any evidence to support that. Total spending on advertising is increasing every year. Newspaper spending is down, Google & Facebook is way up. Overall it's up.
The math is 100 x 100, or one sale for every 10,000 eyes who sees your ad.
In a vacuum, those numbers are awful. If your entire marketing strategy is buying ads to convert to sales, then of course, advertising doesn't work, and really, you probably shouldn't be advertising in the first place.
Also about half the market is branding, which is all about exposure rather than direct clicks or conversions.
(Its a virtual-goods product. Not subscription, but usually multiple-return customers. Around 70% gross margin since we have some high upfront provisioning cost.)
I just don't understand the anti-social media agenda. The same people who for 2 years have been saying that social media advertising is so effective that it got trump elected are now saying it is ineffective. They demand that political advertising on social media be monitored because it is so effective that it gets presidents elected. Now, it's social media ad spending is so ineffective that these companies won't be around.
> What's happening to billboards and newspapers right now is probably coming to several other industries soon.
What's happening to billboards and newspapers is that ad money is flooding into digital space ( where the young kids are ).
https://www.iab.com/news/digital-ad-spend-increases-23-year-...
https://www.recode.net/2017/9/14/16294450/mobile-ad-spending...
Why speak so authoritatively about something you obviously know nothing about?
1) US election went “wrong”.
2) The same is happening to them
3) They’re mostly not hitting their own companies
Obviously it’s a lie. The “right” is gaining in Europe like crazy, not because of Facebook, but because the existing governments have seriously underperformed.
But politicians faced with the choice of admitting mistakes that they don’t even know how to fix, or to wildly and randomly strike at whoever got blamed ...
Is it really the same people? Do you have any examples of this?
So does that mean you think that social media advertising is effective as people claim and Russian use of it got Trump elected?
Regardless of whether your "same people" is a straw man, the opposite of a set of inconsistent claims tends to also be inconsistent, so I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
"...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."
I'm pretty sure that, the more we learn about how well advertising works, the less money people will be willing to pay for it. What's happening to billboards and newspapers right now is probably coming to several other industries soon.