Re:After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and k...
by soared on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @08:02PM
(#18927361)
Marketing intuition is literally what you’re talking about. They teach it in schools. It’s existed for hundreds of years.
Your deep bias is breaking your logic. These are assumptions that marketers test. If they work, you keep doing it. If it doesn’t, you try something else. You clearly have no idea how the industry works, otherwise you’d understand that you’re arguments have been addressed.
Correlation is the entire point of that advertising. No marketer cares whether being single causes a purchase, simply that being single is correlated with a purchase more than a random amount.
That statement makes sense intuitively, but what we're discussing here is whether our intuition reflects reality. It may seem to self-evident to you, but do you have data?
All of your examples "make sense" from the same intuitive perspective, but all assume the subjects are positively influenced by the advertisements more than a randomly selected subject would be. That's an assumption.
Please don't condescendingly remark that I "don't understand advertising" when you've missed the point entirely. This isn't about how the ad industry works—ad companies are clearly economically successful—it's about whether (as another commenter eloquently put it) that emperor is wearing clothes.
> Correlation is the whole point. If someone who is single and goes to the gym is correlated to certain purchases or behavior, you can advertise those.
The point is that the correlation we're talking about here is a proxy. If a lot of people buy a product and are single, but most aren't buying that product because they're single, it means they're buying it for another reason, which may or may not change relative to their relationship status.