There was a study posted on hacker news that targeted ads have something like a 5% higher conversion rate than untargeted ones. The problem is that you end up paying 30% more compared to the commodity service. So unless the fees go down or the efficacy goes up, it’s not worth it.
Not only does this problem remain true despite the high amount of information that advertisers have, but it's compounded by the business model. They don't want you to buy just anything you'd like, they want to sell you some particular product or service which you may never like, no matter the information that's been gathered on you.
Part of a successful as campaign has to be defining your metrics correctly. The closer to your actual end business goal, the more realistic your performance tracking is.
Etc etc
- Confirmation bias. You remember the irrelevant ads, because they made you do a double take, they stood out as unusual.
- The terrible ads are actually effective at getting clicks from people with similar interests, but less of an aversion to ads, less ad-blindness due to depression, more willing to buy online, ...
- Especially with retargeting (what you describe with the fridge), the CTR is higher than with non-retargeted ads. But it is also one of the most visible forms of advertisement (everyone has a story similar to you, where they get followed by ads after looking at cars or fridges).
The online ad industry fuels the likes of Google and Facebook. Tremendous engineering and research effort goes into making these systems more efficient. Personalization and tracking of preferences is at the state of the art for these companies. Though not the potential best, it is close to the best possible we can do with ML right now.
I'm struggling to find my sources, but I read years ago that most advertisements for cars are not to encourage more people to buy a new car, but are actually aimed at people who already own the car. Seeing their purchase being advertised on TV increases it's relative value to them.
Ultimately they feel affirmed in their purchase, overvalue their "asset", and increase in brand loyalty.
But if you believe alexa did that and you still haven't murdered it with fire, I guess you never will.
(Edit: as pointed out below, it was an alexa but not his own so my criticism is undeserved)
I have no reason to buy one. I made a list of benefits and it really wasn't strong enough!
I thought with Alexa we were still in the "in some dystopian future they're going to use that data for ads" phase. If we've moved to that already, I'd like to read about it.
The information about the ads are probably also not related to your data but to whoever's Alexa it is (and the connections to that user).
As for the other thing, I am running this in firefox with containers active. Google gets their own, Facebook gets theirs, twitter gets theirs and mostly everything else gets a temporary container. There will be no connection between them to use my data on, and in a few minutes my records of their cookies will disappear.
Sheer nonsense.
That era is long gone. Internal-public is the default, but there are plenty of secret projects (private source/build artifacts)...
Or not? How many people have access to Alexa source code, let alone that part of Alexa source code, and are also willing to break their NDAs and get fired and/or sued?
I think this is likely correct, and a million times more sinister.
There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here.
A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded correctly. FYI that's both when users say Alexa first and also when they do not. More on that here [1].
I would love some more clarity into what's going on here.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon-human-v...
For 2) it’s worth noting that when you say you didn’t say Alexa, it means Alexa at least thought you did. It’s not trying to constantly record, but may still be a problem to you.
My conclusion is that the targeted ads that people report are either A: coincidence (millions of users, only really tens of thousands of types of "things" to advertise with, sooner or later life coincidences would be expected to happen to large numbers of people) and/or priming (you notice the ad for camping gear since you were just talking about it, but don't notice the several hundred other impressions for camping gear that you just edited out entirely) or B: they didn't get it from your speech; you gave out other signals without realizing it, like a Google search that may not have been "wanna buy camping gear" but unknownst to you is known to be correlated to it, or as you say, your friend ran a search and now you're getting ads, or you're talking about camping gear in the first place because you are in a coffee shop near Camping World Outlet, and in general, the advertising machine knows that you're interested in camping gear right now because that's how well they have you under surveillance... they don't need your actual speech to know that's what you're talking about.
The first is mathematically inevitable, but poorly explains the cases where it recurs to one person. That seems to be the second. In a sort of way, I say that's even creepier than "they're listening to your literal speech and targeting you based on that". They've got you so pegged from everything else they're doing they don't even need that signal. That's creepy.
What you are saying isn’t true. It cannot be.
Just last night myself and my girlfriend were talking and Alexa decided to activate itself without us saying Alexa first.
a more accurate thing to say would be:
Alexa does not send data unless, in the course of listening for the hotword Alexa, it interprets some noise or utterance to be close enough to Alexa to start sending data
They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads.
Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too.
I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific conversation 10 minutes later on the web.
Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?