The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.
Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).
The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.
I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).
Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.
"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"
TuneIn does this.
(partially kidding, but only partially.)
I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.
On the other hand, we have to keep the toilet seat down or they'll try to drink toilet water.
I begun suspecting that one day when my wife was preparing dinner. Soon after she took the meat from the fridge to work on it, our baby started crying and making noise for absolutely no reason. My wife immediately dropped everything and went to investigate, and the cat used this opportunity to attempt to steal our dinner meat.
Ever since, I've been noticing many more cases where the baby and the cat are either simultaneously attempting to do things they're not allowed to, or the baby starts distracting us while the cat goes out to carry out some mischief. It's all coordinated too well to be happenstance.
But I have come to believe they are far smarter than me, particularly with scheming methods of sneaking around to quietly appear when they can get food. One used to push donut boxes off the side so that they would burst open, and would then run off with a donut. I have no idea why he wanted to eat donuts. He also tried to eat bread through the wrapper. Or they fein illness. Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.
They're really clever, just not at jigsaws or sudoku.
The problem is cats are really good at hiding pain - being physically able to jump doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable or painful for him.
We have a pair of very senior cats (18/19ish years old) and make sure the house has little staircases dotted around to make getting on to their regular lounging spots easier, as we noticed they prefer to use a step if something happened to be available - while they are still fairly mobile, I suspect they are developing some level of arthritis. Given they've been good companions for nearly two decades it's the least we can do to make sure they're comfortable.
Apps which lay their buttons out contrary to the conventions of their platform are evil. Apps which randomize the positions of their buttons are unspeakably worse.
I always, always thought this is what X buttons do, so I was simply closing the tab :))
- same color background
- in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake
- I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just opens the ad
- Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad
- I don't remember what company did this, but they would pop the ad and after three seconds, it would reload, all but a few pixels higher so when you're in the process of closing the window, it would reload and then you'd open the ad by mistake because the "X" is in the wrong place now.
I've seen a lot more devious stuff but the sad thing is, I have decent vision. How do these dark patterns affect people who have impaired vision or other issues with their vision? How infuriating it is it for them to deal with this BS? I can't imagine.
The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).
More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.
Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...
Fact check. You cannot make an X with anything less than 3 pixels. ;)
``` *:not(.videoContainer){ background-color: black!important; color: black!important; } img { display:none!important; } ```
An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.
Of course now I'm part of the problem, because some asshole has a graph that shows that (a suspiciously small fraction of) users are able to opt-out so there's no legal liability for having the ads that way.
I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.
Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.
Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.
If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.
I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...
"Hey, have you seen the new COVID-19 contact tracing app? It's named TikTok-19".
Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them
Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.
Pro tip: if the competitor uses your trademark in their ad copy, you can do a takedown notice and usually the ads will be removed.
The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.
There are a few good reasons to do this:
1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.
2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.
The difference from Samsung is that the ads on the LGs are in the same place they've always been (on the smart tv menu overlay), they've never been obtrusive, and they're always in some way connected to video content (usually VOD movies that you can purchase through one of the streaming apps, or adds for streaming apps you can install on the TV).
I’m more excited about the HDMI 2.1 and variable refresh for the new Nvidia cards.
I took that stupid TV off the network as soon as I could.
I think the manufacturers are all as bad as each other. My current Panasonic TV will refuse to load any of the "smart" apps (even Netflix) if it cannot reach Panasonic's servers, which means the entire TV becomes useless as an Internet device (no Netflix or ANY streaming services) if Panasonic has a server issue (which they sometimes do).
Might revert to VHS at this rate.
I didn't push it again because in about 2015 I found that if you push it, it locks up for exactly 30s, which is how long it takes to hit the network timeout and say "Updates are available for your Samsung Smart TV." and then allow you to use the ancient web browser or Netflix or other smart apps. I did try a couple years ago, on a whim, but apparently the update servers have moved and even when plugged into Ethernet it can't actually update.
Everything currently runs through the Roku, the Blu-ray player, or a component-to-HDMI dongle for the Wii, but if I didn't have the Roku I'd have a motivation to update so that Netflix would work without a 30-second delay (and I'd be unsurprised if Netflix wasn't backwards compatible with their 2012 client from a Samsung TV). However, the picture is fine, so it keeps on chugging.
You may want to get an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, or other media server) and plug that into your HDMI if you use the network from apps on the TV.
What can the apps on your TV do that a $40 Amazon Fire stick ($50 if you want 4K) can't?
I'd rather hook up an old laptop to my TV and use that to watch media than use the apps on my TV and deal with all the bullshit that TV manufacturers are doing when you connect the TV to the network.
Also, as a side note, Vudu is like the one app from that era that still works.
Check what network activity it is engaging in. You'll be disappointed, I am sure. Seems dialling home is the new thing to do on every single device these days. Data vacuuming the entire human population just because they can.
Instead I will recommend Sony or LG now
I have a Philips smart TV, so far it has no ads and just mildly annoying bugs, nothing really disruptive. But mine is an old model, it looks like the new ones aren't like that anymore.
A few years ago I brought some TVs to use as monitors because they were much better fit than the actual thing. Now it looks like the trends reversed, and I'll have to start buying monitors to use as TVs. Is there a good TV receptor that I can plug in a Raspberry Pi?
The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.
- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.
- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.
We all know this, but we ignore it. Branding for brandings sake == lying to customers.
Heck the yoga app I use I saw through a mobile ad. Same deal for the fitness app I use (BodBot, awesome app, check it out!)
I've gotten onboard Kickstarters from ads, and I've bought keto cereal from an ad I saw.
99.999% of most ads I ignore, but sometimes ads are really well targeted and actually show me something I want.
(None of these ads were on a tv in any way...)
This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.
The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.
https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/the-marketers-g...
That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?
It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.
- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)
- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”
This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, then hack it and remove the "special offers".
I don't know how prevalent this is, but wonder if it's a consideration in deciding on the "money to disable ads" strategy.
When I was buying my Paperwhite, I just ordered the ad-free version from amazon (.com or .co.uk, don't remember which). And then a couple co-workers (agreed, computer people, but very much not the type that's into tinkering or cracking software) looked at me with surprise, because it turns out everyone does the "standard" route - order "special offers" from amazon.de, and save money while getting an ad-free Kindle, because AFAIR initially the special offers didn't even display in Poland, and when they did, apparently everyone knew how to jump some hoops to get rid of them.
Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.
American tried. American failed. Nobody was willing to pay more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/04/business/american-air-to-...
Back two jobs ago, we had international customers with somewhat high demand to ship our people all across the world on, sometimes on a moment's notice. I had to fly out 4 or 5 times in the span of two years, but some of my colleagues could do more than that in under a year. Somehow, the flights were almost always the cheapest airline available, and the cheapest seats available. The co-workers who flew frequently, including my boss, were all using the accumulating miles to bump themselves a class up.
United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...
tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.
Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?
If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.
The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.
To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.
Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.
And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.
I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.
I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.
There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.
Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).
Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
- Sent from my Xperia Compact
well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad
and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.
I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
I don't really follow this line of thinking.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.
But that isn't the case here.
Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.
And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.
Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
—Upton Sinclair
Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.
This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.
Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.
We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: Yes of course I do. If you don't like ads on your TV why are you working here.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A+group: yes of course we all like ads (lying in a meeting is not a crime, and occurs all over the world)
C: ok no objections, we love it! Ship it!
A, C gets a paycheck at the end of the day.
B gets fired if they don't change their mind.
Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.
Yep, sounds about right.
“Why do we need to track users?” “To give them recommendations!” “But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?” “Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind” “Where is the decline button?” “...” “There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!” “Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”
If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.
"We need to think of our devices as small hyper local billboards with untapped potential"
A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.
B: People don't like ads on their TV.
A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: No.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.
C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?