Embracing targeted ads requires a mind shift that the per-Facebook generation will not be able to conceive. Most people worried about targeted ads are merely riding the ill-fated privacy bandwagon without weighing the pros and cons of such a system. The future generations will prefer targeted ads.
I think not. The TARGET case in Forbes ("How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did") suggests it is best if targeted ads are surrounded by random ones to stop people from creeping out. More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
My only real complaint with those ads that follow you around the internet is that they're nearly always trying to sell you something you already own.
I bought one of those GoPro cameras that you mount on your surfboard a while back, and was punished with six months of nonstop ads telling me how awesome my life would be if only I'd purchase a GoPro camera. It was annoying to the point where I actually dropped down that little menu in the hope that it had an option for "OK, I bought it already. Please stop now."
It's the same problem with any recommendation engine. Amazon/Netflix/Lovefilm are constantly recommending things I already own, since my buying history shows they're related. "Hey, I notice you bought Series 2 through 8 of 24! You should totally check out Series 1 of 24!"
Agreed. At the moment, I'm frequently seeing ads for Chargify (already a customer) and Indochino (I buy suits infrequently and have in fact just bought from them).
My main issue with Amazon is it recommending items connected to presents I bought for other people. My brother is a keen photographer so I have purchased memory cards etc. from Amazon but I now keep receiving recommendations for lenses/cases.
You can say "Don't use this purchase for recommendations" and "Not interested / already own it" on Amazon. It's clearly not well-exposed, given the number of people making your complaint.
>an option for "OK, I bought it already. Please stop now." //
That would be incredibly useful info for the advertising network - you'd be able to chose to advertise to people who already own a particular product. That must be high value (for sellers, advert networks) and probably provides good targetting for those who find that a benefit.
Another one of Amazon's which frustrated me was that after a few years of buying similar items (programming books, computer odds and ends etc) it started recommending reasonable things. Then I put in an order for two children's books for my mother (who teaches young kids), and from that moment on Amazon somehow only recommended kids books to me.
It's never really recovered, however since I bought a blackberry cover a year or so ago it has started recommending other blackberry covers so I guess it's sort of improved.
Amazon has an option to remove items you've purchased or looked at from their recommendation engine. I don't know exactly where it is as I don't use it very often, but with some poking around you should be able to find it.
Depending on where the recommendation is being displayed it will typically a have a "fix this recommendation" button right under the item. Then you can select that you are't interested, already own it, bought it as a gift, or simply mark it to not be used for recommendations.
The problem with this is, it seems to take ten or fifteen minutes of effort to get the system to go back to showing somewhat relevant items after purchasing a few gifts, or browsing some atypical items. Who wants to spend that kind of time pruning advertisements. It's easier to just ignore them.
I remember seeing Amazon's recommendations as I hit the homepage and thinking "wow, those are all exactly the sort of thing I'd want. Their recommendation system is nailing it!" On further inspection, the secret turned out to be... that all of those items had been lifted from my wishlist.
I've had the same thing of late. I host my websites through WP Engine, and I'm tremendously enthusiastic about them - but nonetheless, Google Adwords keep trying to tell me I'd be better off hosting through this scrappy, enthusiastic startup called WP Engine instead...
(For bonus points - the retargeting often means that Adwords is advertising WP Engine to someone who already uses WP Engine, with the ads displayed on the site that they are in fact hosting on WP Engine.)
I think this has more to do with the setup, I'm pretty sure it's possible to add a tracking pixel to their payment page, which will stop paying users from seeing the ads.
I agree that this is the annoying part of it at least for me. Seeing ads for stuff you already bought.
Amazon (at least in the UK) does have the "I already own this" option - along with an "I'm not interested in this" one.
Some of their suggestions are a little odd at times - I've no idea how many different coffee machines they think I might want own - but they are mostly pretty good, and are probably the only place I've ever regularly bought recomendations from.
I have the feeling stackexchange-ux isn't the best place to ask this question. There would be a use for a stackexchange-behaviourial/psychology site.
How many psychologists (or marketers with valid psychology knowledge) are going to explore stackexchange-ui ? Not everything that happens on a screen can be explained by a computer engineer, a computer scientist or a coder :)
"Users don't spend all their time purchasing goods on the internet - often they are doing different and completely unrelated tasks, sometimes at the same time."
Its got to make you ask why the only people who purchase space on a screen are people who are selling goods. How much is a reader worth to someone like NYT? How valuable is a poll answer? I can think of plenty of valuable things people would pay to display there that aren't "ads".
Theory: because the NYT can get more reader acquisition for its buck via non-advertising means. Spend the money on ads or on content marketing, aka journalism? For a newspaper, that's a pretty simple choice.
Too many negative experiences with overeager matching algorithms. Yes, it's helpful to show me ads for spades if I'm searching on Google for "buy spade", but Amazon will not stop suggesting things to me that it thinks I "might" be interested in. They seem surprisingly bad at it too; I looked at a TV costing around £500, and subsequently got an e-mail every few days containing a list of their entire stock of TVs, without any consideration of price. If I'm looking at one worth £500, I'm probably not interested in a TV that costs £150 or one that costs £1500. They do badly on ebooks too, where the recommendations just seem to be "other books by the same authors you've already bought from", which I barely need; what I'd like are suggestions of similar books from other authors that I don't know about yet.
I feel like I don't mind seeing ads that I'm interested in, but there is a difference between that and being shown hundreds of ads that I might be interested in. I guess a sufficiently smart recommendation algorithm could theoretically overcome that eventually, but it seems to be a pretty hard problem since it's apparently not been well solved yet.
Personally, I'd just be happy to see adverts in the right language.
Every major online advertising engine appears to assume that my geolocation equates to my preferred language.
My browser passes the Accept-Language request header of en-GB, but they all ignore it and give me adverts in German or Spanish (or where ever I happen to be visiting or living) based on an IP-to-geolocation lookup.
What I find interesting is that it firstly makes me actively aggressive towards the brands, as well as the site. Secondly, it increases my advertising blindness.
I see this on Google Adsense and Facebook ads.
I assume that in the United States, Spanish speakers are equally ignored? Any Spanish speakers in the US that can confirm this?
I wonder if that's to do with the advertising network / provider placing the ads using geolocation, rather than language requests. I'm an Australian expat living in London - when I visit Australian news sites now they deliver me UK advertisements.
I wonder if the issue is resource and/or delivery time based. Is the number of people affected by this negatively, less than the delivery time or other costs when trying to facilitate this?
As you stated, I would imagine that the ad networks see people like me as a very small minority.
However, there are particularly notable exceptions. There are ~11.5 million Catalan speakers in the world, and most of them in Spain. While the majority of Catalan speakers can also speak Spanish, they are extremely defensive of their language and you will find most road signs, governmental correspondence and general communication in Catalan as well as Spanish.
Most Ad networks will shoe-horn these users into Spanish ads. I imagine some Catalonians find that practice offensive. When you compare the number of Norwegian speakers in the world (~5 million), it puts things into perspective.
In actual fact these ad networks are missing a pretty big slice of the market when you add everything up. In Europe there are huge migrations of different nationalities. In a very short time the numbers of Greeks who leave Greece for other European countries will start to sky rocket. This open migration throughout Europe means that this problem will only get worse, and the numbers of people being mistargeted will increase.
That is what I would call a market niche (or unique selling point) that is potentially up for grabs.
Maybe it is on their todo lists.. Perhaps they do serve that Catalan group, though you mentioned they do in fact get shoe-horned? You'd think someone would have solved this by now if it was valuable enough to?
I think one of the main reasons is that targeted ads tend to show products you already know (whether you already own them, researched them, or just because you are interested in the subject). Then visual recognition (picture or name of the product) occurs and your focus shifts to the ad for a moment --- when you can just unconsciously ignore just 97-98% of the ads you see on the Internet or on the street. And we all know how annoying commercial crap can be when you are not looking to buy anything
Another thing that applies to older generations and educated people among younger ones (I don't think the young masses understand this or care about it) is the privacy invasion argument.
I'll add that, since most people hate ads altogether, adding just a little annoyance to them can seem like just pushing it too far. I think the only places where ads are not hated are subway stations, since waiting in gloomy underground tunnels (most of those in Paris are, anyway) can be a bit depressing
For the longest time I avidly clicked answering Hulu's "Is this relevant to you?" question that came with ads.
After a few months, I began to suspect they were not using the results. They never learned I didn't want a new car, for starters. Not the kind of purchase a commercial is going to change my mind about. (And I can't even recall the brand.)
Exactly. And in the example of searching for baseball bat, if I search for "but baseball bats online", all I care about are organic search results. Yes, those are different than ads, and yes, even when I have a strong intent to buy something right now, I still don't want to see ads. They are lying, bending the truth, or just simply presenting me with suboptimal choices. Personally, there is no context I found ads useful in. Ever.
Only reasons I do use AdBlock,
Saves bandwidth, data plans are expensive out here. Also ads that expand/play music or video directly - are annoying.
I don't mind plain and simple ads. AdBlock beta has an option to allow non-intrusive ads, I do keep it on.
Infact it would be great if there were some sort of guidelines (adblock checklist if I may call it so) which marketers can follow and pass adblock if this option is on.
Reminds me of Kim Dotcom's project of supplying Megauploads' users with an adblocker that injects only his ads. Rumor was if you installed it, you'd get free music.
Ad's are always crap. I _never_ bought anything, because of an ad I might have seen. I don't see ads in my browser, since adblock don't show me this garbage, but I see some of it on buildings in the city. The most ads are terrible idiotic and I still have no clue how people can get influenced by ads. Everyone should be smart enough to ignore them..
39 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadI bought one of those GoPro cameras that you mount on your surfboard a while back, and was punished with six months of nonstop ads telling me how awesome my life would be if only I'd purchase a GoPro camera. It was annoying to the point where I actually dropped down that little menu in the hope that it had an option for "OK, I bought it already. Please stop now."
It's the same problem with any recommendation engine. Amazon/Netflix/Lovefilm are constantly recommending things I already own, since my buying history shows they're related. "Hey, I notice you bought Series 2 through 8 of 24! You should totally check out Series 1 of 24!"
Thanks. Now stop.
My main issue with Amazon is it recommending items connected to presents I bought for other people. My brother is a keen photographer so I have purchased memory cards etc. from Amazon but I now keep receiving recommendations for lenses/cases.
That would be incredibly useful info for the advertising network - you'd be able to chose to advertise to people who already own a particular product. That must be high value (for sellers, advert networks) and probably provides good targetting for those who find that a benefit.
Possibly the answer is that the algorithms aren't close to good enough. That "might be interested in" isn't good enough.
It's never really recovered, however since I bought a blackberry cover a year or so ago it has started recommending other blackberry covers so I guess it's sort of improved.
The problem with this is, it seems to take ten or fifteen minutes of effort to get the system to go back to showing somewhat relevant items after purchasing a few gifts, or browsing some atypical items. Who wants to spend that kind of time pruning advertisements. It's easier to just ignore them.
(For bonus points - the retargeting often means that Adwords is advertising WP Engine to someone who already uses WP Engine, with the ads displayed on the site that they are in fact hosting on WP Engine.)
I agree that this is the annoying part of it at least for me. Seeing ads for stuff you already bought.
Some of their suggestions are a little odd at times - I've no idea how many different coffee machines they think I might want own - but they are mostly pretty good, and are probably the only place I've ever regularly bought recomendations from.
How many psychologists (or marketers with valid psychology knowledge) are going to explore stackexchange-ui ? Not everything that happens on a screen can be explained by a computer engineer, a computer scientist or a coder :)
Its got to make you ask why the only people who purchase space on a screen are people who are selling goods. How much is a reader worth to someone like NYT? How valuable is a poll answer? I can think of plenty of valuable things people would pay to display there that aren't "ads".
Obviously, because they actually are not interested in them.
I feel like I don't mind seeing ads that I'm interested in, but there is a difference between that and being shown hundreds of ads that I might be interested in. I guess a sufficiently smart recommendation algorithm could theoretically overcome that eventually, but it seems to be a pretty hard problem since it's apparently not been well solved yet.
Every major online advertising engine appears to assume that my geolocation equates to my preferred language.
My browser passes the Accept-Language request header of en-GB, but they all ignore it and give me adverts in German or Spanish (or where ever I happen to be visiting or living) based on an IP-to-geolocation lookup.
What I find interesting is that it firstly makes me actively aggressive towards the brands, as well as the site. Secondly, it increases my advertising blindness.
I see this on Google Adsense and Facebook ads.
I assume that in the United States, Spanish speakers are equally ignored? Any Spanish speakers in the US that can confirm this?
Thankfully, no language issues in my instance.
However, there are particularly notable exceptions. There are ~11.5 million Catalan speakers in the world, and most of them in Spain. While the majority of Catalan speakers can also speak Spanish, they are extremely defensive of their language and you will find most road signs, governmental correspondence and general communication in Catalan as well as Spanish.
Most Ad networks will shoe-horn these users into Spanish ads. I imagine some Catalonians find that practice offensive. When you compare the number of Norwegian speakers in the world (~5 million), it puts things into perspective.
In actual fact these ad networks are missing a pretty big slice of the market when you add everything up. In Europe there are huge migrations of different nationalities. In a very short time the numbers of Greeks who leave Greece for other European countries will start to sky rocket. This open migration throughout Europe means that this problem will only get worse, and the numbers of people being mistargeted will increase.
That is what I would call a market niche (or unique selling point) that is potentially up for grabs.
Another thing that applies to older generations and educated people among younger ones (I don't think the young masses understand this or care about it) is the privacy invasion argument.
I'll add that, since most people hate ads altogether, adding just a little annoyance to them can seem like just pushing it too far. I think the only places where ads are not hated are subway stations, since waiting in gloomy underground tunnels (most of those in Paris are, anyway) can be a bit depressing
After a few months, I began to suspect they were not using the results. They never learned I didn't want a new car, for starters. Not the kind of purchase a commercial is going to change my mind about. (And I can't even recall the brand.)
I'd actually like a decent as network just fine.
Because some of us would like, just for once, some space (either virtual or physical) that's not inundated with advertisements.
Because the basis of advertising is manipulation of free will to serve commercial interests, and is thus inherently degrading.
That's why.