Online advertising

[hudebnik]

I seem to get a lot of ads on web pages from companies that I mail-ordered something from yesterday. Which are exactly the companies I'm not likely to buy from today, because whatever I needed from them, I already ordered yesterday.

I'm sure my employer, whose one-word name starts with a "G", is to blame for a lot of this, and presumably has data showing that it works, but it's a puzzlement.

Comments

[mtbc]

I generally figure that I am unlike the median consumer because various marketing to me seems ill-chosen.

[ilaine]

It is a common failing. Some years ago I bought three swimsuits from Lands End, for the three people in our family who swim. At that point we were covered for swimsuits for years because we are all done growing, but they kept trying to sell me more of them.

[cellio]

This happens to me a lot, too. There's also the A-company variant: you just bought a thing one buys only very infrequently (such as a phone), and we will keep pushing similar items at you for months. Meanwhile, I have to go hunting in my order history to find some specific item I've bought several times and now need more of.

[siderea]

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1174748.html Read the comments, especially the ones at the bottom.

[hudebnik]

Yes, I was pretty sure I had seen somebody else make this observation, but not sure who or when. It does seem like an obvious bug in the system, which somebody could make money (and perhaps even win points with the public) by fixing, so why hasn't somebody fixed it?

Google became an advertising behemoth by doing a technically good job of placing ads. There is serious AI and algorithms research going on, even today, in the advertising divisions of Google, to make ads work better and make more money (which pays my salary, since I work for a part of Google that doesn't directly bring in a lot of money).