Why Do Contextual Ads Fail?

minstrelmike writes If we give up all our privacy on-line for contextual ads, then how come so many of them are so far off the mark? Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you. And then the online world becomes customized, just for you. The real problem with this scenario is that is we're paying for contextual ads and content with our personal data, but we're not getting what we pay for. Facebook advertising is off target and almost completely irrelevant. The question is: Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.

Comments

Duh

[i kan reed]

Because there's always going to be a disproportionate amount of ads delivered for those willing to spend the most money on them. If there's 30,000 users who actually like fast food, and McDonalds pays for 5 million impressions per day, people who don't like McDonalds are going to have some golden arches shoved in their face.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, some other reasons:

1) Too many ads are annoying
2) If ads are too well-targeted then they become creepy
3) They often show you ads for things you've just bought. If I get a new laptop why do I want to see more laptop ads?
4) The products may well be out of your price range (a lot of Facebookers are young and broke) & this is more likely to depress the shit out of you than anything else. Just because you chat about Tahiti doesn't mean you can afford to go there.
5) Real-world advertising has increased massively - more TV ads, infomercials, free catalogs, pull-outs in the newspapers, 'sponsored' articles - it all gets a bit too much, so you go online to escape and get blasted with even more of the damn things.
6) Targeting only works sometimes. Example: I look for something on Ebay when logged on & get an email the day after 'Are you still looking for this?' If the answer is yes then cool. On the other hand if I've bought that particular article somewhere else or was just browsing aimlessly then Ebay is wasting my time and bandwidth.

Hardly surprising

[brantondaveperson]

I don't think that there's any such thing as an advert that I actually want to see.

Re:Hardly surprising

[gstoddart]

When deciding what to buy I seek ads out.

Funny, I use search engines and read review sites.

Ads have never added any benefit to me on the internet, and I simply don't care to provide them with the information they'd need to do a targeted ad.

Because I'm not interested in either the ad, or having these companies know anything about who I am and what I like.

In fact, ads want me to let arbitrary web sites run scripts and other crap which makes things less secure. Think I'd trust the people at DoubleClick to run scripts or Flash? Hell no, the entire domain is blocked at my firewall.

Re:Hardly surprising

[swv3752]

A year ago I bought a Volt. In the month prior I did a bunch of research on electric cars. Six months later I was still getting ads on Leafs and Volts. Those ads seemed fairly pointless as I already owned a Volt. I find it happens a lot that I look for a certain product, then after I buy it, I will get ads for that product. Except for items that I buy regularly, then I never see an ad.

Google, when I buy a bathroom scale, I am no longer interested in hearing about bathrooms scales two weeks later. I buy tea regularly, why do I never see an ad for tea.

they fundamentally don't get it.

[Roachgod]

yeah. I know that when I look for something - like motorcycle boots, I see tons of ads for motorcycle boots. The problem - they are the SAME boots I already looked at. If I wanted THOSE I would have bought them. Give me other boots. Stupid.

Huh

[Ultra64]

Do people really still browse the web without an ad blocker plugin?

Whaa??

[JohnFen]

Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you. And then the online world becomes customized, just for you. The real problem with this scenario is that is we're paying for contextual ads and content with our personal data, but we're not getting what we pay for.

I could not disagree with this more. There is nothing "beautiful" about harvesting personal data to serve contextual ads. I doesn't matter how well-targeted the ads are -- ads are not a benefit to me at all. The real problem with this scenario is that my personal data gets harvested in the first place.

Marketting

[Charliemopps]

I know and deal with a lot of marketing people every day. People get very confused about what marketing really is... to the point that most don't really know. Marketing primary product is: Marketing

They spend about 95% of their time proving they are worth keeping around. They do things like send free gifts to 100 targets considered to be "Leads" Then, later, when a salesman makes a sale to that person they claim "See? We made that happen!" But if you ask the salesman about the deal he says "I call everyone... every month. They launched a marketing campaign for winter coats in October. Of course they bought one. The free pen had nothing to do with it."

So what did the free pen really do? Allowed marketing to run a report showing a correlation between the pen and the sale, then suggest to management that is was a CAUSE not a correlation.

So now we're going down the same rabbit hole with the internet. Want to fix it? Disprove their nonsense data. Show that this garbage doesn't work. It shouldn't be that hard given the amount of data captured. Pop-up adds generate clicks... but do they generate sales? No... and it took a while for the industry to realize that, but they did.