Boomers do. Boomers will unironically sign up for mailing lists offering nebulous "promotions". I guess in their minds that means something like "cupins for The Walmart".
I don't know how well targeted ads work on normal people. What I do know is that it doesn't tend to work on
us.
Yeah, I'm being a little biased here. But there's some more evidence for it.
In 2018 $273bn was spent on digital ads globally. We delve into the world of clicks, banners and keywords to find out if any of it is real. What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
thecorrespondent.com
When this article first came out, I thought it was an exaggeration. But as time goes on, I've been seeing more and more that there's a
lot of fuckery and there is a lot of truth here.
For example, this:
Brand keyword advertising, the presentation informed him, was eBay’s most successful advertising method. Somebody googles "eBay" and for a fee, Google places a link to eBay at the top of the search results. Lots of people, apparently, click on this paid link. So many people, according to the consultants, that the auction website earns at least $12.28 for every dollar it spends on brand keyword advertising – a hefty profit!
Tadelis didn’t buy it. "I thought it was fantastic, and I don’t mean extraordinarily good or attractive. I mean imaginative, fanciful, remote from reality." His rationale? People really do click on the paid-link to eBay.com an awful lot. But if that link weren’t there, presumably they would click on the link just below it: the free link to eBay.com. The data consultants were basing their profit calculations on clicks they would be getting anyway.
Happens ALL the fucking time to this day. I've specifically asked people to stop doing this and they don't want to do it, and they actually hide the fact that they are doing this so much unless you really dig into raw data, which they don't like. If really pressed, they will call it "defending the brand". Which I think there is some small amount of value in, but for the most part they are doing it to make their metrics look better.
Another thing is that digital advertising has its own set of metrics that aren't exactly common sense. Let's say that you launch a campaign for x product. How do you measure the success of the campaign? It's the sales for x product, right? Like if the sales increase, it worked, right? WRONG! you actually want to measure its success by a bunch of other bullshit that's couched in a million caveats about what the data actually means. At least one network reports on the sales for a campaign by just reporting the total sales in a period of weeks for
anything you are selling that the customer who blocked on an ad bought. So for example you run a campaign for shoelaces and someone clicks on that ad. Then two weeks later they randomly buy a cabinet you're selling, but it has nothing to do with the ad for shoelaces, your just selling the cabinet really cheap and it showed up on a discount site. The ad network now reports that the campaign was an amazing success because that customer bought $500 of
something after clicking on an ad two weeks ago. Big tech makes it sound like they can perfectly track this person's intent through the shopping journey, but if they can, they're not showing that at all, they are showing this rudimentary ass shit. I could give a million examples of this kind of thing.
This is incentivized at every level. Companies know they need to do "something" with digital ads. Digital ad agencies know that companies don't know what they are doing and think big tech is performing a bunch of magic. The few people that do know, their jobs depend on these things performing anyway so they go along with it. And yeah, they do work to some extent... all this stuff works. It just doesn't work nearly as well as is claimed. They want to say you are getting 10x return when in reality it is probably more like 2.5x. I'd also surmise that the returns have been diminishing over time; in the early to middle days of the internet, these things were probably more effective than they are right now. But everybody still wants those juicy gainz and the ad industry is happy to tell you that you can have them. Just don't look too close.
Procter and Gamble is bucking the trend of brands shifting large swaths of their marketing budgets to digital media. The world’s largest advertiser cut more than $100 million in digital
www.insideradio.com
A large amount of online ad impressions are bots:
https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/38432
Now Google is apparently convinced that I'm the "vacuum cleaner guy", and that one vacuum cleaner is not enough and that all I want to buy ever again is vacuum cleaners, and that when I'm scanning through the newsfeed on a lunch break what I'd really rather be doing is planning my next vacuum cleaner purchase.
Pretty amusing anecdote, I've had very similar experiences. The almighty Facebook was tricked by me.. changing my gender and job description. Then it marketed me a bunch of shit related to that gender and job. Amazing! So glad they recorded what I ate for lunch 5 years ago so they could specifically target me with their amazing technology.