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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

Its funny you should use that example. I recently bought a rice cooker, and then bought another a few weeks later.

I've done similar things a lot, in this case it was because the first cooker had too large a minimum cooking amount. I'm currently looking at buying my mother google WiFi - which I bought a few weeks ago. And a few months back I rebought a tool I had just purchased because I lost it.

I currently work for a (responsible) own site adtech (personalization) company. Its surprising what behaviours our clients find profitable for their business.

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There's a whole lot about advertising I don't know, but the question that sticks in my mind is, did you need that ad to know which rice cooker to buy the second time? Did it change your decision? Did you see an ad for a different rice cooker and act on that?

It seems like an effective ad would be this: Say you bought a rice cooker on Amazon for $75. Now Walmart shows you an ad for the same rice cooker for $60. That would certainly stick in my head- not for the rice cooker but for the price difference that Walmart can provide.

These are amazon internal adds, they don’t care about the specific rice cooker they show as much as the rice cooker category. Thus simply getting you to think about them while you’re on the website is enough they don’t need to predict your specific purchase.

Yes. Without the ads I wouldn't have bought the second cooker - it was a pain point for my partner not for me, so she complained once then a week or two later I saw the ad and purchased another.

With the Google wifi I had forgotten, and it caused me tk reconsider and write it on my whiteboard.

The tool I wpuld purchase anyway.

You said you work for adtech, I'd just like to comment that I personally like targetted ads. Areas of my life have improved from targetted ads, I'm shown things I didn't even know I want until I've seen them, etc. I look at it as a positive.

Its an interesting one. I've made some pretty active choices about jobs for ethical reasons but ended up in a slight geographical bind in my last search. I found my current company through a friend (who works in another department) and was very skeptical. After not finding anything bad I decided to go with it for a few months, but had a resignation letter ready in my car. I'm now over a year in and despite the normal problems businesses have there is not a moral one here - and I've had pretty great insight into the decision making.

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