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Comment by earthdeity | Hacker News Reader

That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).

That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.

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I work in ads targeting

> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).

yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base

> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".

This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.

Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?

My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.

But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?

Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!

Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.

And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.

If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.

As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.

People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.

Nothing says 'solving a pre-existing problem' quite like convincing someone that their evening would be better with a gambling problem.

I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.

What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.

No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.

There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.

But isn't relevance just measured as purchasing the product? That is, someone who can be convinced by advertising to by a ford or a Toyota by which shows the next ad would have equal relevance, even if the Toyota is the vehicle they would most prefer?

I don't understand this principle. Why would Google not accept an ad from Ford for just 1 cent more?

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm still not sure this overcomes the marketing budged differences between entities like "AI Slop Co" vs. "Independent Artist" or "Ford" vs. "Independent Mechanic". There's also the fact that the heaviest advertisers are often the brands I'm going to be least interested in regardless of any other factors[1]. Yes, you can get ad relevance to some local maximum where I do see some stuff I'd actually buy, but optimality is forever out of reach because the products I really want to know about probably spend almost nothing on advertising or have direct competition from an entity like Microsoft that will pour $millions into their ad spend.

[1] VPNs are a perfect example here. I would never use NordVPN because they advertise on every square inch of YouTube. This suggests to me that they're either charging too much for what they offer or they're getting money from their actual customers and the users are simply the inventory they sell to those customers.

Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.

It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.

>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".

Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.

Even if McDonalds could tell Google not to show the ad to vegetarians, they have no way to verify Google isn't.

At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way

Google has no incentive to do so. McDonalds does, but its somewhat costly to scale against ALL the ads they push.

For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.

Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.

infinite things could confound that analysis

Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already

Can't they ask claude to create account do some relevant searches and then check if ad is shown?

What makes you think Google has built a profile that shows Claude is a vegetarian?

That's the thing - ask claude to do requests to build such profile

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