Fallacies of online advertising
The myth of targeted marketing
Spotify is a great service — if you pay for it: if you don’t, it sucks! Their marketing strategy is very simple, actually. It goes like this: you either pay us, or we will bash your eardrums with totally useless and utterly annoying crapvertising.
I understand the strategy. What I find hard to believe is that there are people actually paying for this type of advertising! I can’t believe that the returns on such advertising are anything but marginal. Most of the ads on Spotify are for new musical releases. Are these targeted? Blatantly not: I’m always getting ads for all sorts of stupid crap I would never touch with a 10-foot pole. It’s not like I’m gonna suddenly start to appreciate Justin Bieber just because you repeated his ad 300 times in the last 3 days (besides, looks like Justin Bieber appreciation requires either a congenital handicap or medical malpractice). But someone paid for this. Will they get their money back? Never. Nobody in their right mind would buy that crap. And the simpletons who actually buy that crap will buy it anyway, regardless of how much you advertise it (they buy it because their BFF buys it, or because they think he’s cute — so, your strategy is all wrong).
Facebook is ubiquitous. I myself use it every day. I’m not in love with it, but it’s sort-of-a-nice way to stay in touch with friends who are out of wifi range. It’s too intrusive, so I removed it long ago from my iPhone, along with that obnoxious pile of bits they call “Messenger”. But despite the benefits of using Facebook… I don’t understand why so many idiots in there keep trying to sell me flashlights! What’s the matter with you people? Did you won a freight train full of flashlights in a poker game or something? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas: keep your effing flashlights! Leave me the hell alone! Jeezzus…
Duolingo is an app I use almost every day on my iPhone. My daily commute is 20 minutes to and fro, so i usually get some language practice every day. It’s a great app, that’s for sure. Derzeit versuche ich Deutsche zu lernen… Aber, ich kann kaum meine augen glauben: now it’s got (totally irrelevant) ads, and there was this time that I even got ads in Arabic! Bless the prophet’s beard! I’m a Portuguese guy trying to learn German! What the hell made you think I could understand Arabic?
But the greatest blunder of them all might be next... Recently, a hair transplant clinic opened in the vicinity of my office. Guess what kind of ads started to pop up on my iPhone and on my browsers? Yes… you guessed it. And it happened to all my coworkers too. Those marketing magicians somehow managed to convince the clinic guy to shell out for proximity-targeted advertising. For me it wouldn’t work ever, not even if my hair fell off: I do have a full head of hair, but I have been shaving it for the past 20 years.
The myth of retargeting
Just like billions of people, I do some shopping online. For starters, there are those seasonal things I get like 2 or 3 times every year. And, amazingly, after I place my order, I get this massive barrage of “retargeted” advertising. What kind of idiot thinks that this will ever work? If I just spent the allotted $250 I use to spend every six months on your crap, do you really expect me to buy something more from you during the next 5 minutes, just because you “retargeted me”?
I also do a lot of “virtual window-shopping”. There are lots of stuff I like to look up but I won’t necessarily buy. For instance, I look up cars… But I don’t even have a drivers’ license! Are you sure you want to spend your car dealership advertising budget on people without a drivers’ license?
There is also this mid-term plan I have of moving to a more country-like region. So I recently took up the hobby of looking up real-estate every day. I use a couple of web sites, and their respective native apps. Well, actually… nowadays I only use one (it’s not very good, but everything else sucks soooo bad! Why can’t anyone come up with a good real-estate web site in Portugal?)
Now, after I leave this real-estate website and I go on to chess.com, I get the whole website wallpapered with real-estate ads! This is crazy! Or am I wrong? Let’s see: your website allows me to perform searches specifically targeted to my interests, and if I want a 2-bedroom vila with 2 bathrooms, a garage and a yard, in the district of Lisbon, it’s not very likely that I would suddenly change my mind and move to Vila Nova de Gaia just by looking at a stupid ad! Did you guys fall on your head when you were babies? What’s the matter with you?
A word of advice: get a bit of common sense. And beware: common sense might not be fully A/B testable.
