Still somewhat better than creepy targeted advertising. I bought a new garbage can a few weeks ago now many sites are full of ads for garbage cans. Although this may be one example where the targeting is working. Most of the sites showing those ads are garbage.
This example is brought up all the time - "I just bought something which I buy every few years at most, and now I'm getting ads for it after I bought it".
Obviously it's usually completely ineffective. BUT I think it might make a purchase correlation score go up. Imagine that no human working for the company buying the ads is fully understanding what the correlation score means, and they are effectively using or subscribing to a machine learning model that is trying to increase the correlation score. And they're seeing the score go up.
I'm no expert in the ad targeting ecosystem, and I'm sure I'll be told that's not what it does. But I'm more familiar with systems software, databases, distributed services and such, and I've seen many things that didn't really do what they were supposed to do. It just takes a lot of smarts and a lot of focus, such as Aphyr does with distributed databases, to show that they don't actually do what they claim, due to some mundane bugs or subtle design flaws.
I think there's a good chance that the complex ad targeting ecosystem is just fooling advertisers into thinking it works, without actually working.
I do not understand this behavior at all. You just bought a garbage can. Why would you need another one right away? If you did you presumably would've bought multiple at the time you made the original purchase. To me thats just the marketer or advertising platform being tone deaf.
For several months, I saw no ads on AdSense except for those advertising the Vive. None whatsoever. I saw plenty of ads, they were just the exact same one with an attractive person doing some sort of dance in a headset and controllers.
So...okay, Google. I guess you've figured out that I'm interested in technology, graphics, games, that sort of thing? Is this all that you've got? It's creepy in that it makes me wonder WHEN you're listening to me, not if.
Still somewhat better than creepy targeted advertising. I bought a new garbage can a few weeks ago now many sites are full of ads for garbage cans. Although this may be one example where the targeting is working. Most of the sites showing those ads are garbage.