[Guest9812398]

I see these all the time too.

1. I bought one of those spinning face brushes for my girlfriend. A few minutes after purchasing online, I started seeing advertisements from that same store, for the same exact brush. Literally 90% of the page views were showing that advertisement.

2. I was browsing Airbnb accommodation for a trip to let's say Mexico. I was checking apartments on and off for weeks. I didn't see any Airbnb advertisements during that time. The minute I book that accommodation, Airbnb starts showing advertisements for rooms in Mexico.

3. I'm browsing barbers in a new city. No advertisements until I book an appointment with one online. Then, I start seeing advertisements for the same barbershop. Now, that has potential, but the advertisements stopped after a week. Why do I need to book a second hair appointment in the same week? Why not recognize I booked a men's haircut, and start showing me ads in a few weeks?

For all the tracking, privacy invasion, and fancy "machine learning", advertising sure is dumb.

[username223]

Maybe it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Maybe the goal of targeted advertising is to find the people who were about to buy something anyways, shove an ad for it in front of them just in time, and take a cut[1]:

> Our results indicate that more sophisticated targeting algorithms might not gain, and might even harm, the advertiser as those seeing the ad would convert in the absence of advertising.

There are a bunch of ad-tech people on this site; maybe some of them could chime in and share how many more sales they make using total surveillance versus basic keyword-in-page.

[1] https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=7020000840130690...