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> As a consumer, not an ad tech guy, I don’t get digital advertising at all. It rarely if ever drives behavior on my part, and I just don’t see effective use of it. The most useful ads I see are the circulars in the newspaper that I seek out. That's very different from my experience as a consumer. Nearly all of the ads I see are digital - I mean I look at the stuff in my physical mailbox long enough to sort (I'd happily pay the post office $100/yr to just block the 'bulk rate' and 'resident' email. Maybe more.) but I don't open up and look in them, even though they are local and usually contain discounts, just 'cause they are rarely what I'm looking for. (where I am, it's mostly fast food and off-brand tools, as far as I can tell. I mean, I do spend a fair amount on tools, but I usually either want a fancy tool, or just the exact right tool. I'm not really willing to wait for the pozi-drive #3 screwdriver I need to go on sale.) What sorts of things to you seek out in the circular? and why do you check your physical mailbox rather than using a search engine? I'm asking out of interest; I used to run a business and I used to buy advertising. Once, I even bought space on the conveyor belt dividers at the grocery store, that realtors use. (I looked for pictures, and all the pictures I have of it are terrible. ) To sell Virtual Private Servers. It was good for a laugh, and there was a little bit of attention, I mean, it was a grocery store in silicon valley. There is something really gratifying to the ego, from the perspective of a small business owner, about buying local physical advertising. But I'm not really convinced of it's effectiveness. It didn't really occur to me to use mail... just 'cause I personally hate physical spam so much. >I’m also getting bombarded with air conditioner ads from Amazon because I bought an air conditioner, from Amazon, a few weeks ago. For all of this big data and machine learning investments, they are trying to sell a man sitting in a 60 degree room another AC — which given the price and free shipping they probably lost money on. I get this a lot, too. I mean, amazon knows I just bought that thing, right? I bought it from them. why do they keep serving me the ad? I'm wondering if a lot of it might be third parties trying to arbitrage google ads vs amazon affiliate rates, and those people might be able to see I'm looking for a thing, but not that I bought the thing. |