[Cpoll]

> Knowing that you just visited Best Buy website 10 minutes ago and searched for a camera is _much_ more relevant to figure out which ad to show you on nytimes.com right now than the content of the article you're reading on nytimes.com

The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value.

In my experience when the PhDs say "this doesn't work," the PMs say "that's fine, because we still get to say we have machine learning [insert other buzzword] and the customer thinks it's delivering value."

> Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that.

I admit this is possible, and my gut feeling is that properly implemented targetted ads should be immensely effective, but theory isn't implementation, and I'm taking your word on it either way.

[hombre_fatal]

Driving the user back to BestBuy.com to convert into a concrete sale seems much more valuable than "well, they searched for cameras so they might come back one day and pull the trigger. Fingers crossed!"

Why wouldn't Best Buy pay for that?

I search things on Amazon all the time without checking out. Those aren't locked in as eventual purchases at all. There are even things in my Amazon cart as we speak that I probably won't buy. I'm often a mere teeter from pulling the trigger. Coming home drunk or being reminded at the right moment sometimes push me over the edge.

There's obvious value in giving me the right shove.

[mochomocha]

> The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value.

I agree. The industry is (too slowly) moving towards measuring the actual causal effect of ads to remove the correlation/causation leap that has unfortunately been the norm. But it's much harder to implement given the very fragmented ecosystem, and big players in a monopolistic situation at this point have little incentive to do so.

In reality, it's not uncommon for the causal ad effect to be 10x smaller than the claimed correlational effect.

[dwild]

> The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy.

Are you sure of that? Why would he not buy it on Amazon instead of Best Buy? Why would he choose that Sony camera instead of that Nikon ones?

Ads made him choose that model, at that price, at this specific shop. All theses variables could have changed and he would have still bought a camera, but nothing guarantee that theses variables would have been the same and Best Buy wouldn't have that sale.

Best Buy did win, because someone else didn't.

That's all considering he was already going to buy that camera and it wasn't a poor impulsive choice, which sadly happens too often in this world.