| Where are your really targeted ads, adtech industry? I think the lack of innovation is due to several problems: 1. the constant barrage of ads hurts their reputation making recruiting hard Wherever you land on the ethics of it, it's a bit like porn: you may not disagree with it in principle, but in practice it seems skeezy enough you don't want to tell your friends that's what you do. Or it could be some group has genuinely new ideas, but there is so much competition they can't demonstrate why their technology is better. 2. their data sucks On a lark, I went to Walmart (they're more vertical than Amazon) and I searched for men's belts. When I filtered for "yellow" most of the belts were, indeed bright yellow. (Seriously, Walmart sells a lot of bright yellow men's belts.) Except, of course, for the ones that were black or brown. And if you search for "t-shirts" and filter by fabrics, Walmart thinks reasonable t-shirt fabrics include acrylic, canvas, chiffon, corduroy, down and vinyl. So, retailers don't even know what's in their inventory, because they don't know what "yellow" means or what a t-shirt is made of. 3. they have too much data You point out, "they act on assumption that a person is fixed and cannot change or want to change." I'm pretty sure they're studying the data longitudinally. The trouble is that they're hoping that magic algorithms can somehow purify petabytes of raw sewage into a clear description of consumer behavior. That's led them to invest in these big data money sinks. And it's not just a sunk cost fallacy at work, I think they do get some apparent financial returns from the weird and inexplicable inferences those algorithms generate. So they keep going down this rabbit hole while consumers, regulators and advertisers are steadily getting fed up with them. |