Yeah Melbourne 
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Legend! Cheers man!
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Moderating my ads this morning the phrase ‘do-gooders’ has come up many times.
Just sort of struck at how weird an insult that is.
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This post is basically bite-sized Jaron Lanier:
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Just had to get petrol because I’m on empty and need to go to Bath tomorrow.
Tesco was closed. The other petrol station was feral. I had to go to a 3rd one a bit out of town and I got lucky. The two cars who went in front of me thought all the pumps were out of order and drive out.
There was a guy in the middle bit when I pulled in. He was still pumping diesel when I drove off. He was in a pick up and I think he was filling up container after container blocking one whole section.
Fun times had by all. Still I’m sorted for at least 5 days when things will probably be a shit load worse.
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How the fuck do you watch the show they are talking about?
Seems to be a podcast.
I buy some of this but ultimately Google/facebook doesn’t serve ads, brands do.
As far as I know I’ve never seen ‘toothpaste enthusiast’ as an option. I’m still not sure how that brand would target that guy using the built in ad options but then again I’m not Cambridge Analyticia or anything.
I feel like some of these things are overblown in their intelligence capabilities but I’m basing that on nothing really. I guess it’s because I follow Carole Cadwalladr. I just don’t think these things are that smart.
For example, google display ads are one of the the biggest scams in the world. Say I put in a load of topics - Google should place ads on websites contextually related to those topics.
It literally doesn’t matter. The ads will be served on 99.9% fake spam and clicked by 99% spam or misclicks.
If you plan on running YouTube ads as well you better be prepared to block a few 1, 000 kids channels and block out about 30 kids related topic because if you leave it on default nearly all your ads will be on super simple songs and peppa pig world and shit.
FB admittedly does have the deepest targeting but in the UK at least they stopped being able to use 3rd party data years ago and with the latest ios14.5 update they’ve stopped being able to track users completely.
Snapchat and tiktok ad targeting options are fucking shite. It’s just random made up shite.
Twitter is rubbish too. You can target people who use keywords and hashtags and lookalikes of people who follow up to 100 accounts.
LinkedIn targeting on the face of it is pretty fucked up in its depth but the results are usually absolutely shocking. Literally £3-£5 CPC.
If that toothpaste company asked me to target that guy I really wouldn’t have a clue. I wish I did. Maybe I should know. 
Something similar happening in China right now:
I made this point a few months ago: if those of us that worked with marketing data were in on the subliminal tracking shit then there wouldn’t be a need for our entire industry as they could just get these geniuses who sell ads via brainwaves to do it at no extra cost.
Also google is likely to lose its ubiquity as an access point in the next few years. People are probably going to interact solely with a single environment throughout the conversion process.
What I mean is that you’ll see people staying completely within Facebook or Instagram the whole time - so Facebook won’t refer users to a main site and people won’t even go to google to search for things - they’ll do it within Facebooks environment. So google is going to be completely excluded from a lot of lives as it’s just not convenient, not out of any conscious decision.
Of course the tin foils will be all ‘big tech is conspiring in manipulating my thoughts’ but the truth is that fb and google don’t want to work together at all, they’re each other’s biggest rivals. It’s near impossible to get consolidated data to work with across those two platforms that actually means anything of value without 99% of it being pure assumption.
Google and salesforce seem to like each other though. Salesforce loves a phallic building
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I only have a DV master tape of it I’m afraid and the glitches are on that
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You guys are talking about display ads, there’s way more to it than that. Data about your browsing habits, purchases, searches, etc is being sold to investors/hedge funds too. They use these ‘alternative datasets’ to try and predict which stocks to buy based on observing real-time interaction with companies instead of waiting for profit announcements at the end of the year. It’s almost as effective as insider trading if done properly.
Great article here: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
But how would you get that toothpaste companies ads in front of that guy based on him visiting his mum? I genuinely want to know.
I said the same thing about Carr’s wafer thin crackers a few months ago.
Spanky explained but I still don’t understand.
If you have multiple datasets with a unique identifier like an email address you can do all kinds of crazy targeting.
Have a look at the Twitter ‘Custom Audiences’ options:
Yeah all the ad platforms have custom audiences you can make like this. Still doesn’t explain toothpaste man’s tale though because he hasn’t been cookied or got on a toothpaste lover list or visited the toothpastes website or signed up to a free toothpaste sample.
He said he uses a discount card at the supermarket, so all his purchasing habits are on a list linked to the email address or phone number he used to sign up for that.
Have a look at some of the UK data that’s for sale for marketers right now and then let your imagination go wild as to how you could combine this with any unique customer data you hold. That’s where this starts…
Similar scenario, this episode of Reply All covers similar ground.
Getting a new kitchen, from Wickes. It’s all been in the shop and over the phone, except when they emailed the plans to my wife and she emailed them to me (Gmail to Gmail), and then I got a Wickes ad on my Instagram. Not on my personal Instagram either, the other one.
Coincidence? Surely not.
