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jl2718HNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I have an interesting anecdote about that

I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. …

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azeirahHN

> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care. I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such. I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.

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bee_riderHN

One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.

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mrweaselHN

Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.

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rrrx3HN

> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too. >The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

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