So I bought a couch yesterday online.
So now all these advertisers have polluted my screens with couch advertisements.
But the thing is, it’s not just any couch; it’s the exact same couch I bought. Same color and everything.
If they know this much about me, how could they not know I already bought the damn couch?
It just seems like a waste of advertising dollars to me. It doesn’t make sense.
There’s a premise that if you bought one thing from them you’ll buy another. That’s been a well known practice that goes back to the days of mail order and the Sears catalog so once businesses have a way to contact you they’re going to prioritize you as a target. Somehow the second part of that, having something else to sell the people on their list hasn’t sunk into the mindset as thoroughly. And now it’s worse because it’s incredibly easy to plaster you with pointless ads, it doesn’t cost them a penny as even junk snail mail would.
That’s a pet peeve of mine. Say I go to “Joe’s Camera Shop” online and order a nice used 35mm film camera from them. Then they send me emails daily reminding me that they exist.
Most of the time I wouldn’t mind an email every week or two, but all too frequently businesses go all-in with daily spam. Thankfully they almost all provide a “unsubscribe” link and they stop the spam when I ask them to.
But then when you decline they sell your info to another advertiser.
They don’t care — buy another for a different room, buy one for a friend, buy all the remaining ones and corner the market…
If they don’t burn up their entire advertising budget, they might get less to spend next year.
Sites like Amazon doing this puzzles me. And the more high end the product they more they want me to buy it again. I doubt they have that many customers that are so rich they want to buy a new laptop every week.
E.g., if I buy a toilet seat (hypothetical), they want to show me more toilet seats over and over.
Yeah, if I was a contractor that might make sense, but since that’s much less common do they really “think” I want to buy several more? Why not show me other bathroom renovation products instead. That makes a lot more sense.
Sure, there’s no actual person making the decision but any reasonably programmed algorithm would be able to suggest other related items based on other people’s past buying behavior. E.g., it would note that there’s a correlation between buying a toilet seat one day and later buying a faucet or some such.
Even weirder, the exact same product I just bought.
It’s like there’s only one advertising algorithm for all products, and it gets triggered when you look at the product, and subsequent events (e.g. buying it) are not recorded.
No kidding.
I buy a nice 100-400 mm zoom lens for my Canon DSLR, so then I get “recommended for you” not only other 100-400 mm lenses for the Canon, (like I need more than one?) but also lenses for a Nikon. How would they imagine I need Nikon lenses?
Never mind buying something, just mentioning something in the presence of your smartphone will generate spam for that thing.
This has been happening to me all week.
I was looking for an out-of-print board game. I saw a game company had two copies. I bought one last week.
And all week, I’ve been seeing dozens of ads from this company, telling me they know I’m interested in this game and they only have one copy of it left.
I would think it would make more sense for the company to target me with ads for other games rather than try to sell me a game they know for a fact I already own.
I bought a printer from Staples a couple of years ago.
They kept trying and trying to sell me another printer. Now I do admit that some of their customers are businesses large enough to need multiple printers; but there’s nothing about a Staples to discourage random people from buying things for household use, or tiny businesses for that matter. In fact, they encourage it. So quite a lot of their customers are only going to need one printer.
In addition: the confirmation notice told me to print their form and leave it on the door for the delivery company if I wanted it left when I wasn’t home. Um, hello? I can’t print your confirmation notice because the old printer’s broken. That’s why I bought a printer.
(The delivery company – I forget who it was – took, as usual, my handwritten note on the door asking them to leave packages in the back hall.)
But programming such an algorithm costs money, so instead you just use machine learning to create a black box that meets its training goal and call it a day.
I bought an album on eBay, then eBay was “Hey, you can buy another one of those!” for a while. I only needed one copy of the album like normal people do, thanks.
More amusing was that I recently bought some car floor mats. Two weeks later, I’m getting emails from the company saying “We miss you!”. How many floor mats do you think I need? And, yes, even if I have other cars am I really going to say “Shit, the floor mat company is feeling bad, I better buy more floor mats”? Just hit me up if you’re having a sale or something, trying to emotionally connect me to the floor mat company is weird.
This is a constant source of amusement for my wife and me. We routinely go through several (sponsored) on-line news sites when we’re in bed each evening, just catching up on the news of the day. The sites are overflowing with ads for products we just bought a day or two ago. I could understand that Amazon might think I’m interested in another printer or a second set of headphones, but how many vacuum cleaners do they think I need? I could understand if they were ads for replacement brushes or filters.
It’s cheaper to have an X button on the ad that allows you to ask to remove it. Often you’ll then get a list of reasons why, with choose buttons. One of the choices will be “already purchased”.
Why do the work when they can make you do it. (And don’t ask what happens after you buy a box of See’s candy online.)
Unless given a reason to remove a name from a list it won’t be done. On top of that a place like Amazon is going to keep spamming you because you probably do keep ordering things from them.
Odds are that their ad software knows that you (well, your computer) searched for that game, but that said software isn’t linked to the company’s sales site – so, their ad software doesn’t know that you bought it.
I still feel it’s poor programming. Targeting me with advertising for a product I already own is a waste of their advertising budget. They should amend their algorithms to be able to take note of past purchases and strike those items from any future ads directed at me. I should instead be seeing ads for similar products that I might actually be persuaded to buy. If I just bought a bluray of Blazing Saddles, don’t send me ads suggesting I buy another copy of the same movie. I should be seeing ads for Young Frankenstein and Spaceballs.
This is the kind of stuff they should be teaching students in Advertising 101.
Speaking as an ad guy: I agree; it’s dumb to give an ad to someone who’s literally just bought your product. But, that said…it’s not a matter of bad advertising; it’s a matter of having two different systems, run by two different companies, that aren’t set up to communicate with each other, and that use different data.
The ad-buy system uses cookies or search history to target you with ads, and it’s undoubtedly run by a third party, like Google or Conversant, rather than by the company you bought from. They serve you ads for what you searched for, because they have no idea if you actually have bought it or not, or were just browsing. The sales site you bought your game from is run by the game company (or a third-party shopping cart vendor), and uses the personal information and account info you provide to them.