It seems there is a flurry of discussion around a supposed “leaked” internal email from a Facebook employee who “admitted” that “ads reach(ed) targeted users less than 50% of the time. See the discussion thread on Reddit. Quoting, “[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41%—that means that more than half the time we’re showing ads to someone other than the advertisers’ intended audience. And it is even worse internationally.” The discussion ping-pongs between “I told you so” and utter disbelief. There’s even folks putting forth conspiracy theories like the curious case of the “enthusiastic aunt in her 60’s” who “likes” posts and therefore throws off the ad targeting for ads meant for the 25-35 age group.
Targeting in Digital is Crappy, And We All Knew It Already
The fact that “targeting” in digital marketing is crappy is neither new, nor even surprising. It has been exhaustively covered already, to name a few: Despite Claims That More Targeting Means More Relevant Ads, Nope. Here’s Proof and How Accurate is Programmatic Ad Targeting? and Overtargeting, The Scourge of Marketing. Did you know that most of the targeting data used in programmatic advertising is derived and assumed? That’s because users are not logged into most content sites they visit. The just read the article and leave. Ad tech companies have sold (the snake oil) to clients, that they can derive insights about who users are and what they like, simply by observing what sites they visit or what webpages they look at. That may be possible in theory, but when their predictions of gender are far less than 50% accurate, you should wonder how accurate the rest of their predictions are. In some comical cases, we’ve even seen ad tech companies label the same user as both male and female. This is not accurate, but it helps the ad tech company sell that user (i.e. their cookie) as part of any audience the marketer wants to pay extra for — for supposed targeting purposes. Keep in mind, the ad tech company’s objective is to make more money for themselves, not actually help the marketer do better marketing by actually doing better targeting. And most marketers don’t ask further anyway.
