I miss when targeted ads actually knew me instead of guessing wrong

Back in 2018 my ads were eerily accurate about my hobbies but now they keep showing me baby stuff I've never searched for. I think the cookies got too broad after GDPR changes and now it's just random noise instead of useful suggestions. Has anyone else noticed their recommendations got way dumber over the last few years?

3 comments

3 Comments

jakeb2511d ago

The real issue isn't the cookies getting broader, it's that advertisers switched to behavioral prediction models after losing third party data. They started using machine learning to guess what you'll want based on people similar to you, but those models are super lazy with their training data. So if you bought a baby gift once five years ago, the algorithm lumps you into a "new parent" category forever with no way to fix it. Google and Facebook also made their targeting narrower on purpose after the privacy laws hit, so now they just throw generic categories at you instead of looking at your actual browsing history. It's basically advertisers being too cheap to build good first party data systems, and now we all get served diapers for a mistake we made in 2019 lol.

hayden70911d ago

Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean, yeah it's annoying getting random baby stuff ads, but it's just an ad, you can just scroll past it.

nelson.nancy10d ago

Reset your ad preferences on Facebook it actually cleared my baby stuff finally.