ChrisFromIT t1_ityham5 wrote
Reply to comment by ninthpower in Facebook Segments Ads by Race and Age Based on Photos | Ads with teenage girls are mostly directed at men over 55, while white people see fewer ads with Black faces, a new study finds. by chrisdh79
>Nearly all ad placement is driven by machine learning algorithms
Yes and no. What the ad displays to a user is done through AB testing. As an advertiser, you can select what group you would like to target. You can have multiple different ads targeting different groups.
With the AB testing, you will typically find what ad has the best click through.
The machine learning comes in when serving the ad, by matching people to the target group selected by the advertiser. The machine learning will try to pick people from the target group that best fit the profit and are more likely to click through. It doesn't generate a new ad campaign for the advertiser to increase click through rates.
Frosti11icus t1_ityq495 wrote
This used to be true. Facebook has leaned heavily into marketing automation to allow ai to do constant multivariate testing and optimization without the advertiser necessarily even knowing what creatives and copy are being served.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu0xp49 wrote
Nope, Facebook still does A/B testing. It doesn't have marketing automation to allow AI to do A/B testing and optimization via changing the ad copy without the advertiser's input.
Now it does use AI during the A/B testing to try and help figure out which ad copy will likely perform the best and try and push that ad copy over the others. But it does not create new ad copies.
Frosti11icus t1_iu0ycl7 wrote
Ya but the advertiser can literally give the AI thousands of inputs of copy and creative to choose from and the AI will optimize ads for the best performing. And even further, you can use 3rd party API's to generate ad copy for facebook ads, so an advertiser could absolutely create a campaign and have really very little idea what ad content is being served. We've seen it in gymnastics, hockey, cheer, any travel sport...haven't heard about it in basketball yet but it's almost definitely happening which is horrific.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu1179t wrote
>Ya but the advertiser can literally give the AI thousands of inputs of copy and creative to choose from and the AI will optimize ads for the best performing.
Yes and no, it won't completely be able to optimize it. The larger the audience, the worse the click through rate will be per impression. A more targeted audience, the better the AI will perform.
>And even further, you can use 3rd party API's to generate ad copy for facebook ads, so an advertiser could absolutely create a campaign and have really very little idea what ad content is being served.
While true, this don't support what you were claiming before, which was that Facebook's AI generates the ad copy.
Frosti11icus t1_iu13z54 wrote
I never implied that the AI generate the ad copy, I said that the advertiser can run ads without necessarily knowing what copy was being served.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu15qbz wrote
>This used to be true. Facebook has leaned heavily into marketing automation to allow ai to do constant multivariate testing and optimization without the advertiser necessarily even knowing what creatives and copy are being served.
That is what you said.
This was in response to my comment that Facebook's AI does not generate any ad copy.
By you saying "this used to be true" in response to my comment and the rest of your comment, it very much is saying that Facebook's AI is generating ad copies and displaying those ad copies.
And the advertiser knows that Facebook will serve one out of all the ad copies it has been given for the ad campaign. The only way that Facebook AI will serve a copy that the advertiser doesn't know about, is if it generates its own ad copy.
Frosti11icus t1_iu1llun wrote
>without the advertiser necessarily even knowing what creatives and copy are being served.
Bro, c'mon, reading comprehension. I didn't imply anything. This is verbatim what I said.
If I'm an advertiser and I give facebook 1000 pieces of copy to choose from, and I don't explicitly check every single of the thousands or millions of ads served, then I would have no idea which of the ad copy facebook is serving. Further, if I used a 3rd party AI to generate my ad copy, which isn't that unusual, then I might not have any idea at all what ad copy is being served.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu1plgv wrote
>I don't explicitly check every single of the thousands or millions of ads served, then I would have no idea which of the ad copy facebook is serving.
Two things here. First, if you are ad advertiser on Facebook, you know explicitly that Facebook can only serve the ad copies you give it for the ad campaign. You can give it a million different ad copies and you know 100% that any ads served for your ad campaign is one of those million different ad copies.
Second, Facebook tells you how many impressions are given for each ad copy and the click thru rate, so as an advertisers you can see what ads are being served.
>Bro, c'mon, reading comprehension.
I explained why I read it the way I did. It is your fault for not making it clear.
Frosti11icus t1_iu1r360 wrote
>Two things here. First, if you are ad advertiser on Facebook, you know explicitly that Facebook can only serve the ad copies you give it for the ad campaign. You can give it a million different ad copies and you know 100% that any ads served for your ad campaign is one of those million different ad copies.
>
>Second, Facebook tells you how many impressions are given for each ad copy and the click thru rate, so as an advertisers you can see what ads are being served.
Ok first thing, yes advertisers do give facebook the inputs on ad copy, but if you are doing large amount of programmatic advertising and cranking out ads left and right you're not spending a lot of time dissecting the nuances of your ad copy.
Second, yes facebook gives you data to track your ads, but if you are running hundreds or thousands of ads you aren't as a single person going to be analyzing the performance of any specific ad, (yet another thing that can also be easily handed over to AI btw) let alone each iteration of a given ad. It wouldn't even be possible to do that as a human if you have enough variations on your ad copy and creatives.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu1tyir wrote
You are essentially trying to argue that it is impossible for an advertiser to know what ads are in their ad campaign. I'm just arguing that there are tools there for them to know.
And frankly if they don't know what ads are in their ad campaign, that is not an advertiser you would want to use.
WeirdAndGilly t1_itz0aes wrote
That doesn't seem to be what the article is saying. The advertisers aren't making the choice, the Facebook algorithm is.
ChrisFromIT t1_iu0yc0u wrote
That is what the article says. Essentially the study authors used A/B testing. Which the AI algorithm that Facebook uses, determines which users to serve them to. But again, based on the choices that the advertiser sets out.
sfzombie13 t1_itza0uz wrote
it is, after years of tweaking to find out what works. surely you've heard about all of those tests facebook ran on users, right? you think they haven't been testing and revising this for years? it's also a well known fact that folks prefer to be in the company of those more like themselves, so the targeted ads make a lot of sense, and money.
WeirdAndGilly t1_itzroj3 wrote
Uh huh.
Have you read the article yet? Because it looks like you're reacting entirely to the headline and yet seem to think you can add things to the discussion that weren't covered in the article.
sfzombie13 t1_iu0c7jx wrote
the only thing i added was what i heard from a person who worked on the thing they're talking about, and i not only think i can add them, i think it is irresponsible not to add them. had the reporting been more responsible i would not be adding them, just commenting on them, but that is out of my control. and he didn't tell me anything that wasn't common knowledge, or at least available on the internet, so it's not really something i'm making up and can't back up. it's just not a debate class or peer reviewed paper so forgive me for not adding references.
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