I’m an edge case.
Google, Amazon and other online giants have been serving me ads and content for over 20 years… but they still don’t get me.
I’m currently in Greece, but before that, I lived in the UAE for a few years. Before that it was the UK… but my interests were formed in my home country of Australia.
All the companies with massive market capitalisations, data and AI powered insights know me – where I am, what I search for, what my language preference is…
This isn’t the first Olympics I’ve followed with the help of Google! So why is it that when I add the Olympics search shortcut to my Android phone, Google gives me the medal count and news stories for Greece?
Is the algorithm so simplistic that it just looks at the country level IP address and serves content based on that and no other preference information? Is it because American’s don’t travel very much, or there is not enough diversity in the workforce to imagine different user cases? What if I had travelled to Japan as a fan, would I get the info about my home country or the Japanese medal count?
The advertising platforms that these companies provide are not much better than the broadcast media they replaced. It’s not so much the fault of the platform as the ‘digital marketing‘ people who are wasting millions on ads that are poorly targeted.
On Youtube, I’m forced to watch ads in Greek, for products clearly intended for women. Similarly, via the Google display network, I get ads for many services – in Greek, which suggests that marketing people are using country alone as the targeting mechanism.
But there could be another explanation. Google can’t serve a blank ad. So if it can’t find an ad that matches me, it finds a generic one – because it has to spend the brand’s budget somehow.
On Instagram I get ads for US clothing companies that don’t understand that I have to pay import duty on thier orders.
On my iPad I get ads for apps that I’ve already have installed.
And on Facebook I get ads from Facebook telling me I have to promote my posts or nobody will see them.
I’m still getting emails from companies in the UAE that know I haven’t opened one of their messages for over a year – and of course the SMS spam because I have a UAE mobile number.
Meanwhile, on Linkedin, the platform is telling salespeople that might be interested in buying services that my own company delivers!
The worst part is that someone is paying everytime I get served an irrelevant ad and the share-prices keep going up.
But maybe it’s not about the edge cases. Maybe it’s about being good enough for the masses and as long as the cost per sale is generating margin and profit.
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