Name: Author Antonio Garcia Martinez Explains How Targeted Ads Work
Uploaded: 2022-03-23T22:55:59.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Antonio Garcia Martinez Explains How Targeted Ads Work' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Antonio Garcia Martinez Explains How Targeted Ads Work' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-23. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience basically long story short PhD student drop out of the
PhD go to work at Wall Street Wall Street blows up I come back to tech
right or back to tech I never worked in tech but I'd gone to school in Berkeley
and I had seen kind of the first tech bubble so I was kind of vaguely aware of
it join tech join ad tech do my own startup tiny little company not a big
success get sold to Twitter I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one
of
the early members of the ads team so if you go like browse for shit on the
internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your Instagram feed or
whatever I created the very first versions initial not what's there now
versions of that so a lot of the I was the first like product manager for ads
targeting so like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is
what I was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's
history and so I was there again not that terribly long but it was a lot
happened the company went grew in size enormously and figured out how to make
money like I didn't know how to fucking make money the ads the ads as I
remember
used to suck and now everyone's like ads are either creepy or crappy there's no
in-between so I went from crappy to creepy it was a big team a lot of people
did
stuff to make that happen so the book is about that like how do you start a
company how do you raise money the inner workings of Silicon Valley I went
through this famous incubator thing called white combinator when you say
crappy to creepy do you mean invasive yeah yeah in the sense of like oh this is
like totally relevant to like oh I was literally just searching for this thing
and here's an ad for it let me ask you about this because we've talked about
this multiple times in the podcast sometimes you're having a conversation
oh god the microphone thing is that real no it's not real no no I mean I don't
believe him we were just talking about something the other day I haven't
searched for it at all okay and I got an ad for it something me and you were
talking about what was it I if I remember right I couldn't remember but it was
something we're talking about after the show here six hours later I'm getting
an ad for it
here's what I'd bet on one of you two either searched or went to some
website not only one of us what so if I do he gets an ad yeah that potentially
yeah how the term of art is called look-alike audiences what that means is so
some
retailer knows that you dump much of money at whatever REI Cabela's pick your
favorite retailer whatever you two are buds and you interact a lot on whatever
social media platform if I'm Cabela say just a cited example I'm like okay I
know this guy is worth whatever $2,000 a year get me more people like him and
companies like Facebook or other companies can say aha well guess what he
talks to this dude a lot who by the way whose profile kind of looks like yours
and so you will get targeted for something that you did yeah I get that but we
have very different online things you know I looked sneakers and stuff he's
looking at hunting and whatnot the thing that came up I wish I could I did I
normally take a screenshot when these things happen because I'll share it with
the person yeah like look what just popped up on my phone this was outside
of that yeah this is one of those things I go all right we need to talk about
this
but again I know there's okay so let me like fences to it but this was let me
address the question it's funny there is a there's a planet money show about
this
in which they talked to various people who had this experience try to figure
out
how it actually happened I was I was a guest on it but let me address the
problem so imagine imagine let's say let's say Mark Zuckerberg is listening to
your conversations and gets like a live stream of your phone all the time what
fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something
commercially interesting that would be worth like targeting against like how
often do you say hey I'm flying to Boston next week and I need a flight in a
hotel on a taxi and you say it in some structured way that would be easy it it's
pretty rare right and the amount of I mean think about the amount of data you'd
have to
be on a constant phone call basically to suck it would eat up your network like
crazy and then the fraction of the times versus you just like going to fucking
kayak and like entering Boston and using that data and so it I'm not saying it's
technically impossible and in some future world who knows but it would be
difficult and even if you manage to do it there isn't one of the things one of
the chapters of my book I understand you're listening to have a chapter called
the
narcissism of privacy which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean but privacy
is a right and people have a right to it obviously but I think one of the
sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that
like Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know which
is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever when it
comes
to commercial data that actually helps target ads there's very little very
little of what you do or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want
not
necessarily what you would like what you would not want Facebook to know right
but
what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up keywords
that
they have accounts with so whether it's uh yeah cell phones tires whatever it
is then you see an ad for
it it would be more possible in like the smart speaker systems you have at home
for example right
that that probably wouldn't be so hard to do stuff like that probably wouldn't
be so hard to do that makes sense and so how would they target you for an ad
with that well again if you said something well-structured that would be easy
to tease out and if that's connected to the same account that's connected to
your gmail or your google search or amazon or amazon then they would show you
the ads yeah so like a lot of what happens that's actual
that's actual targeting is like data joining so like getting back to the cabalos
example like i understand you're into hunting so maybe you shop at the local
cabalos or the bass pro shop
um they'll have your phone number and email for all the shit you buy online and
what they want to do is like find you online and sell you because it's the
fucking deer hunting season sale or whatever
and they try to and so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to
facebook and say oh this is the
this is the deer hunting group and then they'll show you ads based on your
actual buying history so that sort of thing absolutely does happen
that makes sense what is it like being in those companies like whether it's
facebook or you know any
any sort of tech company for someone on the outside we we look at it and we say
like how are those
fucking places run because it's like i've had a good friend who was a big
executive at google and now she
works at another large tech company and the way she described it to me she's
like it is utter madness
it's utter madness and the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent
because there's a lot
of people the company that she works for now there's a lot of people that are
inside the company that
legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists and they
have to placate
them because it's a certain percentage of the population of the people that
work for the company
and they're the loudest and they oftentimes don't get work done and when
confronted they could they talk
about their activism right and like she's like listen you are here for you know
x amount of hours a day
this is your fucking job you're not an activist right and don't think that if
you're complaining
about other things that this company does that you doing that is a part of your
job because it is not
yeah i mean i think the companies are somewhat to blame because they've done
the whole like bring
the real self to work thing right and again what is that there's this
philosophy among like the hr
there that like and if you're being cynical about it it's engineered to get the
most productivity out
of you like the real the real self to like if you work at some of these
companies particularly
again to answer your question i think it depends what stage of the company you
join but we're talking
about big companies like apple google facebook now um it it's a campus it's a
lifestyle they do your
laundry for you they feed you there's like they do your laundry they can't yeah
yeah there's like
apple does your laundry i'm not sure about apple because we were never in
office because it was
still under covid but facebook had had laundry i'm sure google does yeah whoa
yeah it's it's weird
it's you join i mean it's a strained analogy but it's kind of like a cult and
there's like a massive
amount of corporate culture like i described this lot in chaos monkeys who said
that what who said
that quote that every successful startup is a cult i think it was keith roboi i
think from
founders fund and he the thing is he's right he's right like facebook was a
cult and i joined it and
i was a happy member of it it was very powerful everyone sacrificed themselves
for the sake of the
facebook empire and its emperor did it change your own personal thinking while
you were there in the
cult oh yeah did you subscribe to kool-aid oh yeah i totally bled blue i still
do to a certain degree
absolutely because again it's a formative experience like some of the most
impactful professional work
i did was there like it or not making taking facebook ads from like the shitty
stupid little ipad offer
ads on the right to like literally the thing you just looked at or bought which
i know sounds cringy
whatever that changed everything i was one of many to be clear it wasn't just
me but that changed
everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry like
how much of an impact did
have when apple came along and in introduced these restrictions oh huge out of
yeah you're talking
about att which is like the ads transparency thing for those who don't know if
you've got an iphone
like you you download an app and suddenly there's like this opt-in that apple
is showing you saying
hey do you want to share your data with these people that's hugely impactful
what that does is
so why does that matter so apple controls this they create the hardware and the
software and all of it
right right at the end of the day seen from apple's point of view facebook as
powerful as it seems
is just another app in the app store right which was always zuck's fear which
is why he wanted to
build a phone apple can say look facebook you can't you don't get to track
users as well as you used
to you can't track joe rogan down or like anonymously your device id you can't
do that anymore
you only get a certain level of granularity it's how much tracking were they
able to do that
before that well i mean an infinite amount they would track you individually i
mean whether it's worth
doing that's another matter but they would get the individual device id from
your phone and so they
would know who you are in terms of that phone they yeah what does that entail
like again you know you
if if you go to if you go to cabela's and buy a thing then you go to some you're
playing a casual game
and they show you an ad you playing that game and you buying that thing in cabela's
can be individually
joined in a very precise way and if you remove that and say oh you can't track
joe rogan's phone
you're tracking a hundred thousand people at a throw then they bucketize you
they put you in a
bucket that isn't quite as precise as before and what that translates into is
fewer clicks fewer sales
like the effective amount of money that either the advertiser makes or the
publisher that showing
the ad makes goes down now is this for the end user for the person who has the
phone
is it beneficial that they've instituted these policies good question um if you
get a warm fuzzy
feeling inside knowing you're not being individually tracked yes but other than
that not particularly
but it also doesn't give up the access to your data that's this very valuable
commodity for facebook
right um so here's a tricky thing about data right one of the one of the many
misconceptions that i try
to address in the book about how facebook works is it's often not facebook data
that's being used to
target you because if you think about facebook right it's like you're posting
random photos you're
engaging with content but a lot of your commercial activity like booking
airplane flights shopping for
shit doesn't happen on facebook facebook doesn't know about that strictly
speaking so how how do they
solve that problem that like we got to show him shoe ads and facebook doesn't
know about what shoes
you like right well so part of this is what i described in the book and what i
helped build in
the early stages there's a way of joining you joe rogan facebook you to cabela's
you in some relatively
data safe way that that lets cabela show you an ad for those shoes facebook
doesn't necessarily
know all the cabela's because cabela's doesn't want to let facebook know that
shit because they don't trust facebook right and so a lot of the stuff that's
going on isn't like oh
facebook knows everything about you it's like no facebook knows who you are on
every device
because you tend to use facebook everywhere maybe not you but other people and
so that
means that they can join you very well to all the other commercial activity you
do
and you use facebook a lot so they have lots of opportunities to maybe show you
an ad so
that's really facebook's strength but getting back to your original question
how does apple
fuck that up well it fucks it up because it doesn't know who you are on that
device at the individual
granular level anymore and so it can't talk to cabela's and say oh that guy who's
look for these
weird things like show them this ad that that can't happen anymore is it in any
way negative for the
person who's the end user good question um because maybe you would want to see
those those ads because
this is something that you're actually interested in purchasing i mean in the
happy case but let's face it
i mean in the happy case well if you're a person who's you know you have full
control over your
urges you're not a person who's just like you know you don't you can't afford
something but you buy it
anyway because you're crazy and you saw the ad and you can't help yourself
because we know that there
are people like that out there right so in the best case scenario is it better
i would think so but
isn't that like what you do as a business i i think the status quo is a lot
better than the like
stupid punch the monkey ads you used to spend those ads and like display band
you probably don't
remember them but like in yahoo come back in the day to be like a little moving
target and he'll
like punch the monkey like you can either see that or you can actually see an
ad that maybe
has a chance of being relevant in instagram feed so yeah that you give anything
up to have those
relative ads no in fact i mean you gain things right like a lot of services
wouldn't exist if they
weren't paid for via ads so like the reality is if facebook's ads start sucking
more i.e the amount of
money they make brads goes down they're just going to show you more ads so do
you think that android
phones handle it better because android phones allow more of those things in
super wonky question
wasn't expecting this it's wonky yeah no no no it's good i think i love talking
about it but um
the model that google and apple have are somewhat different um apple is a fully
you know vertically
integrated thing they create literally the chips and the software you're
looking at google's a little bit
different um you can buy android phones made by all sorts of manufacturers
their model in general
tends to be a little bit more open to third parties and so there's a whole ads
ecosystem in google
where i could fill this wall or whiteboard with all the little boxes of all the
little companies that
like get together to show you a single ad and so google is a little bit better
about being more open
to the outside mind you they still use monopoly power in various ways like they're
not saints
um but apple has a more closed note approach to it i mean that's why they're
building an ad system
because they want to make money in ads but they're not going to go the google
route they're going to
build more than likely i mean not that i have deep insight into it anymore um
but more than likely
they're going to build it themselves because they have a more closed vision of
it that how they
think about data privacy here's another thing if you want to geek out one
direction apple's going
that's kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iphone is going
to live on device
like in other words for the past 20 plus years of internet we've had this model
where like you do
shit on a phone data goes into the cloud weird shit happens and you get shown a
page or an experience
a lot of that's changing right like probably most of what you do on a phone is
through an app it's
not a browser anymore it's like the code is running on your on your phone you're
producing data on that
phone like why shouldn't the computation and all the shit that happens happen
on the phone these
phones are actually pretty powerful right um and so a lot of things are moving
in that direction
for a bunch of reasons one of the reasons actually is privacy and you know
apple and other companies
have made public statements about this it's like oh it's more private like what's
the ultimate opt-out
my data's on this phone you know i do i take it and i throw into the lake their
data's gone right
while like opt-out and deletion when the data's in the cloud and a bunch of
third parties have it
you never really know right right but if you keep the data on the phone it is
better in many ways

Author Antonio Garcia Martinez Explains How Targeted Ads Work

the Joe Rogan experience basically long story short PhD student drop out of the
PhD go to work at Wall Street Wall Street blows up I come back to tech
right or back to tech I never worked in tech but I'd gone to school in Berkeley
and I had seen kind of the first tech bubble so I was kind of vaguely aware of
it join tech join ad tech do my own startup tiny little company not a big
success get sold to Twitter I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one
of
the early members of the ads team so if you go like browse for shit on the
internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your Instagram feed or
whatever I created the very first versions initial not what's there now
versions of that so a lot of the I was the first like product manager for ads
targeting so like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is
what I was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's
history and so I was there again not that terribly long but it was a lot
happened the company went grew in size enormously and figured out how to make
money like I didn't know how to fucking make money the ads the ads as I
remember
used to suck and now everyone's like ads are either creepy or crappy there's no
in-between so I went from crappy to creepy it was a big team a lot of people
did
stuff to make that happen so the book is about that like how do you start a
company how do you raise money the inner workings of Silicon Valley I went
through this famous incubator thing called white combinator when you say
crappy to creepy do you mean invasive yeah yeah in the sense of like oh this is
like totally relevant to like oh I was literally just searching for this thing
and here's an ad for it let me ask you about this because we've talked about
this multiple times in the podcast sometimes you're having a conversation
oh god the microphone thing is that real no it's not real no no I mean I don't
believe him we were just talking about something the other day I haven't
searched for it at all okay and I got an ad for it something me and you were
talking about what was it I if I remember right I couldn't remember but it was
something we're talking about after the show here six hours later I'm getting
an ad for it
here's what I'd bet on one of you two either searched or went to some
website not only one of us what so if I do he gets an ad yeah that potentially
yeah how the term of art is called look-alike audiences what that means is so
some
retailer knows that you dump much of money at whatever REI Cabela's pick your
favorite retailer whatever you two are buds and you interact a lot on whatever
social media platform if I'm Cabela say just a cited example I'm like okay I
know this guy is worth whatever $2,000 a year get me more people like him and
companies like Facebook or other companies can say aha well guess what he
talks to this dude a lot who by the way whose profile kind of looks like yours
and so you will get targeted for something that you did yeah I get that but we
have very different online things you know I looked sneakers and stuff he's
looking at hunting and whatnot the thing that came up I wish I could I did I
normally take a screenshot when these things happen because I'll share it with
the person yeah like look what just popped up on my phone this was outside
of that yeah this is one of those things I go all right we need to talk about
this
but again I know there's okay so let me like fences to it but this was let me
address the question it's funny there is a there's a planet money show about
this
in which they talked to various people who had this experience try to figure
out
how it actually happened I was I was a guest on it but let me address the
problem so imagine imagine let's say let's say Mark Zuckerberg is listening to
your conversations and gets like a live stream of your phone all the time what
fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something
commercially interesting that would be worth like targeting against like how
often do you say hey I'm flying to Boston next week and I need a flight in a
hotel on a taxi and you say it in some structured way that would be easy it it's
pretty rare right and the amount of I mean think about the amount of data you'd
have to
be on a constant phone call basically to suck it would eat up your network like
crazy and then the fraction of the times versus you just like going to fucking
kayak and like entering Boston and using that data and so it I'm not saying it's
technically impossible and in some future world who knows but it would be
difficult and even if you manage to do it there isn't one of the things one of
the chapters of my book I understand you're listening to have a chapter called
the
narcissism of privacy which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean but privacy
is a right and people have a right to it obviously but I think one of the
sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that
like Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know which
is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever when it
comes
to commercial data that actually helps target ads there's very little very
little of what you do or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want
not
necessarily what you would like what you would not want Facebook to know right
but
what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up keywords
that
they have accounts with so whether it's uh yeah cell phones tires whatever it
is then you see an ad for
it it would be more possible in like the smart speaker systems you have at home
for example right
that that probably wouldn't be so hard to do stuff like that probably wouldn't
be so hard to do that makes sense and so how would they target you for an ad
with that well again if you said something well-structured that would be easy
to tease out and if that's connected to the same account that's connected to
your gmail or your google search or amazon or amazon then they would show you
the ads yeah so like a lot of what happens that's actual
that's actual targeting is like data joining so like getting back to the cabalos
example like i understand you're into hunting so maybe you shop at the local
cabalos or the bass pro shop
um they'll have your phone number and email for all the shit you buy online and
what they want to do is like find you online and sell you because it's the
fucking deer hunting season sale or whatever
and they try to and so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to
facebook and say oh this is the
this is the deer hunting group and then they'll show you ads based on your
actual buying history so that sort of thing absolutely does happen
that makes sense what is it like being in those companies like whether it's
facebook or you know any
any sort of tech company for someone on the outside we we look at it and we say
like how are those
fucking places run because it's like i've had a good friend who was a big
executive at google and now she
works at another large tech company and the way she described it to me she's
like it is utter madness
it's utter madness and the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent
because there's a lot
of people the company that she works for now there's a lot of people that are
inside the company that
legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists and they
have to placate
them because it's a certain percentage of the population of the people that
work for the company
and they're the loudest and they oftentimes don't get work done and when
confronted they could they talk
about their activism right and like she's like listen you are here for you know
x amount of hours a day
this is your fucking job you're not an activist right and don't think that if
you're complaining
about other things that this company does that you doing that is a part of your
job because it is not
yeah i mean i think the companies are somewhat to blame because they've done
the whole like bring
the real self to work thing right and again what is that there's this
philosophy among like the hr
there that like and if you're being cynical about it it's engineered to get the
most productivity out
of you like the real the real self to like if you work at some of these
companies particularly
again to answer your question i think it depends what stage of the company you
join but we're talking
about big companies like apple google facebook now um it it's a campus it's a
lifestyle they do your
laundry for you they feed you there's like they do your laundry they can't yeah
yeah there's like
apple does your laundry i'm not sure about apple because we were never in
office because it was
still under covid but facebook had had laundry i'm sure google does yeah whoa
yeah it's it's weird
it's you join i mean it's a strained analogy but it's kind of like a cult and
there's like a massive
amount of corporate culture like i described this lot in chaos monkeys who said
that what who said
that quote that every successful startup is a cult i think it was keith roboi i
think from
founders fund and he the thing is he's right he's right like facebook was a
cult and i joined it and
i was a happy member of it it was very powerful everyone sacrificed themselves
for the sake of the
facebook empire and its emperor did it change your own personal thinking while
you were there in the
cult oh yeah did you subscribe to kool-aid oh yeah i totally bled blue i still
do to a certain degree
absolutely because again it's a formative experience like some of the most
impactful professional work
i did was there like it or not making taking facebook ads from like the shitty
stupid little ipad offer
ads on the right to like literally the thing you just looked at or bought which
i know sounds cringy
whatever that changed everything i was one of many to be clear it wasn't just
me but that changed
everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry like
how much of an impact did
have when apple came along and in introduced these restrictions oh huge out of
yeah you're talking
about att which is like the ads transparency thing for those who don't know if
you've got an iphone
like you you download an app and suddenly there's like this opt-in that apple
is showing you saying
hey do you want to share your data with these people that's hugely impactful
what that does is
so why does that matter so apple controls this they create the hardware and the
software and all of it
right right at the end of the day seen from apple's point of view facebook as
powerful as it seems
is just another app in the app store right which was always zuck's fear which
is why he wanted to
build a phone apple can say look facebook you can't you don't get to track
users as well as you used
to you can't track joe rogan down or like anonymously your device id you can't
do that anymore
you only get a certain level of granularity it's how much tracking were they
able to do that
before that well i mean an infinite amount they would track you individually i
mean whether it's worth
doing that's another matter but they would get the individual device id from
your phone and so they
would know who you are in terms of that phone they yeah what does that entail
like again you know you
if if you go to if you go to cabela's and buy a thing then you go to some you're
playing a casual game
and they show you an ad you playing that game and you buying that thing in cabela's
can be individually
joined in a very precise way and if you remove that and say oh you can't track
joe rogan's phone
you're tracking a hundred thousand people at a throw then they bucketize you
they put you in a
bucket that isn't quite as precise as before and what that translates into is
fewer clicks fewer sales
like the effective amount of money that either the advertiser makes or the
publisher that showing
the ad makes goes down now is this for the end user for 