Being broadly effective, but somewhat inefficient, is better than being narrowly efficient, but less effective.

Targeting can increase the scale of effects, but this study suggests that the cheaper approach of not targeting so specifically, might actually deliver a greater financial outcome

As Wiberg’s findings point out, the problem with targeting towards conversion optimisation is you are effectively advertising to many people who were already going to buy you.

If I only sell to IT decision-makers, for example, I need some targeting, as I just can’t afford to talk to random consumers. I must pay for some targeting in my media buy, in order to reach a relatively niche audience.  Targeting is no longer a nice to do, but a must have. The interesting question then becomes not should I target, but how can I target effectively?

What they found was any form of second or third-party data led segmenting and targeting of advertising does not outperform a random sample when it comes to accuracy of reaching the actual target.

Contextual ads massively outperform even first party data

We can improve the quality of our targeting much better by just buying ads that appear in the right context, than we can by using my massive first party database to drive the buy, and it’s way cheaper to do that. Putting ads in contextually relevant places beats any form of targeting to individual characteristics. Even using your own data.

The secret to effective, immediate action-based advertising, is perhaps not so much about finding the right people with the right personas and serving them a tailored customised message. It’s to be in the right places. The places where they are already engaging with your category, and then use advertising to make buying easier from that place

Even hard, sales-driving advertising isn’t the tough guy we want it to be. Advertising mostly works when it makes things easier, much more often than when it tries to persuade or invoke a reluctant action.

Thinking about advertising as an ease-making mechanism is much more likely to set us on the right path

If your ad is in the right place, you automatically get the right people, and you also get them at the right time; when they are actually more interested in what you have to sell. You also spend much less to be there than crunching all that data

when a customer wants to buy a product, they usually go straight to Amazon.com and enter what they’re looking for. But there’s also a large segment of customers who begin their search on google, and ends up at Amazon. Well guess what. When that type of search to purchase experience happens, Amazon has to pay google. Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google, and be good overall for the brand value of Amazon.

There is no way for a customer to go through the traditional shopping experience, and then during checkout decide they want to give a portion of their purchase to charity, because giving to charity isn't the point of the overall program. Amazon Smile was developed by the Traffic Optimization team, whose entire purpose is increasing efficiency and lowering costs of getting customers to Amazon. A team of Amazon employees whose sole purpose is doing good in the world doesn't exist, despite employees repeatedly asking for such a team to be built in pretty much every single all-hands meeting.

Literally everything the company does is about profits, and extended customer lifetime value. Everything. Even the charity programs are just designed to save Amazon money.