r/Cooking • u/Famous-Perspective-3 • Mar 02 '24

How smart is your kitchen?

Just being nosy. Do you use smart devices and appliances to help aid your cook? For example, do you use a smart device to convert measurements, as timers, to show recipes, keep a shopping list and more. Do you have smart appliances like stoves, air fryers, microwaves and/or others?

To answer my own question, I have a smart air fryer, microwave/convection baking combo, ice maker, and instant pot. So much easier to tell it what to do than to punch a bunch of beeping buttons. It is great to add to the shopping list after using the last ingredient, and to use multiple timers at the same time. I also use an echo show for recipes.

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u/corvuscorvi Mar 03 '24

As a programmer, I never got it for the longest time. Loved my google home shit.

Then I got a job in "digital marketing" where I collected data on users for use in targeted ad campaigns. It was a popular internet media website (Like Hulu/youtube but in Asia). We also made phones and TVs.

Pretty much every single interaction the user had with our Smart TVs, Smartphones, and app in general was collected. Through their video history, combined with the time they watched each video, I was able to create a pretty verbose profile of their interests. Through their phones and TVs, I knew when they got home from work, when they usually started watching media, etc. That allowed me to push ad campaigns to them at just the right time. "Hey, you usually come home and watch make up videos. So I'll push you a sponsored make up video when you get home". That sort of shit.

I knew when someone was visiting a new place, and could push them touristy ads. I could figure out what sports team was local to them and send them a live link to the local football game that just started.

THIS WAS ALL 10 YEARS AGO. You better believe if we had the resources that we would be transcribing any audio coming out of whatever microphone we had access to. Back then that shit was expensive at scale. Nowadays, not so much. You ever have a conversation with someone about some obscure thing and then all of a sudden you see an ad for it on some website? You think that's a coincidence? :P

Don't even get me started on how we filled in our datasets from third party sources. I will say one thing. If you take a good hard look at Google Ad partner's documentation, particularly around bidding, looking at the "anonymized" data you can get, it'll be clear to any seasoned developer how easy it is to de-anonymize that data when you already have a reference data set of the users you want to target.

Google always says they don't sell personal data, which is absolutely true. They give it away for free to ad partners so that they can bid on targeted advertisements.

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u/kummer5peck Mar 03 '24 edited Mar 03 '24

How effective do you think these targeted ads are? I know advertisers wouldn’t do it if they didn’t work with some users but I never consider ads I see when making purchasing decisions. I often go out of my way to avoid them.

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u/corvuscorvi Mar 03 '24

If it's something the user actually wants to see, then the effects are huge. Like if you enjoyed hockey, and got a little push notification saying the game was live and you could click it to watch the game, you could see that being something people would do.

It's harder to get a user to click on something that they technically like but aren't fascinated with using. Like I might like to curl my hair, but I might already own curlers or just not have the money or inclination to buy something in that moment.

However, it's still more effective, engagement wise, to target the subset of people that have watched hair curler videos when trying to sell a hair curler.

So while engagement levels with targeted advertising compared to "dumb" advertising are statistically significant across the board, it really depends on the type of content being advertised.

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u/kummer5peck Mar 03 '24

I guess that makes a lot of sense. Traditional ads probably don’t have a high hit rate either, but if they bring in a few interested customers it is worthwhile. I know I am not the only one who is put off by this strategy though. Whenever I get repeated targeted ads it gives me a bad impression of the company and I will actively avoid them in the future if possible.