Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium fiona carty

How Modern UX & Data Science Changed Everything.

The early days of ads were horrendous, and still even today, there are pop-ups hiding in every nook and cranny of the internet.

If it’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s how annoying they are. But things are starting to change.

Before we can get onto how or why ads have changed quite recently, we have to first understand why we are annoyed by advertisements and why certain ones bring us joy.

During an AMA with Alexis Ohanian — CoFounder of Reddit, one of my classmates had asked, “What is the biggest way you’ve seen Reddit change since 2008?”

“The way we advertise to our users,” was his response.

To elaborate, Alexis recalled that one old Jeep ad — the one that drives across your screen leaving behind an overlay of muddy tracks.

At it’s core, this method of advertisement was flawed. Ads like these aim to catch the user’s attention unprompted, while the user might be focused on using the platform itself. Which, as expected, only aggravated the user.

Fast forward to Fall 2016, advertisers often post sponsored AMA’s and pose questions to everyday redditors to drive engagement. It fits into the same format of any other post you’d see on Reddit, and is similar to the interaction you’d see from the infamous Wendy’s twitter account.

But the reason why this shift is significant, it because advertisements have become opt-in rather than unavoidable.

Another method of implementing ads into your platform without aggravating users is through camouflaging your Ad as just another post that a user might be interested in.

This is easier said than done, but using machine learning and image recognition of similars liked posts by users have guided pleasant, non-intrusive ads on Instagram’s Ad Platform.

I often see ads for products that I would actually consider buying.

In comparison to amount of personal data gathered on Tumblr’s platform — their ad platform is worse. Even as an active user, I follow accounts that advertise products that I would be interested in rather than just getting those ads by default. Tumblr’s ad platform is horrendous, advertising shady products & services that none of us would even consider using.

The comparison of Instagram & Tumblr’s ad platforms are essential to understanding how intelligent ads can be & the role that data science can play in advertising.

When an ad feels more like a friendly suggestion, rather than a forced marketing agenda, you know the platform is doing something right.

What are some bad examples of intelligent advertising platforms, that you might not have even noticed?

Spotify. (Note: this is a personal opinion )

And I’m not even talking about the actual ads. I’m talking about the bands themselves. For many of us, or at least for a music nerd like myself, I value the integrity of music.

So initially, when I started using my Discovery Weekly playlist, I was like, “Hm 🤔 — This is actually super cool.” But after spending time in the Twitter community, and seeing fans recommend music to their favorite musicians, I realized something.

These fans were all recommending the same artists. They weren’t similar bands in any shape or form besides their marketing scheme, and how they were “featured” on spotify’s internally-curated playlists.

Often you’ll see a banner pop up when an artist releases a new album when you open Spotify. I want to make it clear that those aren’t critically acclaimed or well-put-together pieces of work, but rather, they paid to be featured.

And for some reason, after figuring this out, I felt I was no longer a composite of personal choices but of things were the most heavily marketed to me.

What’s the point that I’m trying to make? How do you do advertising correctly?

Your users are actual people, not numbers or KPIs. Let your users know that they’re being advertised something that they may actually buy, politely.

But don’t try to masquerade the fact you’re advertising to them.

The Evolution of the Ad was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Evolution of the Ad

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