Hi all, I wanted to share a plugin that I wrote for Claude code. I’ve been working full time with Claude code over the last few months. I’m generally a big fan and have been using it for product thinking and development. I found it frustrating that important product context that I built during sessions vanished after compacting or switching sessions. I built manual workflows to work around this, essentially structuring and storing product context like strategy docs and mental models. This plugin is an attempt to automate and streamline what’s worked well for me. I’d love to hear feedback and suggestions. Thanks!
The fact that I worked in ad tech doesn't automatically make an advocate for ad targeting. I don't like being tracked either.
As to your question on why it's being done if it isn't effective, I believe there are two reasons for it:
1. A vast % of digital ad spend goes to a few companies that have personally identifiable information and very effective tracking. Google, FB. I did point of this exception in my comment. Frankly, these companies don't need to target you to be effective. They gather their richest data from your usage on their service.
2. As for the rest of ad tech: Media buyers at agencies tend to be fresh out of college grads. They don't fully grasp the capabilities/limitations of ad tech products, targeting effectiveness, etc. Agencies want to spend their digital budgets and not exclusively on FB, Google. They want to show that they're diversifying, innovating, etc. This IMO is how the rest of ad tech stays afloat.
Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, etc. have persistent cookies. They are mapped to your profile in their database. If you delete the cookie, it reappears the next time you sign in. These companies can collect vast amounts of data on you, which allows their targeting to become highly effective over time.
But these companies are few and far between. Most ad tech companies have nowhere near this quality of data or access to users.
As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information.
It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right – you have to make significant investments into product, technical integrations and data buys. Given the fact that the cookies to which you are tying these investments can vanish at any time (and a large % do so regularly), it rarely makes business sense to make the right sort of investments. Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip. I actually remember seeing a deck from a data company boasting how their gender data was ~ 60% accurate.
Why are we worried about this? Contextual targeting is far more effective. As an example, targeting an ad on Elle.com is more than 60% likely to reach women than an ad targeted based on cookie data.
Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. I'm wondering whether this is due to a generally poor understanding of cookie targeting effectiveness or if I'm missing something.