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points by pocksuppet 2 days ago | 0 comments

Even if McDonalds could tell Google not to show the ad to vegetarians, they have no way to verify Google isn't.

At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way

[–] IAmBroom 2 days ago

Google has no incentive to do so. McDonalds does, but its somewhat costly to scale against ALL the ads they push.

[–] jmalicki 2 days ago

For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.

Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.

[–] pocksuppet 2 days ago

infinite things could confound that analysis

[–] derektank 2 days ago

Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already

[–] mapcars 2 days ago

Can't they ask claude to create account do some relevant searches and then check if ad is shown?

[–] 0c3ca83 2 days ago

What makes you think Google has built a profile that shows Claude is a vegetarian?

[–] mapcars 2 days ago

That's the thing - ask claude to do requests to build such profile