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Software developer at a big library, cyclist, photographer, hiker, reader. Email: chris@improbable.org
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Meta’s ‘set it and forget it’ AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash - The Verge
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 6:36 PM

The Verge - All Posts
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It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.

Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like spending a week’s worth of grocery money on a prime cut of wagyu at a steakhouse, only for the waiter to return with a floppy slider.

The Verge spoke to several marketers and businesses that advertise on Meta’s platforms who tell a similar story. Meta’s automated ad platform has been blowing through budgets and failing to deliver sales. Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms.

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty.”

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty,” Karl Baker, founder of meditation startup Mindfulness Works, wrote in a message to The Verge.

The faulty ad service in question, known as Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, is part of a full suite of AI-enabled ad tools that Meta pitches to businesses as a faster and more efficient alternative to manual ad campaigns. To create an ad campaign, advertisers upload their creative assets, pick their conversion goals (e.g., getting more customers to make purchases on Instagram), and then set their budget caps. Meta hyped Advantage Plus shopping campaigns during earnings calls as a carefree, “set it and forget it” automated solution to online ads. But that hasn’t been the case, marketers say. 

Advantage Plus shopping campaigns have been unpredictable, seemingly working well on some days and then not so well on other days. The subreddit r/FacebookAds has become a sort of 24/7 help desk for Advantage Plus. Recent headings discussing the issues include “Advantage+ sucks,” “Is Facebook broken rn,” and “Is it just me?”

“People are always saying, ‘Is it me?’ or ‘Is it Meta?’” Baker said.

What Williams and many other marketers thought was a one-time glitch by Advantage Plus ended up becoming a recurring incident for weeks. “Since February 14th, [Advantage Plus] has overspent on numerous occasions and ignored the cost caps we have in place on it,” he said. 

Problems have persisted into April. “We have a couple of clients for whom we completely stopped Advantage Plus due to these anomalies,” said Aniruddha Mishra, director of growth at Miami-based digital marketing agency Node Media. He noted that for some clients, CPMs on Meta were anywhere from three to four times more expensive than they were last year. 

Advertisers say getting support from Meta has been a challenge, too. Meta laid off thousands of employees over the past year and gutted many of its customer support teams. As Digiday reported, Meta’s ad accounts teams were downsized, and many client inquiries are now being directed to AI chatbots. Several of the marketers that The Verge spoke to said that there’s been a noticeable decline in responsiveness from Meta since the transition. 

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience.”

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience,” said Williams. “They didn’t tell us what actually happened.”

Meta eventually refunded 1-800-D2C for the incident, but Williams said it took him several tries to finally get someone from the company to acknowledge him. The company issued the refund almost a month after the incident.

While some users speculate that Advantage Plus is “glitching” or “broken,” Meta’s response has been to insist that the tool is functioning as it should. 

“I’ve reached out to representatives at Meta, and I’ve been told that they’re not aware of any sort of glitch, which is truly shocking, because all my co-founder friends who work in e-commerce share this sentiment. They’re dealing with the same thing,” said Adriel Darvish, the CEO of a luxury handbag and jewelry service called Switch, in a phone interview with The Verge. “This is something universal that everyone is experiencing.”

With the problems continuing to pile on, Williams said his marketing firm completely halted its use of Advantage Plus in early April. Instead, they’ve gone back to the old-fashioned method of buying Facebook and Instagram ads manually. Notably, going back to the pre-AI, pre-automated way of doing things hasn’t really taken a toll on the firm’s human labor force. 

“Maybe an extra 10 to 20 minutes or so to build out the ad sets, but nothing crazy,” said Williams. 

Meta first launched Advantage Plus shopping campaigns globally in the fall of 2022, when the state of online advertising was in an uncertain place. Just a year before, Apple had launched its App Tracking Transparency feature with iOS 14.5, giving users an easy way to opt out of the third-party app-based tracking that powers many online ads. Meta opposed the change, saying it would “change the internet as we know it” and threaten the future of many online businesses. 

But Meta’s real concern was no doubt the threat to its own ad business, which chalked up a $10 billion dip in ad revenue in 2021 due to Apple’s changes. Targeted ads were no longer as effective since brands no longer had access to as much data, and they were becoming more expensive to boot. As a consequence, brands cut back on their online ad spend. 

With Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, Meta promised that AI and machine learning models could effectively replace the big gaping hole left by Apple’s privacy update. 

In lieu of tracking users, Advantage Plus uses the advertiser’s own first-party sales data to help target ads. But online advertisers would be effectively handing the reins over to Meta and no longer have access to the granular targeting controls and detailed analytics they did prior to Apple’s privacy changes.

Although there was a bit of a “learning curve” with Advantage Plus shopping, the tool gradually began to improve. Brands noticed their AI-driven Meta ad campaigns were performing well and poured more of their budgets into the platform. Adweek reported that by April 2023, marketers who had ditched Meta for TikTok ads and newer opportunities like connected TV were starting to come back. 

Advertisers had a honeymoon period with Advantage Plus last year, especially as Meta began packing it with new features. “Advantage Plus was working so well at this point, for most of the clients, that almost 50 to 70 percent of their ad budget is on Meta’s Advantage Plus campaigns. There are so many targeting and evolutions they’ve done in the past year and a half. It delivers a really strong performance if you know how to tweak the right parameters,” said Mishra. 

In an email to The Verge on April 15th, Meta spokesperson Kash Ayodele said the company had fixed a “few technical issues” with its ad platforms. “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers. We recently fixed a few technical issues and are researching a small amount of additional reports from advertisers to ensure the best possible results for businesses using our apps.”

On an April 24th earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li said that one Advantage Plus tool led to a “a 28 percent decrease in cost per click or per objective.” Li said Advantage Plus tools are seeing “very strong growth” and that the tools are improving when it comes to conversions.

But marketers are still complaining about underperformance on the platform. “Things have recovered for many, but not all. It’s been a very turbulent end to Q1 and beginning of Q2,” wrote media buyer David Herrmann in a direct message to The Verge. 

The dramatic increase in cost per click (CPC) and CPM is not just a Meta problem — online ads as a whole are getting costlier due to what marketers say are increased inefficiencies, which automation has only made worse. This significantly decreases profits for individual advertisers. And fixing this problem may be more complicated than fixing a “glitch” or series of glitches on Advantage Plus, especially since the millions that Meta as well as Google have poured into automated advertising hasn’t led to more successful ad campaigns. 

“The performance of accounts and campaigns hasn’t intrinsically increased [over the last three years],” noted Hawke Media’s Areen Mayelan. 

When ad campaigns are automated, such as with Meta’s Advantage Plus, “things get brushed under the rug,” said Mayelan. Everything from loose keywords to loose audiences to low-quality ads all effectively become inefficiencies that increase the cost of ads for brands. “Inefficiency results in an increase in CPCs and CPMs, because you’re creating artificial ‘competition’ where there otherwise might not be.” 

Meanwhile, Meta only stands to benefit from the boost in ad revenue. According to Meta’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, its ad business is doing just fine. Ad revenue amounted to $35.64 billion for the quarter, an impressive jump of 27 percent from this time in 2023.

Update April 29th, 4:50PM ET: This story has been updated with remarks from Meta’s CFO addressing the performance of Advantage Plus tools. It also clarifies remarks from Ayodele, who says Meta’s technical fixes relate to the ads platform more broadly, not just Advantage Plus.

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Are you overpaying for your car loan? - Vox
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 4:27 PM

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A few weeks ago, a TikTok user named Blaisey Arnold posted a video about her Chevy Tahoe.

“After three years with my Tahoe, I’m finally getting rid of it,” Arnold said. It was her dream car, and she’d taken out a loan for the $84,000 — yes, you read that right, $84,000 — vehicle. Since then, she’d been paying $1,400 a month for the last three years, totaling about $50,000. But because of her high interest rate, only $10,000 of that money went toward paying off the balance of the car. “Honestly, that blows my mind,” she said.

It blew her viewers’ minds, too.

“The math isn’t mathing,” one commenter wrote. “Seriously, what is your interest rate???????” asked another. The video currently has about 2.5 million views. The situation was so untenable that Arnold joked in a follow-up video that she was considering leaving the Tahoe in a “bad part of town,” hiring the mob, or (more seriously) defaulting and letting it get repossessed.

There’s a lot we can’t know about her situation, without looking at her finances and the terms of her loans. But she’s not the only one shelling out huge amounts of cash for a fancy car: Other women have also been sharing the details of their major monthly car payments on TikTok.

Still, the online reactions seem to unite around a central theme: Arnold messed up big time by taking out a loan at a terrible rate. Defaulting and letting her car get repossessed, as she seems to be considering, will wreak havoc on her credit.

You could argue that Arnold’s decisions were irresponsible (and I really don’t recommend paying what amounts to a mortgage on a car), but it’s worth looking beyond this one wacky example at the larger structural forces that make car ownership such a necessary burden — and, at times, such an unnecessary scam.

Car ownership has gotten very expensive — but opting out can be difficult

In a society built almost entirely around the supremacy of cars as a means of transportation, most working-age adults seem to consider owning one necessary.

According to the 2021 Census, nearly 92 percent of American households had at least one vehicle, and the benefits of owning a car in a landscape built for them are so great that research suggests people will go out of their way to get one even if they can’t really afford it.

In the last few years, the costs around car ownership have soared, placing tremendous burdens on working class families and the poor.

The pandemic disrupted supply chains, manufacturers turned their attention toward expensive luxury vehicles, and interest rates soared. New cars are now unaffordable for more than 80 percent of Americans. Used car prices are up 34 percent from early 2020, too. On top of that, auto insurance rates have reached mind-boggling heights.

Owning a car is also much more than just a practical necessity: For a lot of people, it’s an outward symbol of prosperity, freedom, and even political ideology.

Car buyers are really vulnerable to exploitation — especially if they’re low-income

Cars are really expensive in America right now. But some car payments are astronomically — indeed, exploitatively — high.

To give one example: In their 2023 book, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality, authors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross spoke with men recently released from prison who found that their credit histories prevented them from getting reasonable loans at affordable interest rates.

“A lot of people we were interviewing were driving pretty fancy cars. We were stroking our chins, going: ‘How did you afford that?’ It turned out that some of them were walking into dealerships and being told they couldn’t get financing for the Hondas they wanted, but could for a top-of-the-line Mercedes,” Ross told Vox last year.

“Why would a lender and dealer do that? Because they know they’re going to be able to repossess the car quickly.”

It’s not just formerly incarcerated people who are vulnerable.

A 2021 Consumer Reports investigation found that the lack of a federal interest rate limit, combined with a complicated patchwork of state laws, leaves consumers vulnerable to being preyed upon by shady lenders.

The investigation begins with an anecdote about a man who received disability payments from the Social Security Administration; he received a loan for a Jaguar with an astonishing annual percentage rate of 75 percent. “I don’t know APRs, I don’t know nothing about that,” the man told Consumer Reports. “I’m just trying to go in there and get the car.”

In another piece, the publication found that lenders and dealers often lent money to people with poor credit, sometimes at higher rates, with the aim of collecting the high interest and repossessing the vehicles when people defaulted on their loans.

There is some hope that things will get better. A few states have started to address the problem of hidden fees and predatory loans. At the end of 2023, the Federal Trade Commission announced a new rule aimed at cracking down on a slew of deceptive auto lending and sales practices. (It takes effect at the end of July 2024.)

Meanwhile, auto debt reached a record-high $1.61 trillion last year, and that debt is, of course, most onerous for the people who can least afford to pay.

Understanding how auto loans work — as Blaisey Arnold’s critics point out — is necessary, but it’s insufficient. Going after the lenders who prey on people who need cars to survive, and who often don’t realize they’re getting a bad deal, is paramount.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Why Did US Buy Old Soviet Aircraft from Kazakhstan?
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 2:12 PM

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Steve Brown

After a career as a British Army Ammunition Specialist and Bomb Disposal Officer, Steve later worked in the fields of ammunition destruction, demining and explosive ordnance disposal with the UN and NATO. In 2017, after taking early retirement, he moved to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and two sons where he became a full-time writer. He now works as a senior writer and English language editor with the Kyiv Post.

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Elon Musk loses at Supreme Court in case over “funding secured” tweets by Jon Brodkin
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 1:20 PM

Ars Technica
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Elon Musk frowns while sitting on stage during a conference interview.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

The US Supreme Court today rejected Elon Musk's attempt to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk appealed to the Supreme Court in December 2023, claiming the settlement he agreed to in 2018 forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations." The SEC settlement requires Musk to get pre-approval from a Tesla securities lawyer for tweets or other social media posts that may contain information material to the company or its shareholders.

The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, leaving an appeals court ruling against Musk intact. The top court denied Musk's petition without comment Monday morning in a list of orders.

The SEC brought a securities fraud charge against Musk after his August 2018 tweets stating, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" and "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote."

The SEC said the tweets were false and misleading because "Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source," and he "knew that he had not satisfied numerous additional contingencies." Musk's tweets caused Tesla's stock price to jump by over 6 percent and harmed investors by causing "significant confusion and disruption in the market for Tesla's stock," the SEC alleged.

Musk claimed “economic duress”

Musk claimed he was the victim of "economic duress" when he agreed to the settlement and that the SEC "weaponized" the deal in order to "muzzle and harass Mr. Musk and Tesla." In addition to the clause requiring pre-approval of tweets, the settlement required Musk and Tesla to each pay $20 million in penalties and forced Musk to step down from his board chairman post.

A US District Court judge rejected Musk's attempt to get out of the settlement in April 2022. A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit unanimously ruled against Musk in May 2023. The appeals court later denied Musk's request for an en banc rehearing in front of all the court's judges.

The 2nd Circuit panel ruling dismissed Musk's argument that the settlement is a "prior restraint" on his speech, writing, "Parties entering into consent decrees may voluntarily waive their First Amendment and other rights." The judges also saw "no evidence to support Musk's contention that the SEC has used the consent decree to conduct bad-faith, harassing investigations of his protected speech."

Musk's petition to the Supreme Court said the case presents the constitutional question of whether "a party's acceptance of a benefit prevents that party from contending that the government violated the unconstitutional conditions doctrine in requiring a waiver of constitutional rights in exchange for that benefit."

SEC: Settlement designed to prevent securities violations

The SEC urged the Supreme Court to reject Musk's petition in a March 2024 filing. The Supreme Court "has consistently held that, in resolving litigation, parties may choose to waive even fundamental constitutional rights," the SEC said.

The Musk settlement "was reasonably designed to minimize the likelihood that petitioner would make future false or misleading statements in violation of the securities laws," the SEC wrote. Musk's reply brief filed a few weeks ago claimed that the agency's "arguments highlight the need for review. In effect, the SEC argues that the Constitution imposes no limits on its authority to extract demands in its settlements."

Although Musk lost all attempts to terminate the settlement, he persuaded a jury in February 2023 to reject a class-action lawsuit filed by Tesla investors who claimed the tweets caused $12 billion in losses.

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Quoting Moxie Marlinspike
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 12:55 PM

Simon Willison's Weblog
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It's very fast to build something that's 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. With vibecheck, most of the time the results to my queries are great; some percentage of the time they aren't. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I'm unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result.

— Moxie Marlinspike

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D.C. police rejected GWU’s plea to sweep out university protesters - The Washington Post
Monday April 29th, 2024 at 12:43 PM

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D.C. police rejected pleas from George Washington University officials to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators out of an on-campus encampment early Friday morning, saying they worried about the optics of moving against a small number of peaceful protesters, according to two officials familiar with the talks.

Officers had assembled around 3 a.m. Friday and were prepared to enter the encampment, but senior leaders in the police chief’s and mayor’s office ordered them to stand down, the officials said. The demonstrators were small in number and largely peaceful, and the city officials told their university counterparts they wanted to avoid images of violent altercations between police and protesters flashing on TV screens across the country. The George Washington campus in downtown Washington, five blocks from the White House.

As of Saturday afternoon, D.C. police had not sought to arrest anyone in the encampment, though university officials surrounded it with barricades and were not allowing new people to join. Some additional demonstrators erected tents along a portion of H Street that police had already closed.

The city officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive police operations, said they had no immediate plans to clear the area known as University Yard along H Street between 20th and 21st streets NW. They noted that could change if the demonstrators began committing or advocating violence, or if radical groups joined the group’s ranks.

A spokeswoman for George Washington University did not answer questions about school officials’ discussions with law enforcement authorities. The school said in a statement, “After demonstrators refused multiple instructions to relocate, GWPD requested additional support from the DC Metropolitan Police to ensure the safety and security of all our community members through a measured and orderly approach.”

D.C. police also declined to comment on agency officials’ discussions with the university, and it was not immediately clear what tactics they considered using as officers prepared to enter the encampment Friday morning. D.C. police are accustomed to dealing with daily demonstrations over all manner of political issues in the nation’s capital, and they typically try to persuade demonstrators to voluntarily surrender. But they can also use more aggressive tactics, donning riot gear, forming lines and forcefully trying to move large groups.

A statement from a D.C. police spokesman said officers have been monitoring the demonstration. Thus far, D.C. police have kept up a low-key presence near the protest site.

“As always, we are continually assessing and evaluating the circumstances on the ground to inform our response,” the statement said. Lindsey Appiah, the city’s deputy major for public safety and justice, said Saturday that police “continue to monitor and work with GW to make sure things remain safe on their campus.”

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises law enforcement agencies on best practices, said it is rare that an agency would turn down a request from a university to clear unwanted demonstrators from its campus, which is private property. At protests over the war in Gaza on other college campuses, police have sometimes sparred with demonstrators as they have sought to make arrests and break up encampments.

But Wexler said the university should demonstrate to police “a compelling reason” for officers to intervene, and D.C. police appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach.

“If these are peaceful demonstrators and MPD says, ‘Look, we’ll stand by. We’re not leaving, we’re simply saying at this moment we don’t see a compelling need to come in,’ then that’s okay,” he said.

In Boston, law enforcement officers moved in on pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempting to form a human wall. The exchange was so tense that police reported at least four injured officers, and multiple students at Emerson College said they were shoved to the ground.

In Southern California, law enforcement officers looking to break up an on-campus tent encampment pushed through a growing crowd, struggled with protesters and ultimately arrested more than 90 of them.

Atlanta police said officers used chemical irritants when they faced off with demonstrators at an encampment at Emory University. And in Texas, state troopers dressed in riot gear took dozens of protesters into custody at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). Some troopers marched through campus on horseback. Others set up a barricade by pushing demonstrators with their bikes.

In D.C., the protesters are on private university property, and absent seeing a crime being committed, D.C. police said they need to be invited to take action on the campus. To do that, school officials would have to declare the demonstrators illegal trespassers who refuse to leave, or cite other possible crimes.

The D.C. officials who described the decision not to break up the George Washington University encampment said they had flashbacks to June 2020, when images of mostly peaceful protesters being forcefully shoved out of Lafayette Square by U.S. Park Police officers with batons and chemical irritants made national news. The officials said city leaders suggested alternatives to force an end to the demonstration at George Washington University, but they did not describe what those were.

By late afternoon Friday, the number of demonstrators in the encampment had dwindled to about three dozen. The university then warned students who remain in the encampment that they could face temporary suspension or be administratively barred from campus. Several students were suspended Friday.

In a statement, Arielle Geismar, the student government association president, said she urged the administration “not to use violence or actionable force by asking either [university police] or [D.C. police] to forcibly remove students.”

Geismar said that “students across the country have been brutalized and hurt during forced removals. I’m extremely worried about student safety.” She said school leaders have not briefed her on their plans.

Antonio Olivo and Emily Davies contributed to this report.

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