Reply to post: Re: The complaint seems confused

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

LucreLout

Re: The complaint seems confused

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that gender-targeting ads works (I'm not so sure about that).

Lets polarise things for a minute to show that it might.

Most people buying tampax will be women (some men buying for female relations or fringe reasons). Most people going to strip clubs will be men (some women do go but I have a friend who assures me its mostly guys).

If you could differentiate between genders with a better than 50% accuracy, you can make your advertising more effective. Spam everyone and half of the tampax adds go to waste along with half the titty bars.

If the 'AI' could get gender right 60% of the time I could get 20% more bang for my buck with the advertising provided those misidentified did not become angry with my brand enough to bad mouth us and damage the brand. A bit like advertising the local strippers in the gents toilets while the tampax are sold in the womens bogs.

For most products there would be less polarisation and so the required accuracy would be significantly higher and so harder to achieve. I mostly agree with what you're saying but I think you've overlooked where gendered advertising does work.

Muddying the water slightly comes the idea of how do you sell a car, say a ford focus, to a guy or a girl. Do they on average care about the same things, or do you want to give greater prominence to different features to each gender? Do more of the people that care about the horsepower have penises, or boobs? Same for the parking sensors or reversing camera etc? Note I'm not implying or giving answers to those questions, simply showing how subtle targeting along gender lines does work at scale.

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