#targeting

[windvexer]

"When you work spells, how do you deliver them to their target? What techniques and methods do you employ to make sure they can get to where they need to go?"

What part of the spell would this be? The sealing it?

I'd wager somewhere beforehand, during the "programming" phase, or while you direct/teach/instruct the energy to do what it is you want it to do.

Banishing spell for rude customer:

>Charged red peppers >Charged candle >Some olive oil to stick the peppers to the candle (ventilation concerns already taken care of) >Used napkin cleared from customer's table (perhaps more likely, little notecard filled with every bit of identifying info you can manage) At some point you combine all of these things. Try starting your targeting at the very beginning. Ofc I don't know how you work, but like:

"These red peppers are to burn Craig, *reading from notecard* the customer who comes into [Sandwich Shop] every weekday at 12:45. *Visualizing his stupid smarmy face and feeling all your disgust*. This man I see in my mind's eye is who I target. This feeling of disgust is the road that leads to the man I banish.

"Just as I bind the peppers to the candle, so do I bind the spell to Craig. Just as Craig inevitably orders a turkey on rye, so does this spell inevitably chase him from the doorstep of [Sandwich Shop]."

(Or maybe you've got a really excellent taglock like the napkin. Well I'd still say do all of the above; I really focus on targeting, I think it works well! But then if you had the napkin, maybe:)

"As I rub this napkin on the oil-free candle I have yet to anoint with peppers, the spell sniffs his scent like a bloodhound; as his gross fucking mouth touched this napkin so will his mouth burn with the disgust I feel towards him, and his mouth and hands will burn when he thinks of [Sandwich Shop], and he will never return." Regardless of what you have for targeting, whether it be information or a nice taglock (you can be creative also - sweeping up their footprint dust, or sticking up some dust on a piece of tape; capturing their shadow in a mirror, printing off their linkedin profile, etc.), I find the following tricks to also help:

Place any taglock, including a notecard of information, nearby the spell as possible. Of course we couldn't put the napkin on the candle, so just place it underneath the candleholder, or incorporate it in any way possible (drawing a sigil on the napkin, etc).

Deploying the spell as close as possible to the target's physical location. In many situations it is reasonably impossible to leave a spell vessel near to someone. But I would not fuck with any witch who finds Craig's car in his work parking lot across the street and tapes a sigil underneath the tailpipe, or leaves a broken stick with a string tied around it near the entrance to his office.

(Imagine anon if we only did this work during the spell sealing. "Now that I've created a totally generic banishing spell, by the way, this all goes to Craig, that guy I hate. Here is when he comes into the shop:." It has far less zing, although it can be done.)

[vyorei]

Gotta prep for my meeting, should be back in an hour

[political-us]

Elon Musk’s threats for forced advertising on X:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Being watched sucks. Of all the parenting mistakes I've made, none haunt me more than the times my daughter caught me watching her while she was learning to do something, discovered she was being observed in a vulnerable moment, and abandoned her attempt:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

It's hard to be your authentic self while you're under surveillance. For that reason alone, the rise and rise of the surveillance industry – an unholy public-private partnership between cops, spooks, and ad-tech scum – is a plague on humanity and a scourge on the Earth:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

But beyond the psychic damage surveillance metes out, there are immediate, concrete ways in which surveillance brings us to harm. Ad-tech follows us into abortion clinics and then sells the info to the cops back home in the forced birth states run by Handmaid's Tale LARPers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/29/no-i-in-uter-us/#egged-on

And even if you have the good fortune to live in a state whose motto isn't "There's no 'I" in uter-US," ad-tech also lets anti-abortion propagandists trick you into visiting fake "clinics" who defraud you into giving birth by running out the clock on terminating your pregnancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

The commercial surveillance industry fuels SWATting, where sociopaths who don't like your internet opinions or are steamed because you beat them at Call of Duty trick the cops into thinking that there's an "active shooter" at your house, provoking the kind of American policing autoimmune reaction that can get you killed:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/us/swatting-sentence-casey-viner/index.html

There's just a lot of ways that compiling deep, nonconsensual, population-scale surveillance dossiers can bring safety and financial harm to the unwilling subjects of our experiment in digital spying. The wave of "business email compromises" (the infosec term for impersonating your boss to you and tricking you into cleaning out the company bank accounts)? They start with spear phishing, a phishing attack that uses personal information – bought from commercial sources or ganked from leaks – to craft a virtual Big Store con:

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes/business-email-compromise

It's not just spear-phishers. There are plenty of financial predators who run petty grifts – stock swindles, identity theft, and other petty cons. These scams depend on commercial surveillance, both to target victims (e.g. buying Facebook ads targeting people struggling with medical debt and worried about losing their homes) and to run the con itself (by getting the information needed to pull of a successful identity theft).

In "Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud," a new National Bureau of Academic Research paper, a trio of business-school profs – Bo Bian (UBC), Michaela Pagel (WUSTL) and Huan Tang (Wharton) quantify the commercial surveillance industry's relationship to finance crimes:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31692

The authors take advantage of a time-series of ZIP-code-accurate fraud complaint data from the Consumer Finance Protection Board, supplemented by complaints from the FTC, along with Apple's rollout of App Tracking Transparency, a change to app-based tracking on Apple mobile devices that turned of third-party commercial surveillance unless users explicitly opted into being spied on. More than 96% of Apple users blocked spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

In other words, they were able to see, neighborhood by neighborhood, what happened to financial fraud when users were able to block commercial surveillance.

What happened is, fraud plunged. Deprived of the raw material for committing fraud, criminals were substantially hampered in their ability to steal from internet users.

While this is something that security professionals have understood for years, this study puts some empirical spine into the large corpus of qualitative accounts of the surveillance-to-fraud pipeline.

As the authors note in their conclusion, this analysis is timely. Google has just rolled out a new surveillance system, the deceptively named "Privacy Sandbox," that every Chrome user is being opted in to unless they find and untick three separate preference tickboxes. You should find and untick these boxes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-privacy-sandbox-ad-tracking-and-why-you-should

Google has spun, lied and bullied Privacy Sandbox into existence; whenever this program draws enough fire, they rename it (it used to be called FLoC). But as the Apple example showed, no one wants to be spied on – that's why Google makes you find and untick three boxes to opt out of this new form of surveillance.

There is no consensual basis for mass commercial surveillance. The story that "people don't mind ads so long as they're relevant" is a lie. But even if it was true, it wouldn't be enough, because beyond the harms to being our authentic selves that come from the knowledge that we're being observed, surveillance data is a crucial ingredient for all kinds of crime, harassment, and deception.

We can't rely on companies to spy on us responsibly. Apple may have blocked third-party app spying, but they effect nonconsensual, continuous surveillance of every Apple mobile device user, and lie about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

That's why we should ban commercial surveillance. We should outlaw surveillance advertising. Period:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Contrary to the claims of surveillance profiteers, this wouldn't reduce the income to ad-supported news and other media – it would increase their revenues, by letting them place ads without relying on the surveillance troves assembled by the Google/Meta ad-tech duopoly, who take the majority of ad-revenue:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

We're 30 years into the commercial surveillance pandemic and Congress still hasn't passed a federal privacy law with a private right of action. But other agencies aren't waiting for Congress. The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Divsision have proposed new merger guidelines that allow regulators to consider privacy harms when companies merge:

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FTC-2023-0043-1569

Think here of how Google devoured Fitbit and claimed massive troves of extremely personal data, much of which was collected because employers required workers to wear biometric trackers to get the best deal on health care:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire

Companies can't be trusted to collect, retain or use our personal data wisely. The right "balance" here is to simply ban that collection, without an explicit opt-in. The way this should work is that companies can't collect private data unless users hunt down and untick three "don't spy on me" boxes. After all, that's the standard that Google has set.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/29/ban-surveillance-ads/#sucker-funnel

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[queenmabscherzo]

Hi! I was just randomly thinking about your fic Targeting - which I read in 2016, again in 2017, and then again in 2018 😅 - went to find it on ao3, found your Tumblr linked, and wanted to tell you (in case you don't check the comments there anymore) how much I loved the fic. I think of it often, even though it's been nearly 9 years since I first read it. I'm a massive steelers fan, so sometimes I'll see something, and it will bring me back to that fic. I think I'm going to reread it again this year before football starts. Essentially, this is just a long-winded THANK YOU for such an incredible piece of media that you gave us. 💛

Oh my gosh thank you so much! I had so much fun writing that fic and to this day I’m still surprised anyone else read it let alone liked it 😂 thank you for the message. im also a Steelers fan and our team is falling apart now apparently?? but so it goes. I’m so glad you enjoyed targeting and i appreciate you so much for sharing this!

[pinkscarlet08]

I’ve noticed that the many years that I’ve been in this fandom, people end up being targeted for having different opinions! All the way from being a Cedfia Shipper to making Adult Rated Content for the show. If someone does something that no one else agrees with, the rest of the fandom targets that person and makes their lives miserable. Why are we like this? I even had a period where everyone targeted me for not including gay material in my content. It’s not cause you’re not allowed to be lgbt or ship them, I just like keeping my content feeling as though it’s true to the show. We’ve canonically seen straight kid crushes in the show (such as Ruby & Jade having crushes on James in the Pilot and the beginning of the series), so I feel it’s ok to include other straight kid ships. Cause that’s already been part of the show! Yet I got so much backlash despite never saying anything bad about you being allowed to think otherwise.

I even have people bully and spam me to make something that I don’t necessarily feel like would fit into my content, or they get mad if I don’t post more Hugfia content. It feels like no one in this fandom can be pleased. I get targeted for only making Hugfia and Desamber, I get targeted for not making more Hugfia!

Please, can we stop belittling others for making content that they are happy with? You are free to make content YOU love and prefer. Let the Cedfia shippers ship, let the AU makers write, let the true to shows stay accurate to the show! If you don’t like or agree, then don’t read it. That doesn’t mean you should target them. Sometimes, people even change, so let them learn lessons instead of making their lives miserable instead. I really want this fandom to feel as loving and friendly as the show we all love, not be a fandom who bullies people they don’t agree with.

[just-a-blog-for-polls]

Severe distress: caused impairment in social, occupational, and/or school functioning, and (would have) required professional help

Moderate distress: caused negative emotions and other negative effects (e.g. physical symptoms of anxiety, sleep problems) but did not cause impairment in the domains mentioned above and wasn't so bad that professional help would have been necessary

Mild distress: caused negative emotions but it was rather easy to get rid of them and it did not cause other negative effects nor would it have required professional help

[hamedobaidy]

Targeting your audience

[neap4wlitan]

THIS ONE.

can you guys ever so politely jump this person here on tiktok? they've committed an atrocity and I will not stand by it. (They sent DEATH THREATS. and called slurs.) I do not care what you say to them, its your business.

[paidmediaadvertising]

What Are Custom Audiences in Targeting Options in Messages?

In the realm of digital marketing, precision targeting is key to achieving higher engagement and conversion rates. One of the most powerful tools available to marketers is the ability to create custom audiences. Custom audiences allow businesses to reach specific groups of people based on their unique behaviors, interests, and demographics. This blog explores the concept of custom audiences in targeting options, specifically within the context of PPC and digital marketing messages, and how leveraging these audiences can enhance your Paid Media Advertising services company and overall Digital Marketing strategy.

Understanding Custom Audiences

Custom audiences are groups of people curated based on specific criteria that align with your marketing goals. These criteria can include past interactions with your brand, demographic information, online behaviors, or interests. By targeting these specific groups, marketers can create highly relevant and personalized advertising campaigns.

Types of Custom Audiences

There are several types of custom audiences that marketers can create and use in their PPC campaigns:

Website Custom Audiences: These audiences are created based on visitors to your website. You can target users who have visited specific pages, spent a certain amount of time on your site, or completed specific actions such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

Customer List Audiences: This type involves uploading a list of customer information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, to the advertising platform. The platform then matches this data with its users to create a custom audience.

App Activity Audiences: If you have a mobile app, you can create audiences based on users' interactions with your app. This can include users who have installed your app, made in-app purchases, or achieved certain milestones.

Engagement Audiences: These audiences are based on interactions with your content on social media platforms. For instance, you can target users who have watched your videos, liked your posts, or shared your content.

Benefits of Using Custom Audiences

1. Enhanced Relevance

Custom audiences allow you to deliver highly relevant messages to specific groups of people. By targeting users based on their past interactions with your brand or their specific interests, you can create personalized ads that resonate more effectively with your audience.

2. Improved ROI

By focusing your advertising efforts on a well-defined audience, you can increase your return on investment (ROI). Custom audiences help ensure that your ads are seen by people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services, leading to higher conversion rates and better overall campaign performance.

3. Better Engagement

Ads that are tailored to the interests and behaviors of your audience are more likely to capture their attention and drive engagement. Custom audiences enable you to create more engaging and compelling ads, resulting in higher click-through rates and increased interaction with your brand.

4. Effective Retargeting

Custom audiences are particularly useful for retargeting campaigns. By targeting users who have already interacted with your brand, you can remind them of their interest and encourage them to take further action, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

How to Create Custom Audiences

Creating custom audiences typically involves a few key steps, depending on the advertising platform you are using. This is a broad synopsis of the procedure:

Define Your Criteria: Determine the specific criteria you want to use to create your custom audience. This could include website visits, customer lists, app activity, or social media engagement.

Set Up Tracking: Ensure that you have the necessary tracking mechanisms in place to collect the data needed to create your custom audience. This might involve installing tracking pixels on your website or integrating your app with the advertising platform.

Upload Data: If you are creating a customer list audience, upload your list of customer information to the advertising platform. The platform will then match this data with its users to create your custom audience.

Create the Audience: Use the platform’s tools to create your custom audience based on the defined criteria. You can usually specify additional parameters, such as the time frame for website visits or the specific actions users must take to be included in the audience.

Test and Optimize: Once your custom audience is set up, test different ad variations to see which ones perform best. Use the insights gained from these tests to optimize your campaigns and improve performance over time.

Case Study: Successful Use of Custom Audiences

Consider the example of a mid-sized e-commerce company that used custom audiences to improve its PPC campaign performance. By creating custom audiences based on website visitors who abandoned their shopping carts, the company was able to deliver targeted ads reminding these users to complete their purchases. This retargeting campaign resulted in a significant increase in conversion rates and overall sales.

Additionally, the company created custom audiences based on their email subscriber list. By targeting these users with personalized product recommendations and exclusive offers, they saw a substantial boost in engagement and repeat purchases. The combination of these strategies helped the company maximize its advertising budget and achieve better ROI.

Conclusion

Custom audiences are a powerful tool in the arsenal of digital marketers. By allowing for highly targeted and personalized advertising, they can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your PPC and digital marketing campaigns. Whether you are looking to retarget previous visitors, engage with your app users, or reconnect with your email subscribers, custom audiences offer a way to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

Incorporating custom audiences into your Paid Media Advertising services company strategy can help you achieve better engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved ROI. Start leveraging the power of custom audiences today and see how they can transform your digital marketing efforts.

[imsosocold]

do I even need to say anything about this?!!

[rbbaileyjr]

What is a Sales Funnel? Everything You Need to Know

For someone who tried marketing his own books unsuccessfully, this is some handy information. I’ve seen ads about events for click funnels, but didn’t know exactly what it even was. Still don’t, but interesting because it does have some common sense elements that I like. It’s a least a start. Please note: I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. Just thought this was interesting, so try at your own…

[afifaic]

Marketing to the wrong type of customer can lead to poor product performance. If you know who your current customers are, you can target them in the future.

Comparative studies are great for monitoring the advancement of your competitors relative to that of your business. If they are well ahead of you, this is a great chance for you to find out what they are doing that you aren't. You can create business strategies to help you keep one step ahead of your rivals.

Market research assist in determining market viability, lowering the risk of failure. Understanding customers’ needs is crucial to reduce risks, which leads to profitability.

social media marketing is a great way to connect with potential customers by sharing a brand’s storyline, showing off your products or services, and structuring relationships with potential customers. Finally, social media marketing is an influential tool for building brand awareness and attracting leads.

Follow for more tips-

Twitter- @afifaic

Instagram- @afifaic

Gmail- afiifa.ic@gmail.com

[queenmabscherzo]

I loved, loved Targeting !! I wanted to ask you who do you think between Steve and Bucky is more anxious about the other? Because obviously we mostly see Steve's POV and he's always worrying about Bucky, he's so protective but also Bucky is pretty protective too in its own, more "subtle" way! I can see him being so worried to the point of getting angry at Steve for being reckless in the field, whereas Steve would just cry straight away and look after him, does it make sense? I miss them! Thank you for writing that amazing story

You’re so right 100%. im reminded of course of Chapter 17 after they play each other for the first time and Steve gets probably concussed and Bucky SOMEHOW got Steve’s phone number SPECIFICALLY to yell at him for coming back into the game while probably concussed. sure they haven’t spoken in years, amd sure it’s intimidating af to ask one of Steve’s teammates for his phone number out of the blue, but he did it because he’s ridiculous. the question is, was it isaiah or sam? ;)

Bucky is just naturally more anxious than Steve so yeah he probably worries more for steve by the nature of worrying all the time, although we all know Steve worries about Bucky in particular. so like. they got it bad is what im saying.

[towlerknows]

I wasn't aware of this one, so I'm trying to spread the word.