BUT, I hate to admit this, the ads I get in Instagram are the most relevant I have ever gotten. I actually look forward to them, to discover new products. They are perfectly tailored to me.
Dammit.
What's wrong with that?
Among the biggest problems with ads are that when they are the primary economic model for these services, they will tweak everything to favor paid ads as much as they can get away with. That means everything from conflicts-of-interest around serving the needs of the biggest advertisers to undermining organic (non-paid-ads) discovery of products and services…
Can you expand on this? I also can't really parse what your second paragraph is trying to say. How do businesses that rely on ads undermine organic product discovery, and what conflict of interests could they have?
1. Products reliant on advertising for revenue are incentivized to increase the amount of ads shown (per user and in total). This leads to product strategy which prioritizes growth and engagement above all. The line between "highly engaging" and "addictive" products becomes very thin, arguably disappearing entirely.
2. In order to provide highly targeted ads, companies must necessarily collect, store and organize a tremendous amount of data on their users. We have seen over and over again that this data can then be requested, stolen or tapped by governments, hostile actors and other powerful organizations for nefarious purposes without the consent of the user.
2. Source? Outside of a few edge cases (china) I don't think this is a real concern. The same can happen with financial (or any) data, but I don't see people saying the data is the problem. Rather its the processes around that data that need fixing.
Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model.
2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
> "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."
In other words, the topic is the advertising where you give your attention to one party and that party participates (gets paid) to show you something else different from what you went there to see.
So, concretely: this is about paid ads on Facebook. This is NOT about products listed on Amazon that show up with compelling descriptions when you search for that type of product and clink on a link that wasn't higher in the list because someone paid for that.
When you go to Amazon and search, you are specifically choosing to put your attention toward products of a certain sort and asking for information. Amazon is delivering that information. There's marketing in how the products present themselves, but it's still something you are actively looking for, given to you second-party by the company from whom you are considering buying the thing.
When you go to Facebook to see how your friends are doing and your attention there gets sold to advertisers to show you unrelated products that may happen to fit your interests, that is the topic of discussion here.
1. Given capital being so unequally distributed, paid ads amount to amplification of the messages from those who happen to have money. In another framing: you see ads about mediocre products with a big marketing budget; you don't see ads about wonderful products that have little marketing budget.
2. The conflict of interest is where Facebook has an incentive not to highlight too much the non-paid posts from people that mention products that don't pay for advertising. If you were to consistently see non-paid posts that gave you all the info you need to get products and services you appreciate, then the advertisers wouldn't be seeing their ads pay off and might cut back on paying Facebook for ads.
Overall, attention is somewhat zero-sum. Your attention to one thing is not attention to something else. You never really know what you're missing. But in an ad-driven system, attention is biased toward (but not exclusively) whatever serves those things connected with ad money.
What annoys me are ads for products I've already purchased (amazon is terrible about this), or the same ad plastered 20 times across multiple sites.
Instagram handles ads pretty well IMO. They are non-intrusive, easy to digest, and highly relevant.
Facebook OTOH, has become one giant scrolling, auto-playing, clickbait/video ad. There is essentially 90% junk to 10% information (posts/photos/etc). IG has the same ratio but in reverse.
People love to bemoan the horrors of internet advertising, but tbh I find it way less intrusive than other forms of ad placements (TV, radio, billboards).
Except autoplay vids w/ audio. Those should be banned flat out.
(I'm fine with ad-supported products, but I see it as a necessary evil of the transaction, not as a win).
You also have the option to fully block ads using extensions/plugins - nothing like that really exist for cable tv/radio/public spaces.
Talk about damming with faint praise. Ads are the top reason why I no longer listen to radio, and the TV is only bearable because I have a DVR.
That said, those are just annoying. Online ads are much more dangerous.
Lots of poor advertising methods have tainted the industry unfortunately but marketing is directly responsible for the success of every single corporation and the immense amount of content and information we all get to enjoy.
I wish I could pay a fee to get rid of ads and get a reverse chronological feed.
The only thing I can think of that would make them not do this is that maybe the folks most likely to pay $15/mo not to see advertisements are the same folks advertisers most want to get in front of. Expendable income and willing to pay money for convenience and personal taste.
I never developed this intentionally, it just sort of developed.
My point is, I suppose, that I've no idea how good the advertising is on my instagram account because I really don't see the ads.
What I was even more impressed by is that after I bought one, I never saw another Gravity Blanket ad again.
My girlfriend uses it when she's having troubles sleeping, she says that it really does put her to sleep quite well.
However, she says that there is a bit of adjustment, when you wake in the night or in the morning, there is a slight moment of panic when you don't have your strength back and are in a sleepy haze, because you have a bit of trouble moving around. But you get used to that.
When you receive it, you have to tie the weighted insert down with cloth ties inside the washable cover. I wish there were more of these on the inside though, the weighted part of the blanket can get too out-of place for my liking, and I also don't trust the ties to hold up for very long if you're not careful moving it. It definitely takes two hands and a good grip to get the blanket on top of you.
If I had to pay millions to shove my product in people’a faces because that’s the only way to get them to use it, I would reconsider whether my product should even exist.
Demand for different products is generated very differently depending on the product. Some things travel by word of mouth, some things don't.
The comment I was criticising claimed they were spending millions a month on FB & Insta only, which seems astronomical and raises some concerns about whether the product provides any value at all.
How? Spending on fb/insta is no different than print & tv. Air BnB ads are probably 5x as effective on FB than on a billboard, how does that say anything about their product?
Web ads, on the other hand...
I don’t see obvious scams, phishing or malware being advertised on TV or print, but I saw a lot of them back when I was on Facebook, and even reporting them didn’t do anything.
Most companies do paid marketing. I’d also suggest there are probably many things that you think of as general promotion (events, sponsorships, talks, community engagement, more) which are in fact brand marketing, and that for most companies brand marketing is an inefficient use of funds compared to performance marketing.
You seem to have a very misaligned thought on why advertising occurs and why it works, especially for a relative small timer like the poster (since a couple million is a drop in the bucket for IG/FB).
As a consumer, I would much prefer ads that are carefully tailed to my interests - software, fitness, general aviation - than see wildly different ads on the same platform, or the same 2-3 high paying ads for the latest garbage CBS sitcom. As a business owner, I would much rather pay $10-12 per click on one of my ads that is highly targeted to demographics, income, technology use, browsing history (of my sites, re-targeting etc) than pay $0.10 per click on a completely dumb ad with insight into who is actually clicking.
This idea is complete bologna in my opinion. People aren't trying to fight the existence of ads (e.g., movie trailers, magazines, sports ads on ESPN, maybe even the off native ad) -- people are fighting the invasive, predatory, and downright deceitful nature of the current online advertising model.
> "As a consumer, I would much prefer ads that are carefully tailed to my interests"
Don't we all want this? But when getting ads tailored to my interest comes with the price tag of having these exchanges/platforms follow me around for the rest of my internet life (or until I delete their cookies) -- the cost doesn't seem to be worth the benefit (to many, but obviously not all)
> "As a business owner, I would much rather pay $10-12 per click on one of my ads that is highly targeted to demographics, income,"
Of course. You've just exposed your vested interest in this topic. So it's not surprising that your personal opinion aligns with your business interests.
Not me. I’d rather no ads, but if I can’t block them I’d prefer irrelevant ads to targeted ads. They waste my attention equally, but one does not require the collection of my personal data.
Yeah if this doesn't scream "astroturfing for an ad company" I don't know what is anymore.
Sorry, I'd rather keep up the good fight of being the owners of my attention. Pushing back against ads isn't "sad" or "quixotic" at all, and in fact should be celebrated.
Welcome to the machine.
Your primary function to society is to consume.
Congratulations.
Your life also doesn't have to revolve around finding something new to buy/consume.
To all the downvoters - are you saying instagram doesn't use your phone microphone to serve you ads? It definately does. It's happened to me countless times.