"Do you want to pay to have your advert shown to somebody who has no interest in your product?"
The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is "good" - and why TV, printing and all the rest are having their collective arse handed to them by on-line.
Now we can move onto discussions around fraud, ethics, leaking, micro-transactions and a million other things - but that study is clearly stupid.
For example most ads shown by Google Search are based on the search keywords, since that’s what most advertisers bid on and not a user profile. Google’s great advantage in this space is that a search shows clear intent, clear need.
I once worked on a platform for serving ads in mobile apps. The apps themselves can be pretty clear signals of intent. A weight loss app for example can serve ads for gym or diet-friendly restaurants with great success. Similarly for publications. I can imagine articles on politics don’t have valuable context, unless the elections are coming, however howto articles or articles on home and garden or various hobbies have great context.
Btw, I never click on ads. If personalization was meant to save costs you’d think these ads companies would have learned to not serve me any ads.
Truth of the matter is that personalization has less to do with cost savings and more to do with optimizing the message for better conversions. And that’s what I find unethical ... the use of personal data to personalize a message in order to make me buy a product that I normally don’t want to buy.
Thing is you don’t need personalization for this to work and it can be counterproductive. Because these ads are designed to make the customers remember the brand in the future, when they’ll need it and not to fulfill an immediate need.
Ads companies doing personalization try to paint their algorithms as having better conversions, however measuring the impact of brand advertising is really difficult due to the deferred effect and all you can do is to make educated guesses. And for the labels in a supermarket for example, which is the vast majority of brand advertising, you don’t need any personalization.
Personalization is meant for the long tail. Like those shitty commercials on FB trying to sell you indestructible iPhone cases or shitty apps that help you exercise your brain. Or miracle cures to diabetes, if you were uninspired enough to join an FB group on such topics.
Such ads do not benefit just from being seen. If you don’t click on them, the opportunity for the advertiser is gone.
Not at all. This assumption that ads themselves are unavoidable is ludicrous.
>Now we can move onto discussions around fraud, ethics, leaking, micro-transactions and a million other things.
Enormous blunders of fraud and ethics out of sight unless we look directly at ads, targeted or not. And if you’re like most, you’ve got a banal understanding of how advertising and psychology game the limits of the sensual system.
As someone who spent most my life producing them, I must be honest: ads are the bane of our existence.
Ads have hollowed subsumed and proceeded to hollow art and culture.
They have wrecked our landscapes.
They have reformed our workforce into consumers and producers of something entirely foreign to our sustenance and enrichment.
They have malformed our conception of private and social responsibility.
They have rewritten the very rules of power!
Targetted ads are just a technological conclusion of an existing problem.
I'm more pragmatic. I earn and spend money. Given that I'm going to spend money, I'd like to spend it wisely. That's why I might use amazon to check out the reviews for say a "sliding mitre saw" - I know some are better than others. I go to amazon as they have a load of reviews - and have all the sliding mitre saws, they don't care which one I buy - as long as I buy one. So makes sense for amazon to know what I want to buy, know which is going to make me happiest, and just shove up a "here's a saw for £x, that has 4.7 from a thousand people". The traditional advert wants to sell me something I don't need/want. The perfect modern advert tells me what I actually (probably) need - and removes the friction.
If I go to Amazon and search for mitre saws, I'll see mitre saws, and probably some ads for mitre saws. If I visited Amazon via an ad derived from a google search for "buy sliding mitre saw", they can direct me to the right page, and know my search term.
They do not need to know what sites I visited last week, how often, or where I go next, or where the device currently is. Amazon already has my address, anyone else will require it on order. Nor do they need to continue showing ads for mitre saws now I'm on Youtube watching a music video or reading a news site. 99 times of 100 retargeting is trying to sell me on something I just decided I don't want (maybe I just read and didn't like that product's specs in my brief ad-driven visit to the site), or I decided I got something more urgent or fun to do right now than buy mitre saws. If it's approaching someone's birthday retargeting gladly ruins the surprise if you share a house or device with anyone.
None of what you have described needs a continually growing personal profile made for me, across as many sites and niches as possible, in order to work nicely. Just context relevant ads - that's very different to personalisation.
In the end I didn't buy mine from Amazon - I picked up my maybe #2 option from a local wholesaler that had an offer on and gave me a discount if I picked up the saw and the compatible base. In this case I was just using amazon to confirm that the item was 'fine' Now I didn't check in this case, but I am aware that other online merchants discount their stores based upon tracking - and who doesn't like a discount? I like to think 'they' knew that I "goldcd wanted a decent saw for a mid-price" and were all undercutting each other to try to get me to enter by details.
In the end, your purchase is relying on so much effort to curtail price exploitation, and it misses the potentials for manipulation and misrepresentation. You feel like an independent player but a minimal systemic analysis shows you could just as likely be misled. Of course, the systems you depend on are designed to do exactly that, unless it somehow benefits them more to help you out. What are the chances? Well, it benefits them not to tell you that. Your confidence appears foolish, I am afraid.
Trust and aligned interests are out the window with these systems. We can do trmendously better to one another.
Which is quite different than the one that's best solution for your problem given the money you want to pay. This is the fundamental immorality of most ads; the place they disturb the voluntary exchange of value the free market should be all about.
I don't want a personal tail following everything I, and my family who periodically share devices, do over years in order to "infer" what's suitable to target me for. Ever.
I am more than happy to have ads on the page that are relevant to the page, or to the search terms I've just used. I would even whitelist them in my adblocking if they were served from a first party domain and were free of JS crap.
Ad personalisation is not good, unless I have requested it on that particular site. Which for some sites, I very well might, so long as it remained siloed. Which would require trust. Which rules out everyone currently in Adtech.
I feel absolutely no obligation to support a deeply flawed business model. That's why I block all ads now and forever, and do my utmost to block any online tracking. I will never whitelist a single ad, because advertising is nothing but lies, designed to steal my time, attention and money.
I do not support the "hidden payment" that advertising represents, because it is dishonest and the terms of the deal are opaque. I prefer content creators who are upfront about their funding needs and use services like Patreon or direct donations or merch sales.
No, he doesn't. He puts it up for free, and then expects a particular way of compensation. Anywhere else this kind of behaviour is considered antisocial, and is frowned upon; it's advertising industry that tries to perpetuate a lie that they have moral high ground here.
It's a deceptive practice. A fair one would be e.g. putting up a paywall. Companies prefer ads because they work better - in the same way that mugging people makes money faster than selling pretzels. Better doesn't automatically mean more ethical.
In every other scenario aside from online, I can decline to answer or decline the loyalty card etc. If I have attracted enough interest of the authorities to gain a real-life surveillance tail ads are the least of my worries. :)
My take is that there's a generation of people who've come later and just have complete cognitive-dissonance as to what pays for what they interact with. "I use Facebook - but I've no idea why they're worth billions" I've no doubt a correction is coming, and the winner should be whoever can ride this new wave.
Honestly, that's a bit like saying "if you don't want to be shot, you got bulletproof vests and bodyguards, that's your opt-out", in a world where everyone can just shoot guns randomly at each other, with very few to no repercussions.
Data driven / targeted advertisements are the worst of both worlds: doxxing people, and terrible results. Products after I've already bought them. Junk I'm not remotely interested in. Stuff I'm interested in, but won't touch, because humans are so far out of the loop that I can't trust anything about it.
I can't trust the quality, I can't trust whatever ecommerce site it's taking me to, I probably can't even trust my browser to render because of the threat of malware. No vetting, no accountability.
> “Do you want to be forced to watch an advert you have no interest in?” > The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is "good"...
I don’t want to be forced to watch any ads. Personalization isn’t “good” because I get forced to watch something I’m more likely to be interested in buying. And just because I’m more likely to be interested doesn’t somehow make losing privacy okay. Ads don’t become more moral when they work.
> ...and why TV, printing and all the rest are having their collective arse handed to them by on-line
Personalized ads have nothing to do with why online is growing and why TV and print are shrinking. The web exploded precisely because of the amount of content you could get without any advertising at all. Ads and privacy concerns are now slowing the growth. TV and print are just dying because they’re nowhere near as convenient.
I wouldn't know until I watched it. As opposed to seeing an ad of something I recently bought.
Do you want to pay to have your advert shown to somebody who has no interest in your product?
How do we know that? Having no information about a given person is not equal to knowing that that person is not interested.
It's not that simple.
Or when I proposed. I worked out that a jewelry-maker usually just adds a fixed % to the costs to come up with the final price. I bought a 'modest' flawless diamond and then got my local jeweler to put it in a beautiful mount, for a fixed price. 6 f'in months over every page I looked at, being covered in diamonds. Each and every one of them wasting their money. Now in perfect data-mining-world, they'd have worked out I'd booked a wedding venue and a ring, so unlikely to need another ring.
...Actually, this gives me quite a good thought. All the tracking we have, is "one-way" - and it's hard to correct the f'ups. If we could maybe accept the tracking and learn to live with it, the trackers could be more upfront and ask us direct questions. Or at the very least have a "was this advert of interest to you" button. A/B test it obviously - as most people will say no to everything, but I'd be on board.
Compared to being forced into watching something an AI-bubble mistakenly believes I’m interested in, for the 20th time, sure.
Also, not being tracked is pretty great.
Stop fucking snooping, even if it's just for ads. And stop working for companies that have zero morals on this.
In general, yes, because then I might learn something new about the world. I'm not a business owner, but I saw a few B2B untargeted ads during the Super Bowl. Now I know stuff like those companies exist.
It's like asking a school kid if they want to be forced to read a textbook, or if they would rather read something targeted to them specifically like a comic book.
Personal anecdote - I find targeted ads more boring and irritating than standard ads in the press - they are either predictable and therefore don't catch me off guard or they are just plain silly - data driven mistaken predictions.
I might even agree with you. But ad tech has lost the battle for trust so badly, they are now playing defensive on issues they probably thought safe.
Given your way, you'd have us in the therapy chair from A Clockwork Orange.
It's irrational to use any information obtained from an advertisement to make a purchasing decision, because the advertiser is incentivized to give you any information that will influence you to buy the product, regardless of whether it's true or useful. Consequently, it's in your best interest to ignore any advertisements you see.
If I see an ad for car insurance, it doesn't affect me, because I don't have a car. If I see an ad for mechanical keyboards, I might be influenced to buy one, even though it might not be the best-value option. So I'd rather see the car insurance ad.
Well, not really, because Geico ads make me want to jump off a tall building. But the point still stands.
I'm fully aware that writing at an abstract level and am personally a reluctant capitalist - but I detest waste.
To deep-dive into a really specific example. Today there is most likely a plane flying from your city with an empty seat, to a city you want to visit but can't afford, which has an empty hotel room. Why would not offering you this itinerary for a price you could afford, not be a good thing to offer you before you watched your next youtube video?
Now the intrusive part of this is that it requires somebody to work out where you want to go, which airlines and hotels are hiding 'failure', and what "you can afford". Nobody really wants to share any of this - but as a theoretical, could make everybody a bit happier.
Advertising in practice does not converge to market efficiency; it overshoots and ultimately strip-mines people, by exploiting information asymmetry.
At the end it's behavioral modification.
until ads become opt in, i will opt out of 100% of ads wherever possible. i'll also always run Ad Nauseum and try to ruin advertiser's profit margins and quality of information wherever legally possible and within my means and convenience.
if i'm "forced" to see an ad, i can always use a different product or service instead. or i could simply do without altogether instead -- like with TV.
just to drive this point home, i want to make it clear that i'm putting my money where my mouth is. i refuse to invest in companies that use ad-based revenue as their business model or develops ad tech for others to use. and i'm not alone.
in fact, i don't know any people in tech -- or outside of tech -- who don't try to block ads as often as they can.