I'm hoping for a revival of dumb ads. That large sites such as major newspapers will have ads like they had in the 90:s - internal ad sales departments spending long hours making ad contracts with advertisers who will trust and/or audit the traffic.
However I suspect it would be fiendishly difficult to work out the effect over anything other than the immediate short term (i.e. impression to click to sale).
If anyone knows of some good experimental work on this I'd love to read it.
The other part of that is those kinds of ads (dumb ads as you say) are going to be mostly useful for branding. Which is fine when you are Apple or Coke, but if you're a smaller player, you'd rather make sure your ads only get in front of the right eyeballs.
SMBs will only leverage Google, Facebook and other big platforms because I believe they'll have the ability to keep being relevant given their "walled-garden" model despite GDPR-like legal framework.
Every small publisher, aka 99% of them will likely collapse one way or another.
As counter intuitive as it might seem, while this would hurt their bottom line, Google and FB would benefit the most from this.
I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(
That would be great. I think browsers could push this. A simple standard data structure that people volonteer to provide for themselves. If I want "relevant ads" I populate it thuroughly and honestly. If I don't want that, I don't populate it at all, or even ask my browser to randomize it. But info used for targeting it should be info that the browser (i.e. user) provides and not info that the industry scrapes together.
Second: identity. I think step one must be making sure users can't be tracked or fingerprinted. Browser vendors need to make absolutely 100% sure that no font rendering or other fingerprinting can be used.
Obviously point #2 means that point #1 can't be too detailed, or can't be transferred verbatim every time. If you have narrow enough interests you can be fingerprinted.