Toronto is surveillance capitalism’s new frontier

So I spend a lot on ads, I'm a little bit familiar:

Most 'search' ads are 'relevant' to the search, but they're not necessarily relevant to me.

In particular, banner ads, which are very crudely targeted, tend to be of 'low relevance' in marketing lingo, but in real terms, extremely low relevance.

For example, I don't live in the US, and I see an astonishing number of ads for US-centric content, and for products that are not even available where I live.

Consider the ad in the article itself: it's for a special night at the 'ROM' (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto. But I don't live anywhere near Toronto!

Scrolling down I see an add for the IDS 'Interior Design Show' in Toronto. Not only do I have absolutely no interest in the subject, but I don't live in Toronto.

I don't know if those are Google ad displays or not, but the it's basically the same, ad nauseam: the ad market is an astonishingly inefficient marketplace.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity for 'relevance' might be on Facebook - because they have such a massive base, and a real means to captured nuance behaviour. I run ads on that platform which score way above average in terms of relevance and performance, but I know for certain I'm not getting the kind of material relevance that I want.

Honestly it's a strange paradox to me: Google has everything at their fingertips and can't figure out who wants to buy a lawn mower and who has definitely no interest.

It's also been shown empirically that 'nerds', 'geeks' tend to be ad-resistant (not just tech-nerds, the general psych profile regardless of domain).

It's not that ads are that irrelevant to nerds compared to most people (no stat outliers), it's apparently related to something in the brain that just responds less to ads. Whether that be conscious filtering, unconscious pattern recognition training which lets one discard irrelevant stimulus, .. take your pick.

Parent might thus just be a nerd. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> about half of U.S. adults (49%) say it is acceptable for the government to collect data about all Americans in order to assess potential threats.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

"Maybe more relevant ads would mean fewer ads and less revenue?"

Definitely not :)

Empathetically ... it's the opposite.

I see there's a bit of misunderstanding here about Google's, or any other platform's ability and willingness to show relevant ads.

Google is absolutely trying to maximise relevance for ads. That's not to say they won't take your money anyhow, but the unconditionally want your ads - all of them if possible - to be effective.

The economics of marketing are such that when a spend is effective, it's followed by considerably more spend. It shouldn't surprise anyone that when companies find a positive ROI, that they're willing to invest much more heavily in this.

Google is a business which is powered by ads, and relevance is the most core and effective measures of value of their product by their customers.

Again, in 2019, with all of the data they have, it's still really hard to target in a consistently efficient manner for almost all product categories.

Have you ever wondered why at the bottom of ostensibly respected entities like CNN you see clickbait for so many ridiculous, innocuous products? It's because the value of click-bait style targeting still transcends our ability to do meaningful targeting.

To anyone who's never worked in Marketing or bought any ads, I'd suggest popping $20 into Facebook ads and just running a couple ads for anything. Just like 'Music' seems to be one of those subjects that goes hand in hand with 'Computer Science', my hunch is that the human behavioural issues surrounding ads are one of those subjects as well. It's really fun. It's one of those amazingly complicated and interesting pockets of curiosity.

Google are hoarding data in a way which is totally unacceptable and probably illegal, at least in Europe.

And why? In order to fool companies to buy the worst and most useless advertising format ever, the banner ad.

I mean, the evidence is meant to be used to back some principles. For example, I am proponent of evidence based policy and I am also an advocate of mental health help. There is a lot of pseudo science and easy feel good stuff but there is also a lot of really good behaviour therapy out there. One works, one is muck, and I think tax dollars should be used to fund the one that works because people deserve to not be depressed

I think principles decide what you do about the evidence (and even what evidence needs to be collected) to accomplish your goals. The goals themselves derive from principles.

Evidence-based governance can give you gas chambers or head-start pre-K programs depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

I agree laws should be based on principles, but I do wonder where to draw the line. I've noticed that any system that is built up from axiomatic principles and reasoning usually ends up out of touch with reality as well. It's likely we need to have evidence feeding back into a principled-based system.

> Laws should be decided based on principles, not evidence.

Agree 100%. It has become my recent understanding that "evidence-based policy" is a more sanitised, technocratic way of carrying out good old-fashioned eugenics policies.

The problem with principles is they don’t tell you much about consequences. We might all agree that we should help very poor people in region X, but what will actually help most? Micro loans, micro loans with coaching, unconditional lump sum cash at random, unconditional lump sum cash to targeted promising candidates, free schools, schools with small fees?

We can’t know how the different effects of these things compare from a principled argument. That’s where evidence is useful.