Imagine an NYT text that's sort of personalized to you. Very cool concept.
In old radio serials, sometimes the actors would break character right in the middle of a scene and do a commercial.
TV news anchors actually wore sponsor patches on their suits, and the sponsor logos were on the set, in a very NASCAR fashion. If you're ever in Baton Rouge, the state museum there has an old preserved TV news set and you can see the sponsor logos on everything.
Jimmy Kimmel does this occasionally, with a full-on commercial as a skit in the middle of the show (clearly marked as an ad for broadcast purposes). The humor value generally comes from his sidekick Guillermo always being featured and always being pretty bad at it.
First, we should be able to exist in a world where advertising isn't so pervasive we can't even figure out what is real anymore. We're already heading toward this Orwellian dystopia of a glossy marketing shine on everything (and that's another State Farm touchdown!). It's a problem because it dehumanizes the receiver as just another set of body organs to manipulate into spending money, and it seems to turn the receiver into an inattentive, quivering set of reflexes. I can't imagine most of us thinking that would be a desirable world to live in.
Second, I feel that a writer should be able to write something once and it be done with. If I were writing an article for the NYT, I would push back as hard as I could if the publisher wanted to have some AI algorithm tailoring my message to sell a product. That is the opposite of respectable journalism, and perhaps with the exception of novel cases, the opposite of respectable writing in general.
Third, I think we as a society should be able to read someone else's views and be able to exist with the tension of them being somewhat different than ours. I don't want everything personalized to me. Let me learn how other people see things. We as members of society should be able to see ourselves as contributing members of that society and not merely individuals. We need works of thought to parse and debate so we can participate in the Great Conversation that humanity has continued for millennia.
If what you're saying is the direction we are going, I'm not a fan.
That sounds like it would lead to a extra-potent filter bubble effect [1].
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/twice-as-happy-...
That's not a cool concept at all. That's a horrifying one.
One of the great things about the Star Trek universe was the complete absence of advertising. That does sound rather Utopian.