What is targeted advertising needed for?
This allows you - the brand - to reduce wastage. And in theory, it should reduce Ad Fatigue in the audience.
Wastage because every time you miss a potential audience member, or you reach a wrong person, you paid to deliver a message that won't be heard/read/seen. If you think about it, this adds up - even with targeted advertising.
Ad Fatigue comes from you being shown advertising you have no interested in (why are you seeing bunions cream if you don't have bunions), or you see too many times the same ad you start to notice it for the wrong reasons (imagine you see a re targeted ad from amazon for a product you bought 3 weeks ago, and for 3 weeks you're seeing daily the same product being recommended to you).
In theory, everyone should win with targeted ads, in reality, it's being abused and it's saturating consumers. Not only abused by brands, but also by a consumer behavior/culture that aims to spend more.
You can argue that one fuels the other, well, I'm not so sure about that, because cultural shifts are too big to be the agenda of anyone. In my opinion, they feed on each other.
You mention you don't mind ads; would you also prefer to be subject to targeted advertising rather than to have software running on your own device which displays equally-relevant reference material without sharing your personal data?
The ads themselves aren't the problem here, nor is it really what's being discussed.
A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had already some data for some targeting.
> in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others.
This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the country).
What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.
What advertisers care about is who is susceptible or vulnerable to persuasion.
Targeted advertising lets the advertiser pay for part of more expensive searches.
One of the problems with Google and Facebook is that they are businesses whose core product should be driving search costs very low, so they compromise their product so that their advertising remains valuable to close the gap.
There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is.
Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles.
Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and you should always take that into consideration.
You're right haha, plus I'm more of a minimalist so I just want to have less stuff in general.