In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top.
In an ad engine… that list gets resorted
Advertising’s true cost is opportunity cost. It’s the lost opportunity of knowing the actual best option for your quality of life.
A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such guardrails. It recommends things that reflect someone else's economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.
https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-re...
My point was around the utility of marketing, at least in theory. If I release a new brand of baked beans, how would a recommender based on past sales (and combinations of sales) know to recommend it to anyone. Marketing allows it to go up the list (unfairly, according to the post I was replying to).
Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that recommendation list because a large portion of them know that the recommendation list is adversarial.
So, modern advertisers are left with two options:
1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside other content).
2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to influence results).
Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it somewhat adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to buy things against your own best interest. But it's not so adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you to stop eating it.
Thats because the company who produces the product you are most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads. Products you aren't very interested in, either because they cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be able to afford to get to the top ad spot.
In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product to spend on advertising widely varies.
The notion that perfect realizations of Econ 101 concepts would produce outcomes everybody likes it both wrong and quasi-religious. It's like saying, "The perfect knife would never cut a human." Nope.
If anything, the whole purpose of advertising is to create market distortions. Look at Coke vs Pepsi, for example. Billions are spent yearly to manipulate consumers to make choices that differ from whatever the natural marketplace outcome would be.
In a perfect market, the top ad would be for the best treadmill. You'd never see an ad for just going outside for a run.
The reason you don't see this is because free parks are themselves a market distortion.