Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours.
On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.
Recently, this has been reminding me of all the hand wringing about "prompt injection vulnerabilities" - like e.g. when you have an LLM summarizing articles for you, or going over your inbox, and a malicious actor sneaks in a well-crafted bit of text that makes that LLM return you false information, or forward all your e-mails to attacker's address, etc.
Well guess what, ads are exactly such prompt injection attacks, but on humans.
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Edit: Let me them turn on the screws, I says.
But I dream.
edit: I just thought about a little more. How would that work with UDM. Would they be able to detect that?
edit 2: to the downvoters, tell me how I am wrong. Argue your point. Don't simply assume status quo is the desired state.
I am simply not that kind of consumer. That's not the way I learn about products I'll buy later. In fact, I've never ever bought something I saw in a youtube commercial. IMHO, the current model of advertisement is broken.