EU is a huge fan of shooting itself in the foot with useless regulations, unable to think 1-2 steps ahead.
Waiting for someone to tell you why "the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry" is actually a good thing in their view.
Waiting for someone to tell you why "the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry" is actually a good thing in their view.
Online != behavioral
Quantitative changes enabled by technology can present qualitative problems.
As someone who spent five years doing advertising market research, and whose parents each spent 30+ years doing the same prior to ubiquitous internet use, I call bullshit on that statement.
While there certainly were efforts (with millions spent collecting data) to identify market segments and emotional triggers to better target market products/services (cf. BSB GlobalScan as an example), the idea that it was the right of ad sellers to monitor everyone's activities as their right in order to "target" advertising was never an option, nor was there ever any push to do so.
Convincing folks to participate in telephone/mall intercept/door-to-door surveys was used to identify consumer preferences and advertising efficacy.
No one ever asked (or did so without asking) to go through a consumer's mail, personal communications or effects as a method to determine how to target ads.
Since all those things are pretty much de rigueur these days, I'd say that's not a just difference of degree, but a completely different mechanism for gathering information about consumers.
And just because it wasn't possible to snoop through (without a potential breaking/entering and/or burglary charge) the private documents and communications of consumers, doesn't mean those folks would have done so if they could.
So yes, there's a big difference between the market research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) done in the past and the blatant spying/snooping on people's private documents and communications we see now.
You're making an assertion which doesn't match the facts.
Feel free to disagree, but I was there, and that business paid for my housing, food, clothes and everything else for more than twenty-five years -- both as the child of marketers and as a marketer myself.
I'd also point out that the Advertising Market Research industry was a very small group of people (perhaps a thousand employed by ad agencies/large corporations and a few thousand more employed by market research supply houses and interviewing/focus group companies.) and, as such, if there was a market for breaking into people's houses and rifling through their papers/mail, wiretapping their phones, etc., I'd know about it.
Advertising negatively affects markets because it leads people to make decisions based on things that are not necessarily in their interests, i.e. it leads people to make more uninformed (or misinformed) decisions.
In effect, it's basically exploiting a market externality: vulnerabilities in human psychology.
I mean, this is not always true. Sometimes, you might become aware of a great product or service due to advertising. But I am entirely convinced that, in general, the negative effects hugely, hugely outweigh the occasional benefit, just by observing how people usually make their buying decisions in their day-to-day lives (including me, I'm not immune to that!).
Like anti smoking posters in a phillip morris factory