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> Advertisement used to be fact based, but it's nowaday all emotional trickery...Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.

Wow. I guess if we ban it then, we'll be living in a perfect utopia...like we used to have in the past?

Have you ever considered that "Targeted Advertising" could be, for the most part, a way for customers with wants/needs and businesses with products/solutions to efficiently match up? And that the people who have been "duped" by targeted advertising actually just have different wants/desires/needs than you?

I think its more likely that the root cause of all the things you mention, is just normal human nature stuff.

I think you might be using Targeted advertising as a panacea boogieman instead of confronting the uncomfortable real causes for these things (from election results you don't like to family breakups/suicides)?

Advertising has always struggled with being too manipulative. Before targeted internet ads, magazines touched up imperfections on models to enhance the "buy this and be beautiful" message they were selling. Before they could retouch photos as easily, they forced models to barely eat to be "thin and attractive", affecting the mental health of people who felt "bad" for not looking like a model...which made them more susceptible to buying the "fix" the company is pushing.

Neutral market speak about "market efficiency" and matching customers with issues to businesses with solutions is fine, but talking about it at the expense of acknowledging that advertising CAN be harmful is against the point the parent comment is making.

I remember Enzyte commercials on TV in the 2000s. Manipulative against manhood, people who tried the drug had to have a doctors note saying "No, Enzyte didn't make my client's penis size increase" to be "allowed" to cancel their subscription. I can't even begin to imagine the hell someone with a "has small penis" ad profile lives in with targeted ads.

> Advertisement used to be fact based

This is demonstrably not true. For over 100 years, advertising has had strong roots in emotional appeal. From wiki:

"In the 1910s and 1920s, many ad men believed that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – "sublimated" into the desire to purchase commodities"

Just look at smoking ads from this time. Claiming health benefits that didn't exist, covering up health issues they knew existed, and associating smoking with cool people and socially desirable behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#Since_1...

One need only consider the term snake oil salesman to see advertisements root as emotional and non-fact-based. The term dates back to the late 1800, and fascinatingly, only came to refer to a fake product when White men copied a Chinese recipe which actually did reduce inflammation. The Chinese laborers would use this oil after a hard day's work, but used water snakes, which did not exist in California.

Clark Stanley, a former cowboy, copied this tincture, but claimed it came from the Hopi tribe of Native Americans and used rattlesnakes, which had barely any of the anti-inflammatory chemicals as the original Chinese recipe.

More importantly, a Federal government regulation in 1906, with the intention of cracking down on "patent medicine", discovered (in 1917) that Stanley's snake oil, had, in fact, no snake oil in it at all! For this gross violation of consumer trust, Stanley was fined $20, or about $500 in today's dollars.

> Advertisement used to be fact based

Instantly invalidates everything you said

Attributing all of these ills to better ads is just comical

No, that's not the worst they can do.

They can sell/give the data they have on you to someone with real intent to harm you.

They can use their money, power and the data they have on you to ruin your life, just like a Government could. A strategic leak of private data about a vocal critic of your company is not uncommon.

They can also use their data to influence Governments in ways that will harm all of us. And they do.

I could go on and on.

>No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games,

I dunno if you realize this but this sentiment is by FAR the most dangerous opinion in regards to advertising one can have. Because you are essentially saying that humans have no personal agency and that every decision we make is influenced by external factors. Which leads to a logical conclusion of a society where eveyone is required by law to take Xanax and is subjected to a carefully planned life down to the minute.

>Targeted advertising has already changed governments, caused hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, family trouble and breakups, and many sucides.

No it hasn't. Don't make shit up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You can't just declare an outcome you don't like as Strawman.

We already see the result of this happening in San Francisco - the policies that led to the state of the homelessness population and crime all stemmed from taking away agency from people. "Its not their fault that they are addicted to drugs. Its not their fault that they feel so desperate to turn to life of crime".

Now, with the recent shenanigans of Cambridge Analytica, if you follow this claim, you are essentially saying that people can't be trusted to make rational decisions on their own because they are so influenced by information that they see, so that information must be controlled.

None of this is farfetched. Privacy is simply being used as a political tool for people to gain control, it has no implications in the real world.