Meta's Free-Speech Shift Made It Clear to Advertisers: 'Brand Safety' Is Out
wsj.com
wsj.com
The idea never made sense to me. I don’t see why seeing an ad next to some content would cause me to think differently about the contents of the ad. It’s a nonsensical connection to draw. Whenever advertisers got attacked for showing up on a YouTube video or conservative news site or whatever, it seemed to me like manufactured outrage.
What really happened, I think, is that a few big advertising agencies that control a big portion of ad purchasing got ideologically captured, as many companies did in the last 10 years, and the activist employees in those ad agencies used their position to implement their political ideas, which they felt was the right thing to do. An ecosystem of DEI oriented advertising industry people popularized phrases like “brand safety” that didn’t exist before the 2016 election, and used that as reason to attack, deplatform, demonetize, and effectively censor political speech in our society as a result. GARM was one such point of ideological capture (https://apnews.com/article/x-twitter-advertiser-lawsuit-garm...) that enabled all this.
I hope we are done with that culture of censorship and deplatforming and can get back to holding reasonable debates and discussions even on controversial topics people disagree on.
why do you expect this targeting to be any better than recommendation systems on video and music streaming sites?
If I point out that ads are mostly lies, and even the meta commentary on ads (tight targeting) are lies, I often get your response. I'm not blaming you at all, I just find it all strange. Advertising clearly effects sales, and advertisers clearly influence ad supported media, we're just supposed to ignore those elephants in the room.
If that didn't happen, I imagine enough of the global $1 trillion-plus industry would have noticed by now, and already adjusted their strategies to exploit the under-valued placements.