Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.
This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is.
Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising because they have by definition more information about the reader. So instead of generically exploiting people's self esteem, it exploits people's self esteem armed with much more information about the users.
Targeting and tracking is a plague and should be discouraged and blocked to oblivion.
> "So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising"
On average yes. Just as there is a gradient in non-targeted advertising of 'basically benign' to 'scum of the earth', I think there is a gradient in targeted advertising too.
On the basically benign end of the gradient you have the "You recently bought book X from author Y, perhaps you'd be interested in Book Z from author Y." (I don't like that stuff, I still block it, but it doesn't quite get me incensed if you know what I mean.) But the potential for harm from targetted ads can be truly extreme.
Yes, fully agree. Not all advertisers are bad. Not all advertising is bad. But the idea that targeted advertising is inherently better is bullshit and potentially far worse. I know you are not suggesting that either, just clarifying my above comment.
Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser.
Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.
Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer.
Exactly this.
Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.
That's fair, and I should have been more specific in saying that I'm not referring to cases of outright fraud. What I mean is this:
If I an a potential buyer of, say, a book... and my interests include AI, multi-agent systems, and operating systems, then an ad for Barnes & Noble offering the new title OS Development for AI and Multi-Agent Systems is probably going to be mutually beneficial, because it will help me find a book I would want, and it helps B&N sell said book. OTOH, an ad for the new title Necrophilia And Cemetery Porn Of The Deep South is not beneficial to either party (if it's displayed to me) because it's not something I'd ever be remotely interested in. Frankly, I'd much prefer the (accurately) targeted ad.
Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer.
If it resulted in a sale, then that means by definition it helped me find a product or service I wanted. If I made a bad decision in making that purchase, that's an orthogonal issue.
People buy crap they don't need all the time. The whole point of advertising is to sell. I believe the OPs are saying that they leverage information about you to bully you in to thinking that something is actually helpful and you should buy it, hence the talk about exploiting self esteem on a much more personal level. While I can't be sure if Google or Facebook actively do this kind of thing or sellers just use these platforms to do this, there's very little question that social media and consumer internet has gone rogue. Unless you've been living under a rock, you just have come across at least a few of those.
I, personally, have no issues with these platforms collecting my data and making money off it in exchange for their services that I use. But when they do the same even when Im not using their services or explicility expressing my disagreement, I'm not cool with that.
Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you.
This is nonsense. History is littered with cases of advertising abuse and misuse. Everything from literal snake oil salesmen to modern day shysters profiting from selling conspiracy theories and anti-tax bullshit is enabled and propagated by advertising.
I get your point about the potential benefits of targeted advertising, and in an ideal world it's true. Of course in that same ideal world we wouldn't have sleazy non-targeted advertising either. I just see so much abuse of tracking and targeting that the damage far outweighs the benefits.
