
Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful - ingve
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
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a3n
> Why aren’t users saying, "There’s a magic machine in a data center that will
> only show me ads for stuff I really want to buy? Better turn off the ad
> blocker!"

Regardless of the technical and privacy reasons for blocking, I just don't
want to buy anything. I had no thought of a particular product before seeing
the ad, and no thought afterword of buying it, despite its being just right
for me.

I just don't want anything, other than food, clothes when mine wear out, and
occasional specific purchases like a car or a book (that I knew I wanted on my
own).

I think a big part of not wanting anything is that I don't watch cable or
broadcast TV, just movies on Netflix or Vudu. I've inadvertently unconditioned
myself from the purchase response. I'm almost sickened on the rare occasions
when I see broadcast TV. "Really? I used to watch this constant, animated
catalog of product? Bleah!"

~~~
pappyo
> I just don't want to buy anything.

But you still do. And you are susceptible to advertising signaling.

You buy toilet paper, shampoo and soap (I hope), laundry detergent, gas,
coffee (presumably), personal ailment products and so forth. There is no way
anyone could possibly research every category products they buy. So you will
use what information you have available to you...and that is probably the
memory of certain brands spending a dump truck's worth of money on
advertising.

~~~
wutbrodo
> But you still do. And you are susceptible to advertising signaling.

I honestly don't understand the confidence with which people claim this is
universally true for absolutely everyone. I have no doubt that many or most
people fall back on brand recognition, but it's really not that hard to avoid.
To be clear, I don't doubt that brand awareness is driven largely by
advertising, but no one has ever made a good case to me for why that
necessarily affects purchase.

When I buy a commodity item (soap, tp. etc), I usually buy the cheapest one
that I haven't already found to be lacking (or if I hit upon a particular
product that I found works well for me, I continue buying that). When I buy a
big ticket item, it's almost by definition worth spending an hour doing
research on, and for expensive items there are almost always ample reviews and
articles representing both sides[1].

[1] I'm aware that ethics breaches like undisclosed payola have the ability to
corrupt this line of investigation but it doesn't have to do with
susceptibility to advertising signaling.

~~~
jbooth
Because your brain's a sponge, and all that stuff gets into your subconscious
and affects your decision-making. In your examples given, it colors your
perception of which products 'work well for you' and it biases that research
you do for big-ticket purchases.

Studies have demonstrated it time and time again -- if you think you're
unaffected, well, maybe you're _less_ affected by most, or maybe you're
engaging in wishful thinking.

~~~
Yetanfou
Sure, the brain is a sponge and remembers many things which you're not
consciously aware of. Those memories can affect your decisions. So far, so
good. But... and there is a big 'but' here...

Advertising does not always have the desired effect. I generally avoid
commercial content - whether it be printed advertisements, sponsored content
or otherwise - but it is nearly impossible to avoid being exposed to some
commercial content, whether I like it or not. Those advertisers which, through
sheer tenaciousness or downright trickery manage to make their way into my
consciousness might not like what their presence there does: it actively
lowers my perception of their products as viable choices. To me, advertising
is like mould on a piece of bread, like slimy threads in a bottle of beer,
like a wriggling meal worm in a bag of flour. It does many things, but it does
not make me want to buy the related product. I probably conditioned myself to
behave like this due to my dislike of the dishonesty in advertising, but this
is less relevant. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there who reacts
like this. Mentally connecting a brand or product to a piece of advertising
just makes me think it is of low(er) quality, over-priced, designed to fail or
otherwise deficient as the manufacturer needed to whittle down on production
costs to pay for said advertising. It might not be true, but to me it feels
like it is.

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KirinDave
I am visibly frustrated with this article. It attempts to paint a
proliferation of ad blocking as a measure by users to take back their privacy.

But it totally ignores the proliferation of defensive software to protect
users from malicious ads that attempt to trick or confuse the user, many of
which are funded or provided by the very agencies interviewed. The web without
an adblocker can be a very dangerous place and users are becoming educated on
this.

Ignored also is any not that the signal is confounded further by people
seeking to avoid *-roll ads on video media, a market with amazing growth but
positively miserable tools for unobtrusive advertising largely chained to the
expectations of legacy media. YouTube is 10x better with adblock letting you
bypass the same 15s shotgun preroll ad 16 times a day.

It also heavily biases the reasoning towards older people with a heavy stake
in expensive and smaller log advertising. And all due respect to Doc Searles
(SBLUG for lyfe!) and other sources, they're not 19yr old with what amounts to
a substantial shift in privacy values and expectations informing their
decisions.

Most toxic of all, this article implies that advertising overspend is the
important part. While banks and other vendors have recognized this effect, its
in no one's long term best interests to continue to feed that trend. It is
tool that large institutions use to lock out small business by implying cash
flow = confidence. We really don't want to encourage a world where you have to
behave like Samsung to succeed even at a small scale.

I've resisted restarting my blog but ugh... I'm tempted to pull together some
opposing data just to sock this pro-old-media anti-technology screed in the
chin. It's just such an obviously disingenuous take on the situation.

~~~
danudey
I adblock so that pages take 1/10th the time to load as they would otherwise,
don't block me from seeing content, and don't irritate me by playing sound or
animations.

The other factor I see is that most ads are terrible. Most YouTube ads seem to
think that they have 30 seconds to tell a story, and try to do so. No, you
have 5 seconds to hook my attention. Some ads actually succeed at this and I
watch the whole thing just to see what they're saying. Most start out with a
slow pan across a horizon or some kids running around a house making noise,
and I click Next before I have any idea what the ad is even remotely about.

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Mauricio_
It's true what it says about the purpose of advertising, and how it needs to
be expensive to work; and the cost of advertising online keeps getting lower
and lower. However I'm not sure stopping targeted ads will magically solve
everything and make online ads as profitable as traditional ads; I'm sure most
people block ads because they don't want to see them, not because they are
targeted. Maybe online ads should be like traditional ones: ads being more
expensive the more traffic the website gets; so having a banner in a very
popular website should be the equivalent of having a billboard in an important
avenue. So cost should be per view, and not per click. After all most of the
most expensive ads in traditional media are there to establish a brand, not
for you to buy something right now.

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blueflow
Inb4: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful -
[http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

~~~
lfowles
Nerd clickbait!

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spankalee
The spam analogy for targeted ads is a really bad one, I think. Spam became
popular for senders because it was extremely cheap to reach millions and
millions of people. Over time costs did grow a bit, because of the
effectiveness of filtering, but at the same time if it's unlikely for your
spam to be ready, how much would you be willing to pay for it? Not that much,
hopefully.

Targeting does not necessarily reduce the cost of ads - for very valuable
users the cost of an extremely targeted ad can be quite high. The question is
then what happens to the total cost of the campaign. The article seems to
imply that the cost of the campaign is low for low-quality sellers, and this
is why targeted ads become a bad signal for buyers. But online ads are very
often performance tracked, and the entire reason that some demographics are so
expensive is that the ads to them perform well. If an ad is measurably giving
a high-return on investment, then the advertiser should be pouring as much as
they can into the campaign, which implies that campaign budgets for some
targets go up, not down, and the quality signal to buyers should be higher,
now lower.

So it seems like as targetting differentiates by consumer, it also
differentiates by seller. The ad networks also allow choosing which
publications to target, and higher quality publishers do cost more. So given
some self-awareness about your own value for a given target and the quality of
the publication you're reading, you could (given the signaling theory of ads
is correct) get a better signal in many cases.

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msellout
If we reject the author's claim that the purpose and value of advertising is
solely a signalling mechanism similar to a peacock's feathers, then the entire
argument fails.

~~~
KirinDave
And it's a very skewed perspective that would raise that, as any small
business owner can tell you. It is not even the faintest exaggeration to say
that every intentionally publicly facing point of information is advertising
for every company of one sort or another, even down to things like office
location, retail store location, and employee hiring practices.

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astazangasta
Too bad 99% of the effort in the Valley is focused on this question. Hey, its
almost as if the interests of capital are generally antithetical to the
desires of most of humanity.

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tbrownaw
1\. People care about how much they think an advertiser is spending on ads?
Really?

2\. I had my ad-blocker turned off for quite a while. I turned it back on when
I was watching lots of short youtube videos, and seemed to be getting almost
more video ads than actual content. If there was an option for "only block ads
on these sites" (as opposed to "only _allow_ ads on these sites"), I'd use it.

3\. I don't care what some bigco that thinks I'm one data point out of a few
million thinks about me. I would care what targeted ads (or content) show up
if I'm doing something in an in-person-social context. So if I sign up to give
a talk at a local UG, or go to a hackathon or something, I have a second
browser that's not used for irrelevant stuff. And so doesn't have tracking
cookies (including login cookies for anything social).

~~~
com2kid
In regards to your first point,

Imagine you are in the market to buy a new phone.

Two flagship devices just came out, one from a well estaished brand that is a
solid contender, and another from a company that is new to smartphones and had
traditionally competed in other product areas.

The new entrant's product is superior and priced competitively.

You read that the established player is spending a record 300 million on
advertising for their latest flagship. Meanwhile the new entrant, despite
having a large corporation behind it, has not made any major announcements
about its ad campaign, nor for that matter have you really heard much buzz
outside of enthusiast circles.

At some point you'll realize the new product is DOA.

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amelius
> Why doesn’t Apple’s browser “help you connect and share with your favorite
> brands”?

Perhaps they are building such a system behind the scenes. Of course, all
confined to the boundaries of their own ecosystem (the app store / itunes /
and perhaps paid-for ads) Who knows what the future might bring to iOS users.

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scotty79
I don't mind high quality brands advertisement being displayed on pirate and
even porn websites.

What I do mind is "one magic trick to lose fat" advertisement displayed on
most popular, high quality websites.

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chair92
If you ask somebody if they want personalized ads, of course they say no. That
sounds creepy.

But in reality, those ads work, which means that people are more likely to
make a voluntary economic transaction after seeing them than they would be in
the base condition.

So this comes down to: do we believe what people say... or what they do?

~~~
Spivak
You're missing a case, which is the one I fall into. I recognize that ads work
and I don't want them too.

This is why I indiscriminately block or avoid them whenever I can. I would
like to believe that I'm above the influence of ads but I'm not and I seem to
have no control over my or my children's exposure to them. Sure, I could just
not use the internet but that's only a small portion of the ads I see
everyday; I can't watch TV, listen to radio, read newspapers or magazines,
hell I can't even go out in public without being bombarded with them!

But on the internet I have at least a few tools to fight back, but they're
slowly being eroded now that advertisers are paying for content itself.

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IshKebab
Such an imaginative title.

