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Long, long time ago, when last.fm radio was still a thing on it's own, I loved it: instead of pre-arranging a playlist, it kept adding the next song by searching for similar ones based on the one currently playing. It kept crawling away, sometimes into terrible direction, but more often into an area I'd like to refer to as "satellite".

"Satellite" would be friends-of-friends or even friends-of-friends-of-friends in social media terms.

And this is how it comes to ads: when I bought a magazine, I got a set of ads that only had a rough idea about their audience. Those edges were the ones that allowed ads to broaden my views on the world, and, therefore, ads were useful for me. This, and the financial impossibility of ever getting one - early teen in Hungary -, were the reasons why I loved Sony catalogues in the '90s.

Targeted ads are the polar opposite: they want to change me, force me to buy a certain, specific product, instead of gradually opening my interest to a lot more things in the world.




I feel the exact same way about sampling 'alien' ad culture. It's fun to switch on the local TV station in a new city and see what ads are being shown to people there. It's like a form of social calibration that shows what 'is available.' Same thing with reading the ads in the back of Popular Science or The Economist. I don't get that online unless I VPN+incognito, and I absolutely cannot get it on my phone, which is locked down much tighter.




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