Customers are being educated by companies, personal experience and news media why they are seeing the ads they are being shown. Just because advertising doesn't have to be personal, doesn't make that a sufficient argument for not doing it.
> Advertising makes brands.
Certainly brands are useful for trust, but often brand dominance blinds customers from smaller players and solutions. It's a trade-off.
> Advertising carries an economic signal.
Are there no other signals to determine economic strength of a company? Good advertising should project value and tilt perception in their favor.
> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media.
Companies study their customers without cookies to learn where better to advertise for them. This isn't new because of cookies. Tracking cookies gave the ability for small advertisers to understand their customers and their other consumption in ways that only the largest marketers could.
> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative associations with brands.
The author keeps making the assumption that strong brands are better than aligning customers with products that fit them well.
> Adtech wants to be personal. That’s why it’s tracking-based. Though its enthusiasts call it “interest-based,” “relevant” and other harmless-sounding euphemisms, it relies on tracking people.
The author again is throwing the baby out with the bathwater with no imagination for regulatory controls to limit the scope of access for customer data.
> Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy.
Emotional language, privacy is something that isn't monolithic for all people. There is nuance here.
> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware.
So is the internet at large.
> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism.
And on the other side of the coin, adtech incentivizes growth of smaller outfits to be competitive because it allows advertisers to find their platform. The author failed to mention all of the new media companies that have sprouted up now that they can compete with larger outfits. Customers have never had more choice. Who is to say the bias of a large firm is more advantageous than a smaller firm?
> Intermediators take most of what’s spent on adtech. Bob Hoffman does a great job showing how as little as 3¢ of a dollar spent on adtech actually makes an “impression. The most generous number I’ve seen is 12¢.
It's not about brand impressions. It's about conversions.
> Adtech gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.
This is being worked on right now by the adtech platforms, it has a ton of visibility and public interest.
> Adtech incentivizes hate speech and tribalism by giving both—and the platforms that host them—a business model too.
Tribalism is not inherently a bad thing. Hate speech is a symptom of hate. Adtech is not making people hate each other. Hate speech is widely decried and has tons of visibility and public interest.
> Adtech relies on misdirection.
Again the author implictly is valuing brand presence over customers finding what they want.
> Compared to advertising, adtech is ugly.
Not ugly == expensive. Is that added cost necessary in helping customers find the right products and services? If not, it's superfluous.
> Adtech has caused the largest boycott in human history.
Which shows that the system can be worked around by users when it is too onerous.