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Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

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Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#71

Post by ch4s3 »

spodek wrote: post #18

The images of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... illustrate the difference in a different space. Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it. The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wo…

I think you’re misunderstanding why people like soda and McDonald’s. You’re hardwired to love sugar, fat, and salt which soda and fast food provide in abundance. Advertising these products is about capturing dollars that might otherwise flow to competitors products.

This isn’t to say that ads can’t help drive overall consumption, but the lift isn’t huge and the demand has to already be there.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#72

Post by danaris »

avalys wrote: post #57
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to you. Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on t…

Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens” earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is that better? How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?

People don't get to make the choice themselves now. They are forced to see the advertising, whether they want to or not.

Removing the advertising would, in fact, give them back choice they currently lack.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#73

Post by jasonlotito »

antris wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

How would such a law define targeted advertising? (Serious question.)

Any advertisement that is displayed/not displayed based on personal information of the potential viewer perhaps?

And here is the rabbit hole. What is the personal information?

That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?

What is personal information?

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#74

Post by bregma »

avalys wrote: post #38
bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

The argument for massive Pigouvian taxes on advertising seems much clearer. Advertising imposes massive costs on society and the viewers. These costs aren't borne by the advertiser, so they should be captured through massive taxes and put to good use. And many brands wouldn't feel much of an impact: what matters to Coke is that it spends more than Pepsi. If their $6B on advertising only buys 1/10th as many ads as it…

What’s the cost that advertising imposes exactly?

Well, for one, I pay for my internet bandwidth. Somewhere around 80% of all my bandwidth is used up with either advertising or all the infrastructure associated with tracking everything I do in order to sell my eyeballs.

From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#75

Post by captainmuon »

Small distinction, but I wouldn't ban targeted advertising, but profiling instead.

So a site could absolutely show you ads according to the content you view or create, and companies can go to a site and ask them to show an ad to certain users. But it would be banned to pass on any kind of usage data that is not explicitly destined as public (profile page data, posts), and it would be forbidden for third parties to create profiles on you.

I think tracking is also not bad per se, I still want to be able to identify recurring visiters to my site uniquely. It's the centralized advertising brokerage and profiling that should go away.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#76

Post by michaelt »

indigochill wrote: post #24
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't we just ban advertising? Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based. Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor. Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) th…

>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based. In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run. Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value…

Seems to me just as likely we'd get a third option: Free journalism paid for by the super-rich and large corporations.

If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#77

Post by ben_w »

avalys wrote: post #57
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to you. Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on t…

Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens” earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is that better? How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?

> Is that better?

“Better” by what metric?

If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert.

> How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?

What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins.

[0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#78

Post by libertine »

I'm a suspect because I worked in digital media in a media agency some time ago, and let me tell you that this is quite a broad request.

Why? Let's start by asking: what is targeted advertising?

Is it based on interests? Behavior? Demographic? Psychographic? Contextual? Placement? Geolocation? Search queries? The list goes on.

Even if they want to narrow it down to collected data from users, this still has a lot of broad aspects to it.

What about what Kantar and GFK, and many other market research companies do, where they track people who consent to be tracked and share their opinions and behavior, to generate statistical inferences? Because that's one of the ways you target on TV for example.

So, I understand where they are coming from, but this is such a broad request that's naive.

A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS (Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has the consent of everyone involved?

Or the solution is to randomize ad placement? The amount of wastage and the play field would destroy anyone who tried to compete with companies who could afford mass media platforms with budgets in the orders of millions+.

Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?

#79

Post by op03 »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #25

I'd add nuance to this: Ban _involuntarily_ targeted advertising. I am 100% ok with Google, Facebook etc. knowing that I live in Oxfordshire, UK; that I love cycling; that I play the church organ. That's who I am. If they want to target cycling, classical music, and local ads at me based on this information, that's great. I would happily log onto these sites and click checkboxes based on this (or do it via browser se…

This is the direction we need to head in. ML/AI peeps dont wait for regulation. Push back on misguided attempts from mgmt and point them in different directions.

I have had experiences with execs running large video services for content producers/publishers who would openly say (and therefore influence underlings and the next gen) - we know there are people who are addicted to our platforms, they have nothing better to do etc so how do we get them to consume excess Ad inventory we are holding? Can you use AI to improve our identification and targeting of such groups?

My initial reaction to such kind of requests was to say thank you no and walk out. But over time I realized they just find someone else and stay happily in denial of responsibility. Its not enough to then call them out. The only thing that works is to point them in a different more constructive direction. Feel free to make wild claims about how profitable its going to be, if you are dealing with mindlessly ambitious douchebags who don't understand any other language.

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