I wish we could ban all advertising, it all puts money over people no matter how benign it appears. It’s never going to happen but I can dream.
Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps to inform people about the goods and services that you offer that they might be interested in buying?
Is this not what a search engine is for? When I want a good or service I'm interested in buying, I can search it, do my research, and/or find a place to buy it. I only want advertising when I explicitly opt into it. Otherwise, I never want to see an ad.
Do not forget that you represent a small minority of tech literate people.
There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is.
Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles.
Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and you should always take that into consideration.
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Online, without personalization it's the other way around Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past month or so.
How would that work for site like Facebook or Instagram or other sites where there is no clear relevant content to target?
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#114Small 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 cr…
It's fairly easy to forbid, but very challenging to regulate. Yes, it would be better to do it properly, rather than ban altogether, however chances of that succeeding are not great. For the end user it's not worth the effort and resources (and that's who would end up paying for any introduced processes around this).
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades. Perhaps removing ads now wouldn't bring a dramatic change in the next months or even years; But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda. It might be a chicken and egg problem, but at least I think the…
> I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades.
That has nothing to do with your innate preference for sugars and calorie density. People liked sweet foods and dumped heaps of sugar into tea long before modern advertising existed.
> But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.
Soda is hugely popular in Asian and Europe. Out of the top 10 per-capita consumers of soda 4 are in Europe, including the Netherlands which has quite a few controls on ads[1].
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/which-countries-consu...
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past month or so.
How would that work for site like Facebook or Instagram or other sites where there is no clear relevant content to target?
Natural language processing for posts and video analysis via machine learning could work.
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#117The 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…
Online, without personalization it's the other way around Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
You can assert that, but where is the evidence? Tracking exists today and I never see ads relevant to my large American city. I see the same gross out earwax scams as everyone in the world.
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past month or so.
How would that work for site like Facebook or Instagram or other sites where there is no clear relevant content to target?
There's been a lot of work in this area over the last few years, clustering and tagging text and video. Facebook even has an open source library for it called Starspace.
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Online, without personalization it's the other way around Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
You can assert that, but where is the evidence? Tracking exists today and I never see ads relevant to my large American city. I see the same gross out earwax scams as everyone in the world.
"You can assert that, but where is the evidence?"
It's not a remotely controversial statement. If you take a minute to actually run a marketing campaign for your company you'll learn all sorts of things. Including how targeting works.
There are other options such as restricting the type and degree of targetting.
The 'big outdoor ads' thing is not related to targeted ads, it's not part of this discussion. I'm fine with banning all outdoor ads but not targetted ads. There we need regulation.
Re: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this not what a search engine is for? When I want a good or service I'm interested in buying, I can search it, do my research, and/or find a place to buy it. I only want advertising when I explicitly opt into it. Otherwise, I never want to see an ad.
Do not forget that you represent a small minority of tech literate people. There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is. Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles. Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and yo…
> Do not forget that you represent a small minority of tech literate people.
You're right haha, plus I'm more of a minimalist so I just want to have less stuff in general.