I know lots of advertisers think they can't live without it --- because promoters have told them so.
As a thought experiment, let's go back to the time when the internet existed, adds existed, but targeted adds were in their infancy. Now let's imagine they were launched as some sort of op-in Google BETA this in early 0s fashion.
Assuming, for a moment that the targeting quality was on part — would that have been a success? Ie. would the user adoption have been significantly higher Apple's Tracking Transparancy Policy? (Considering that consent was involved before distrust accumulated in the following decades as result of forcefully surveiling, fingerprinting, third-party cookiea, facebook shenanigans, appstore malware, supercookies, etc.)
That would imply, that (globally) we spent significantly [EDIT: remove -less-, insert:] more on advertising before the advent of personalized targeting.
Back then, before smartphones, before carrying a device in your pocket that can track your every move, it wouldn't have seemed nearly as creepy.
It's actually kind of amusing to me that Apple is the one acting like it's protecting people's data. Without Apple's invention of the iPhone, which doesn't have to be built to collect as much data about its use as it does, there wouldn't be nearly as much data for these apps to collect!
Got confused while writing by the observation that ad expenditure is rising year after year. So clearly, the "savings" allegedly attributed to personalized targeting have not translated to advertisers.
Why would a reduction in advertising costs equate to lower consumer pricing — if there's a better margin to be had instead?
No, it's because they want to make as much money as possible.
If promoters told them to turn off all ads, they wouldn't. They don't care about promoters. They care about money.
The promoters of personalized advertising care about money too.
The auction systems they promote can be easily manipulated to maximize profits. And since these systems are "black boxes", advertisers themselves really have no way to know if they are being manipulated or not. The only insight they have is what the promoters tell them.
Advertising is a type of "content", and people like content-, but how one can say it's better than the content recommended by people not paid to promote it?
One, the more people are used to get their content via ads (instead of share by friends), the least they'll be incentivize to share good content.
Two, platforms that are paid by advertisers are certainly incentivize to have the best content in ads vs non ads. Why feature a video in your feed but they can be paid to push the same content from an advertiser?
There are so many reasons why "some ads are great" says nothing about ads being a good thing.
Products with no fancy marketing, frequently coming from smaller local companies, bring much better price/quality ratio.
The sponsoring of brainwashing is worse than the value loss.