It's taken as a given that more targetability is always better for ads but lately, I've come to believe that lack of targeting ability can, in and of itself, be

It's taken as a given that more targetability is always better for ads but lately, I've come to believe that lack of targeting ability can, in and of itself, be an asset. The more coarse the targeting, the more humans are able to reason about ad placement. If I see an tv ad on a program, I know that all the people in my region watching the same program are also guaranteed to see the ad. Whereas if I get an ad on Facebook, I have no idea who else might have seen the same ad. I've been mulling this over because Podcasts, by some weird quirk of technological path dependence, got locked early on into a state of extreme ad unsophistication. Despite, or maybe because of this, podcasts have some of the highest ad rates in the business. Take Mailchimp's sponsorship of Serial for example, that sponsorship itself became somewhat of a mild media sensation surrounding the discussion of the story. But that could only happen because of the impossibility of ad targeting in podcasts. Because of that, you knew everyone else listening to serial was hearing the exact same ad as you.