This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody invol

This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody involved gets anything out of stopping this happening. Incoming extreme cynicism. First off, the marketers are still mostly using demographic segments - often a marketer will encounter a machine-learning model, and their first question is "who are these people" and when you can't explain how the model works, they revert to using demographic segments because they trust them more. This means they often do analysis demographically, and over target people in particular narrow age and gender demographics because they did better last month by chance. Second, management want to keep their budgets large so their resumes look good. Their desire is to increase the amount of people they can target, while simultaneously appearing to work on interesting tech. Since social and video have recently been en vogue, spend increases on these platforms, while projects focus less on increasing spend efficiency and more on taking credit for sales by tracking customers through the pipeline. This creates a weird scenario where everyone says they're using sophisticated machine learning models, but the contractors and consultants involved are glorified powerpoint factories. Third, the big silos, google and Facebook, probably have some incredibly sophisticated models of consumer behaviour that are incredibly efficient - but why would they want to give their advertising customers something that would reduce spend?