High-quality advertising is more important in the information age, not less. I still buy magazines every month, in large part because of the advertising. Skimmi

High-quality advertising is more important in the information age, not less. I still buy magazines every month, in large part because of the advertising. Skimming through the ads gives me a quick overview of trends in the market, but it also provides a sense of which companies are serious players. A single advert might just be a pack of lies, but multiple full-page adverts every month for several years is a costly signal that the company is playing the long game. Such a large investment in advertising is only viable if you're selling a lot of product and you're confident in the quality of your product; if you're selling vast quantities of total crap, word gets out very quickly and you don't stay around for long. Targeted ads and online reviews don't provide this signalling value, precisely because they're relatively cheap and efficient from the seller's perspective. Any two-bit operator can cheaply buy a bunch of five star reviews on Amazon, then relaunch under a new brand name when the real one star reviews start flooding in. If I see a lot of targeted ads from the same company, they might be engaging in a hugely expensive media blitz or I might have been identified by their algorithm as a total sucker. Untargeted mass advertising tells me that a) the company is heavily invested in their product and b) all my peers are seeing the same adverts.