Meta-take on it: Maybe you as the consumer aren't their target. Maybe it's the businesses that they've successfully "tricked" into thinking that advertising wor

Meta-take on it: Maybe you as the consumer aren't their target. Maybe it's the businesses that they've successfully "tricked" into thinking that advertising works. For that to work, they need lots of "metrics", "knobs and dials", graphs, "conversion funnels" and a myriad of other doo-dads that can be used to give the impression that they're doing something useful. Hence the focus on tracking, I'd argue.