5 ms·

EU is a huge fan of shooting itself in the foot with useless regulations, unable to think 1-2 steps ahead. Waiting for someone to tell you why "the destruction

• Pannoniae 3y ago
  Well, it would be a net positive for society if the advertising industry disappeared, so at least this move is not short-sighted at all.
  • ponderings 3y ago
    We wouldn't know which products to buy! We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket, hungry but not knowing what to buy. We would wait for that old lady then follow her around talking amongst our own (on our phone ofc), what is she doing? What would she be up to with that? Chat GPT would have to baby us though the apple pie from scratch as the only one who remembers all those marvels of SEO recipe websites from back in the days.
• EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  It's not "online advertising", it's just behavioral. There's nothing preventing corporations from advertising the old-fashioned way, like they did on TV, radio, newspapers, etc. Online != behavioral
  • seydor 3y ago
    all advertising was (and is) always behavioral
    • EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      Not to the extent where advertisers had this level of fine-grained information about their target though, which is the whole point of contention.
      • seydor 3y ago
        they always did, to the extent that was allowed by the tech of the time
        • EMIRELADERO 3y ago
          And the tech changed and suddenly there was the privacy issue. That's... the whole point. Quantitative changes enabled by technology can present qualitative problems.
        • nobody9999 3y ago
          >they always did, to the extent that was allowed by the tech of the time As someone who spent five years doing advertising market research, and whose parents each spent 30+ years doing the same prior to ubiquitous internet use, I call bullshit on that statement. While there certainly were efforts (with millions spent collecting data) to identify market segments and emotional triggers to better target market products/services (cf. BSB GlobalScan as an example), the idea that it was the right of ad sellers to monitor everyone's activities as their right in order to "target" advertising was never an option, nor was there ever any push to do so. Convincing folks to participate in telephone/mall intercept/door-to-door surveys was used to identify consumer preferences and advertising efficacy. No one ever asked (or did so without asking) to go through a consumer's mail, personal communications or effects as a method to determine how to target ads. Since all those things are pretty much de rigueur these days, I'd say that's not a just difference of degree, but a completely different mechanism for gathering information about consumers. And just because it wasn't possible to snoop through (without a potential breaking/entering and/or burglary charge) the private documents and communications of consumers, doesn't mean those folks would have done so if they could. So yes, there's a big difference between the market research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) done in the past and the blatant spying/snooping on people's private documents and communications we see now. You're making an assertion which doesn't match the facts. Feel free to disagree, but I was there, and that business paid for my housing, food, clothes and everything else for more than twenty-five years -- both as the child of marketers and as a marketer myself. I'd also point out that the Advertising Market Research industry was a very small group of people (perhaps a thousand employed by ad agencies/large corporations and a few thousand more employed by market research supply houses and interviewing/focus group companies.) and, as such, if there was a market for breaking into people's houses and rifling through their papers/mail, wiretapping their phones, etc., I'd know about it.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• seydor 3y ago
  you didnt have to wait long
  • laserdancepony 3y ago
    That's what you get for making the world a worse place.
• master-lincoln 3y ago
  Isn't the destruction of advertising (not just online) a good thing? It's skewing markets by creating demands that were not there before, but only for the big players who can afford to be in peoples faces everywhere. Advertising is often misinforming (or not informing) people about the products/services. It promotes a throwaway society where resources are wasted.
  • someplaceguy 3y ago
    Exactly... As a general rule, all other things being equal, the more informed the participants in a market are, the better the efficiency of the market. Advertising negatively affects markets because it leads people to make decisions based on things that are not necessarily in their interests, i.e. it leads people to make more uninformed (or misinformed) decisions. In effect, it's basically exploiting a market externality: vulnerabilities in human psychology. I mean, this is not always true. Sometimes, you might become aware of a great product or service due to advertising. But I am entirely convinced that, in general, the negative effects hugely, hugely outweigh the occasional benefit, just by observing how people usually make their buying decisions in their day-to-day lives (including me, I'm not immune to that!).
  • seydor 3y ago
    It s surreal to read this comment in a SV VC supported forum Like anti smoking posters in a phillip morris factory
    • piaste 3y ago
      That's a brilliant analogy in a way you probably didn't intend.