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It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. The idea that this is now required for advertising is ju

It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such

Alupis 2y ago
> The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...
- mossTechnician 2y ago
  > Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. The opposite is worse. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
  - Alupis 2y ago
    I don't see how your cited article is "worse" in any way. They used intuition to deduce what items a customer might be interested in based on their other purchases. > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever. Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
    - mossTechnician 2y ago
      I personally don't buy into the notion that advertisement is inherently good or necessary. Especially when the "best" ads effectively manipulate emotions and remain in people's subconscious. A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        The article you linked to, regarding Target, is exactly what your corner store cashier is doing. There is literally no difference. You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests. Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market. Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.
        mossTechnician 2y ago
        > Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Ad networks that track you are necessary?
        Alupis 2y ago
        Define track please. You seem to assume they're doing something nefarious or that they couldn't observe if you walked into a store. To answer your question - yes. If you want relevant ads for items you might be interested in, then advertisers need to know what you are interested in. It's that simple. Your own cited article about Target is evidence of why this is a good thing. Your position that advertising is manipulative and unnecessary is disconnected with reality as well.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  You can use context from the site, just not from stalking the user. Showing diaper ads on a site about babies is fine. Showing ads for AWS on a tech site is fine. Showing diaper ads on a tech site because you've been spying on the user and decided that they might have a baby is a problem even if it does happen to be true.
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Why is it a problem if the user searches/shops for diapers, and then advertisers show diaper ads? The person is interested in diapers after all, and you don't just buy diapers once.
    - crtasm 2y ago
      Because it's none of their business what websites I'm looking at, especially completely unrelated websites. Remove the re-targeting and tracking then they don't need to know who's looking at the page.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        You probably use a debit or credit card for a lot of your purchases - don't you?
        endgame 2y ago
        Nope, I use cash. Besides "and yet, you participate in modern society therefore you must endorse all of its problems" is not a good take, IMHO.
        Alupis 2y ago
        > Nope, I use cash. So you admit to being an extremist then. You probably find problems with a great deal of the modern world as well. You can't buy things online with cash. Your opinion on what people do online is therefore, colored significantly and is definitely out of touch with most people's experiences.
tzs 2y ago
> It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. What works for advertising in that environment won't necessarily work in the massively different news and entertainment environment we now have.
- eesmith 2y ago
  "Small" means what? Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents. Several dozen radio networks. Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow. The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper. I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services. And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.) That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market. I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive. I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom. Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.) It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction. I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.
lovethevoid 2y ago
It was never normal or profitable to advertise without personal information online. One of the first selling points to companies making the transition digitally was because things could get so much more personalized than just seeing a basic billboard in person.

Alupis 2y ago

> The idea that this is now required for advertising is just wrong, and shouldn't be accepted as such Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. Some extremist will come along and assert that just means we shouldn't allow advertising at all...

mossTechnician 2y ago
> Then people complain about seeing diaper ads when they don't even have a baby. The opposite is worse. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- Alupis 2y ago
  I don't see how your cited article is "worse" in any way. They used intuition to deduce what items a customer might be interested in based on their other purchases. > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever. Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.
  - mossTechnician 2y ago
    I personally don't buy into the notion that advertisement is inherently good or necessary. Especially when the "best" ads effectively manipulate emotions and remain in people's subconscious. A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      The article you linked to, regarding Target, is exactly what your corner store cashier is doing. There is literally no difference. You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests. Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market. Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.
      - mossTechnician 2y ago
        > Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Ad networks that track you are necessary?
        Alupis 2y ago
        Define track please. You seem to assume they're doing something nefarious or that they couldn't observe if you walked into a store. To answer your question - yes. If you want relevant ads for items you might be interested in, then advertisers need to know what you are interested in. It's that simple. Your own cited article about Target is evidence of why this is a good thing. Your position that advertising is manipulative and unnecessary is disconnected with reality as well.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
You can use context from the site, just not from stalking the user. Showing diaper ads on a site about babies is fine. Showing ads for AWS on a tech site is fine. Showing diaper ads on a tech site because you've been spying on the user and decided that they might have a baby is a problem even if it does happen to be true.
- Alupis 2y ago
  Why is it a problem if the user searches/shops for diapers, and then advertisers show diaper ads? The person is interested in diapers after all, and you don't just buy diapers once.
  - crtasm 2y ago
    Because it's none of their business what websites I'm looking at, especially completely unrelated websites. Remove the re-targeting and tracking then they don't need to know who's looking at the page.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      You probably use a debit or credit card for a lot of your purchases - don't you?
      - endgame 2y ago
        Nope, I use cash. Besides "and yet, you participate in modern society therefore you must endorse all of its problems" is not a good take, IMHO.
        Alupis 2y ago
        > Nope, I use cash. So you admit to being an extremist then. You probably find problems with a great deal of the modern world as well. You can't buy things online with cash. Your opinion on what people do online is therefore, colored significantly and is definitely out of touch with most people's experiences.

tzs 2y ago

> It used to be completely normal, and profitable, to effectively advertise without personal information. It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. What works for advertising in that environment won't necessarily work in the massively different news and entertainment environment we now have.

eesmith 2y ago
"Small" means what? Four TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS), plus independents. Several dozen radio networks. Shortwave if you are really into world news like the BBC or Radio Moscow. The local newspaper. A big city used to have several. If you are in a small place you might also subscribe to the nearest big city paper, and/or the New York Times or other major city paper. I knew people who received the local paper via mail from the small town they came from. Every one of those is a potential news source, though for major news they mostly used wire news services. And then there's the weekly and monthly news magazines (Time, The Economist, etc.) That's far less of a bottleneck on news distribution than we have now, where a couple of advertising companies dominate the entire market. I cannot believe that a digital marketplace, which has less overhead than a physical one, requires user tracking and behavioral marketing in order to survive. I find it much easier to believe that user tracking and behavioral marketing gives the ability to out-compete more ethical context-based marketing, just like how companies which dump their waste right into the river can out-compete companies which treat their waste first.
pessimizer 2y ago
> It used to be completely normal to get all of our news and entertainment through a small number of curated channels. Before the 90s, there were one or two orders of magnitude more channels for information than there are now. There may be a bunch of brands now, but all the people who own, run, and make the final decision about what goes on them could fit in my bathroom. Seeing our new, concentrated media culture as diverse requires the intentional deception of ignoring that this claimed diversity is delivered through precariously employed independent contracting "content providers" who all have to pass through half a dozen gatekeepers who have complete control of their income and message at any time, with no oversight (except through various forms of informal government intimidation.) It's not "what works for advertising," it's what works for the tiny number of incestuous oligarchs with media publishing arms and the politicians they pay for. It's also a matchmaking problem: publications used to have subjects, and advertise things related to those subjects. Now the content is generic, fact-free jingoistic sludge that people are tricked into reading by manipulatively vague headlines, advertising random shit that happened to win a realtime auction. I absolutely promise that you could keep your fishing website afloat advertising fishing gear, but only if the market and fishing gear manufacturers were operating individually and rationally, rather than based on calculations motivated by complex ownership structures and market manipulation.

lovethevoid 2y ago

It was never normal or profitable to advertise without personal information online. One of the first selling points to companies making the transition digitally was because things could get so much more personalized than just seeing a basic billboard in person.