this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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It’s worth noting that the advertising industry never has had a concept of an untargetted advert. They have always had some marker to target their distribution; be that geographical placement of a billboard, the typical social status of a newspaper’s readership, or the target audience for a tv programme they run ads in. Truly untargetted ads would be effectively useless to an advertiser; nobody in Kolkatta is buying the new American Swiss Cheese from Danone; and nobody in Middle England is buying Japanese tentacle sex toys.
Distribution channel (i.e. a site’s core purpose) is the last untargetted target option; sell sex stuff on porn sites, games stuff on games sites etc. However, when your platform is for everyone, does everything, hosts any kind of content, you have nothing to use.
It is my opinion that the best solution for the average user is to ban cross-site tracking and scraping, but allow content and interaction based advertising within the site. If someone posts on a bunch of maternity groups, advertise them pumps etc. but someone searching that on Google should have the reasonable expectation that clicking on maternitytips.co.nz won’t mean their Facebook feed is full of pumps. I think for most people, that level of profiling is acceptable and, crucially, understandable. They can understand how the data footprint they create impacts what they see. Which is far less intrusive.
That said, Facebook can burn, I left it nearly ten years ago and wouldn’t dream of returning.
Traditional advertising has worked perfectly fine for centuries. In the last 10 years technology has advanced to the point where dragnet surveillance is cheap, and suddenly all the advertisers are chomping at the bit to overpay for "targeted" advertising. Most ads are still only sold based on geographic region, and "demographic data" is proving to be completely useless. Your average social media user will see ads that are completely unrelated to their actual interests.
At best, maybe a "targeted" ad is worth twice as much as a normal ad, but is that worth the hundreds of billions of dollars spent developing that technology, and the loss of privacy for billions of people?
My point I suppose is that traditional advertising hasn’t operated with out a context on which to show ads. There has always been some context, some manner to target an advert at consumers to whom it might be most relevant. The idea that advertisers should see value in an untargetted ad because that’s historically what they bought is wrong, because that’s not something they ever historically bought. So my point boils down to the idea that some sort of targeting has to occur for there to be value in the advertising; and given these are adrev funded platforms, they’ll need that value to exist - however that the scope and scale of data collection is wildly disproportionate to the needs of creating audiences.
The processes by which a user can guard themselves is simply too opaque; the average user can control what they show a platform intentionally (through likes, interactions etc.) but has no concept of how to protect themselves against some cookie farm bullshit selling Facebook the contents of their last three trips to Asda.com. We have three viable options;
Why can't you use the content of the page to decide what ads to show? If there's a Reddit thread discussing games, show gaming ads in that thread and kitchen ads in the threads about cooking. If your front page on Twitter happens to have multiple people writing about traveling, show travel ads. You don't need to know anything about the users to advertise based on content.