Maybe I am too negative about advertising, but it seems like its major strategy is to annoy me. Like that advertisement I won’t mention that I have recently seen (the first five seconds of) perhaps several hundred times, because YouTube plays it at the beginning of almost every video I see.
I feel quite helpless, because even if as a policy I would never buy a product I associate with such annoying campaign, it doesn’t matter at a larger scale. If only 1% of targets would buy the product, it may still be profitable to annoy the remaining 99%. My suffering is an acceptable negative externality for people who cooperate on making sure I hear about the product several times a day.
Yeah, one could argue that my suffering is not an externality; it is how I pay for having access to YouTube. Anyway, the explanations how “the advertising provides me useful information about a product” feel completely alien to me. Telling me the name of the product several hundred times, whenever I want to listen to a song, I don’t call that “useful information”. Yes, I know already, it’s a fucking spellchecker, you already told me. (Or should it be “more than a spellchecker”? Because in ads, every X is “more than X” in an unspecified way.)
I would probably be quite happy if some artificial intelligence would provide me relevant information about the products I might actually want. Well, not at the beginning of every song, of course. But the current state of advertising feels more like spamming everyone with random stuff. Despite all the information that Google et al. collect about me, the products they are trying to sell me are very generic. After having read all my e-mails, the only information they seem to actually use is my sex and age group.
So… my guess is that the world without “targeted advertising” would be almost exactly the same as the world we have now; except you wouldn’t suddenly get dozens of ads for a product you have already bought (because apparently the strongest evidence for “being the kind of person who buys X” is having bought X recently).
because apparently the strongest evidence for “being the kind of person who buys X” is having bought X recently
In general, that you’ve bought something is evidence that you’re the kind of person who buys that thing. Furthermore, if you’ve bought certain items recently, you are far more likely to buy a similar product (for example, you regret the purchase and want to replace it) than someone who hasn’t.
Perhaps those 99% could somehow come together to pay consumers of the product to stop buying it, in order to make their suffering matter to that advertiser?
You could pay youtube to buy out the ads. Have you considered doing so?
When youtube launched their subscription service, they now have two customers and thus divided loyalties. They adjusted their policies to be more annoying, to put more pressure on the user to subscribe. So this is not quite the pure advertising example.
Maybe I am too negative about advertising, but it seems like its major strategy is to annoy me. Like that advertisement I won’t mention that I have recently seen (the first five seconds of) perhaps several hundred times, because YouTube plays it at the beginning of almost every video I see.
FYI, adblockers (like ublock origin) work fine to prevent all of youtube’s ads, including the video ones.
Maybe I am too negative about advertising, but it seems like its major strategy is to annoy me. Like that advertisement I won’t mention that I have recently seen (the first five seconds of) perhaps several hundred times, because YouTube plays it at the beginning of almost every video I see.
I feel quite helpless, because even if as a policy I would never buy a product I associate with such annoying campaign, it doesn’t matter at a larger scale. If only 1% of targets would buy the product, it may still be profitable to annoy the remaining 99%. My suffering is an acceptable negative externality for people who cooperate on making sure I hear about the product several times a day.
Yeah, one could argue that my suffering is not an externality; it is how I pay for having access to YouTube. Anyway, the explanations how “the advertising provides me useful information about a product” feel completely alien to me. Telling me the name of the product several hundred times, whenever I want to listen to a song, I don’t call that “useful information”. Yes, I know already, it’s a fucking spellchecker, you already told me. (Or should it be “more than a spellchecker”? Because in ads, every X is “more than X” in an unspecified way.)
I would probably be quite happy if some artificial intelligence would provide me relevant information about the products I might actually want. Well, not at the beginning of every song, of course. But the current state of advertising feels more like spamming everyone with random stuff. Despite all the information that Google et al. collect about me, the products they are trying to sell me are very generic. After having read all my e-mails, the only information they seem to actually use is my sex and age group.
So… my guess is that the world without “targeted advertising” would be almost exactly the same as the world we have now; except you wouldn’t suddenly get dozens of ads for a product you have already bought (because apparently the strongest evidence for “being the kind of person who buys X” is having bought X recently).
In general, that you’ve bought something is evidence that you’re the kind of person who buys that thing. Furthermore, if you’ve bought certain items recently, you are far more likely to buy a similar product (for example, you regret the purchase and want to replace it) than someone who hasn’t.
Perhaps those 99% could somehow come together to pay consumers of the product to stop buying it, in order to make their suffering matter to that advertiser?
You could pay youtube to buy out the ads. Have you considered doing so?
When youtube launched their subscription service, they now have two customers and thus divided loyalties. They adjusted their policies to be more annoying, to put more pressure on the user to subscribe. So this is not quite the pure advertising example.
FYI, adblockers (like ublock origin) work fine to prevent all of youtube’s ads, including the video ones.
Yes, but this also involves using a service without paying for it (one framing of this is stealing)
This is a minor quibble, but Google doesn’t use emails to target ads anymore: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/