I worked in mind control before quitting. The company calculated that most advertising firms lost money relative to just randomly sending reminder sms’s to people about your product.
That said, there were able to do some absolutely heinous stuff based on the data that were harvested. Like determine if people were probably buying plane tickets for family events and charging them more (dunno if that ever shipped but was demonstrated in theoretical sims) .
Btw, how is programmatic advertising still legal? Nobody can take responsibility since nobody knows where what comes from and it’s a huge problem in malvertising and misinformation.
At least the company providing the platform should have acoountability over the bidders.
Remember the guy who bought a toilet seat and Amazon thought he’s starting a collection?
Statistically speaking, the only thing advertisers are good at selling is their own services to businesses. Advertising is a miserably bad investment that mostly just eats up funds, even as it’s forced to exist by businesses needing to be seen and known about. Like nobody alive sees an ad and thinks “ah, I must own [thing] now!” they just maybe notice that [thing] exists and maybe at some point remember that it exists but are more likely to just run across it when doing a search for [general type of thing] later anyways. But without engaging in it, businesses suffocate because they never build up a critical mass of being known about.
It’s all such a fucking stupid and pointless grift that has no reason at all to exist and it doesn’t even do the one thing it’s claiming to do well at all.
but are more likely to just run across it when doing a search for [general type of thing] later anyways
This is not organic. It’s called re-marketing. You are running across that stuff later because the ad agencies keep a profile on you and know you came into contact with this ad earlier but did not convert into a sale. They know that re-marketing to you at another more appropriate time can convert into a sale.
And then you have the insidious social media influencer shit, especially on Instagram and TikTok, where people posing as everyday randos start gushing about how great X product is… A week later, my partner is demanding whatever the latest Ninja kitchen gadget is, while the last four sit on the counter in varying states of disuse. Or worse, those emery cloth abrasive “hair removers” that are just white label AliExpress trash that scratch the ever-loving shit out of your skin and sometimes leave bits of grit in stuck in your skin and/or pores. It’s a little horrifying to watch “consumer demand” get generated in real-time against an otherwise rational person.
Maybe I’m just hyper-aware of it because of my own history with piss-poor impulse control and some hard-learned lessons.
