I've always wanted to inquire the significance of advertising from the standpoint of the business, and yet its failure to please users. Advertising sucks from the standpoint of the user, and some say that if you want to scale any online business from 0 customers to N, advertising is pivotal and word of mouth won't do. Whether it comes in the flavor of give $10 to sign up a Paypal account, banner ads, search engine ads and these days also social ads (YT promotion, sleezy product reviews, IG celebrities) - it's important. So how come we have not solved the problem of user hostility in advertisement? Blendtec's "Will it blend?" series blends entertainment and advertisement. Engineers go to trade fairs and conferences voluntarily to seek out new suppliers/companies. People pay to go to Disneyland. Another genius in advertising is products/services that self advertise (Louis Vuitton). My gut feeling is that there is a deeper, more fundamental trade-off between advertisement effectiveness, and user hostility that always persists. Most of the time, we just adandon further inquiry and call it off as "It is the way it is because it damn well works".
We haven’t “solved” user hostility because the industry still relies on user data collection and tracking on a massive scale with default opt in rather than opt out. Consumers are spooked by that and the industry has (by and large) failed to convince them of the utility of targeted advertising.
It’s the original sin of online ads that nobody really wants to address. Because of that, we have a lot of rather shady players in the industry making the problem even worse.
I feel like there is a distinction between targeting ads based on the profile you've created on their site (say, Facebook) and targeting ads by tracking users all over the internet.
Almost every web property with a significant user base uses “identity resolution” to personalize ads. Without regulations forbidding organizations from doing this it’s not going to stop.
