I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash.

That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard.

And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.

"They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at."

I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase.

A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.

Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.

Internet advertising sounds horrible. I marvel that so many people still put up with it.

In my experience, it's because internet advertising is indeed globally horrible, but advertising on internet is often not about global effects.

To give you a perspective, efficient "performance" (the kind which wants you to buy now) advertising is a click ratio of about half a percent on ads, which vastly outperforms the basic performance one, usually having a ratio of about a tenth of a percent. Of those fractions of a percent, a fraction of a percent will actually buy...

That still means ads missed the target 995 times out of 1000, so are still globally horrible.

Nevertheless, since ads on the internet are so cheap (prices are often negotiated by 1000 ads, to make it a bit more tangible, and we're talking like 5$ per 1000 ads here), it's still sometimes worth it.

So yeah, the global experience is crap, but that's often not the point anyway.

We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.

Paranoid fantasies about 42% of the population being lured into smoking and millions of lives lost to easily preventable disease.

Other factors (e.g. Do your friends smoke?) play a much larger role than advertising.

It helps that cigarette smoking is physically addicting.

Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders from 1957 is well worth a look about how advertising was seen as far back as the 1950s.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3730.The_Hidden_Persuade...

> I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying.

Or worse, for big-ticket items that you'd only buy infrequently. HEY THIS GUY BOUGHT A DRONE LETS SEND HIM DRONE ADS! WAIT NO NOW HE BOUGHT A CAR HE'S A CAR BUYER SEND CAR ADS. No, you silly equation, I just bought a car, that means I'm NOT in the market for a car.

This strategy may actually work for drones. I know very few people who own a drone and don't also own five drones.

Can confirm, it works for cameras too. This brought to you by the menagerie of Panasonics now littering my office...

or who own a drone and haven't crashed at least one drone

On some ads (Google?) you can click an X button to select a reason for not wanting to see that ad anymore. If I recall correctly one of the options is that you've already purchased that item. It actually worked in my case, but guess what - the advertiser now has even more info on you!

Not only Google slurps all your personal information to better target ads it shows you, you have to do extra work on top of that to keep them relevant. That's rich.

The problem is that their models are so broken, they require an insatiable amount of invasive training data to try to correct for their erroneous conclusions. Their failures drive even more affronts to privacy. The cycle continues.

Then they sell us household gadgets to sink their hooks deeper into our lives. Microphones listening to conversations won't be enough; soon we'll herald the coming of new "smart" appliances like the Google Toilet, which plays your favorite music, recommends better posture, sprays you off when done and stealthily analyzes your stool samples for markers to see if the Captain Crunch ads they bombarded you with over the last week led to a conversion.

It doesn't work, but failure is clearly no impediment to progress.

Any chance it’s actually all a house of cards and direct to consumer advertising doesn’t actually doesn’t do much to begin with?

"Half of all money spent on advertising is wasted - the problem is we don't know which half."

Cut ad spending in two (random choice) and put that money into product development, or just cut prices. Win win.

Genius! We should also throw a randomly selected 50% of job applicants' resumes in the bin. After all, we don't want to hire anyone who's unlucky!

Say what you will but I haven't seen a diaper or tampon ad in years so I'm pretty happy with the improvement over the untargeted advertising of the past. Grammarly is at least within the realm of things that have some possible use to me.

It seems the ML's cost-reward function maximises profit for the platform.

There was a great article posted here a few months about the internal market maker that Facebook uses to decide which ads to display. Long story short unless a particular platform is the only way to deliver ads to some group of people, the platform needs to keep its customers (the ad purchasers) happy with what they've bought.

Those ads simply pay more and / or have more inventory to burn.