The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the idea held at one point that perhaps consumers would be so turned off by ads that they'd defect to a different solution. There might be SOME people who don't use Google or Facebook for these reasons, but most people simply deal with poor user experience, security, and frustration because they want to see things listed with reviews on a map, or know what their friends are doing on the weekend.

> "...serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data..."

well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.

in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.

You gave examples of what I assume you consider "bad" ads. What would be examples of "good" ads in your opinion? I mean, examples matching the definition you gave:

Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.

another poster gave a good example--offering related merchandise on a interest-based website/forum.

a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.

i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.

To be fair, the example you gave require facial recognition wouldn't it?

You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.

well, face recognition is more specific than you'd need in this case.

if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).

but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.

i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).