A trick I think they're missing though is that I'm a lot more likely to pay for things a better version of myself should want, even more so if I've essentially asked my advertisers to nag me about it. The potential conversion rates are so much higher that I think any network which gets this right is set to blow the competition out of the water.

The basic advertising infrastructure has been A/B tested to death. And one of the biggest takeaways that is that what people think that they respond to is not what they actually will respond to. One of the next biggest is that people who actually have responded are often completely unaware of what it is that they are responding to.

The underlying reason is simple. A/B testing is very good at teasing out what we respond to before we consciously notice that we are responding. But since that happens before we are conscious of it, we lack awareness of what caused that.

But the simple fact remains. If you think that advertising would work better if they just did things the way that you think that they should, you are almost certainly wrong.

Really though, it's a wasted opportunity. I have childhood ambitions that I'd follow up almost any realistic lead to achieve. I refuse to believe that out of six billion people, not one has created a product that would help me. But nobody in the ad space is even asking for my input.

In similar vein, why not just advertise based on the content the person is currently consuming? Put fishing ads into an article about fishing, the same way people put gun ads into gun magazines.

Given how abysmal targetted advertising is I don't see this being much worse.

Why not advertise based on what they consumed last week too? And once you start down that path it's like the Netflix recommendation problem. Also, at scale one Hope's they refine the algorithms based on actual CTR feedback.

from my personal experience because it takes a way too static view of my consumption habits. Echoing some other replies here I find these personal recommender systems to be completely awful.

They constantly recommend me stuff I've already bought or have no interest in any more, and Netflix constantly overfits what I like, vastly underestimating genres I haven't seen yet while recommending me awful shows presumably just because they fall into some sort of similar buckets to higher quality shows I've watched.

Case in point, the NYT already got rid of behavioural targetting in Europe last year and actually saw ad-revenue go up. (https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/)

Maybe you're thinking of how it is now, but when Netflix had its sophisticated Cinematch, its recommendations were much, much better.

This is known as the Amazon vacuum problem. Try buying a vacuum and your suggestions will be about vacuums forever!

* You have concrete intent

* At a 5% return rate (pretty low), that's 5% you're going to buy the alternative

I'm not sure I buy it.

As for why:

1. I don't have much data except myself but I can't remember buying from those ads.

I can remember smiling at them a lot though.

2. That wouldn't explain why I get ads for the exact same product I bought.

Here's another argument I remember from marketing at engineering school:

Some marketing is justified even after the customer has bought -especially with expensive items - to make them feel like they did the right thing (which in turn should make them less likely to return it.)