Britain had exactly this issue a few years back with Cambridge Analytica and targeted facebook advertising (the biggest scandal was actually the extra campaign funding that was spent on it), it wasn't until the scandal was long over that the actual list of adverts was released and people found them horrifying, but the people who were against them had _never_ seem them at the actual time because it was so heavily targeted.
Targeting messages is another form of hiding them and dividing people up.
Thinking out loud: Maybe companies should be required to keep an archive of all advertising. They'd display it on their own website and adverts that were considered misleading or had any upheld complaints would be necessarily marked?
The the ads were for scummy "wonder-supplements", but displayed the URL of a newspaper that had nothing to do with the ad, I guess to try and get some legitimacy.
I couldn't write what was wrong with the ad in my report, only choose from some very broad categories, and both the reports were rejected with "ad is not in voilation of our guidelines".
I've stopped reporting lying Facebook ads.
And I doubt Google does this much better.
There is a non-zero chance that TV timeslots are seen by people not in the targeted group. A billboard in a school zone may have a high chance of being seen by naive young moms but the canny young moms will also see it, along with dads and grandparents picking up kids, not to mention hundreds of other people who live and work in the area.
> it doesn't make sense to make a company waste money
except it does, to keep them accountable