I think this covers how it's supposed to work, but the reality is far messier and worse. In particular, the hypothetical cheese grater manufacturer would probably be have to pay Google to advertise on their own brand name adword so a generic competitor doesn't steal customers that already know about their great cheese graters. Oh, and about 90% of the people who see your cheese grater ads would be people who just bought one of your cheese graters. Even worse, cheesegraterreviews.com would be paid off by your (larger) competitors to review their cheese graters better and this site has much better SEO than forums.graterenthusiasts.com so they would list higher in organic cheese grater search.

All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche, high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're targeting someone like me) in an environment where search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise. Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in. At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I like than relying on the internet.

You are right of course, it's not a perfect situation and, yes, many times may still not be able to get your cheese grater off the ground. My question remains though - if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what practical alternatives do you have to mass market your useful product?

We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.

> if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what practical alternatives do you have to mass market your useful product?

Contextual advertising.

I still don't care. My privacy shouldn't be forced to be sacrificed just because you decided to make a cheese grater that's better than every other cheese grater in existence.

>If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.

I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every single time.

This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless

You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.

In a thread that is broadly about giving users the choice in how their personal data is tracked, analyzed, and utilized for the sake of ads, how is my comment off-topic? I mean, OP posited that perhaps we're better off without companies whose goods rely on targeted/invasive advertising, you provided the perspective of someone who might really rely on that sort of advertising, and I suggested that my right to privacy should not be superseded by someone's "need" (though I think "desire" would be more apt there) to get the word out about their product.

Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.

Fair enough, it was relevant to the topic of the thread, albeit not my comment. Apologies

Societal usefulness is not defined in a vacuum - it’s fundamentally based on the principles of everyone in the society. And judging by the people who chose not to share data with Facebook, society is better off without the targeted ads.

We should advertise cheese graters to people who search “good cheese graters” instead of trying to track people across the web panopticon-style and cross reference if they are a) moving houses b) making a cheese-based dish c) friends with chefs or cooks d) planning a dinner party e) physically located in a kitchen goods store.

What the heck is the world's best cheese grater? Some products are effectively "finished" and the best there is already exists and we don't need your new business.

Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product, go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly expressed an interest in what you're selling without requiring a global corporate panopticon.