But on the web, advertising doesn’t stop at attention theft. Most web ads are agents of surveillance networks, and also are software running on your hardware. Neither we should tolerate.
In my ideal, advertising and marketing are about really understanding what the other party needs and finding a truly mutually beneficial agreement that actually generates value through exchange (A has X but values Y more highly, B has Y but values X more highly, simply by the act of exchange, value is generated).
I was even pro-tracking at one point because the more you know about people, the better you can understand their needs so the better you can offer them something they'll value. In the abstract, I still think there's something here. But it has to be done responsibly and with a user-before-profit mindset.
By contrast, ad companies have time and again proven themselves irresponsible with this information, e.g. selling it to shady groups.
There are ethical ways to go about it. In certain contexts, what people think of as advertising is really just information. It's totally fine to inform people when they ask for it.
When people open a store app, it's because they want to see products. There's no ethical conflict when the store app does what people want it to do. What's unethical is the constant product spam when people are trying to do anything else.
Ads are only good for things with broad appeal like that.
I agree that it could be posted somewhere locally in the real world, and it may have been, but the interesting part is that I dont live in my hometown anymore, even though I travel there frequently. I live in another country, 4 hours away, so I would have never seen a real world ad. Only instagram and all the data they connected about me knew my ties to my hometown and my interest in the music hence they showed the ad.
I agree on all the stalking points and I dont like that they have all this data, but this one time it was useful, i can not deny that.
Is it? I wish online ads that make it through would target me well.
yes, I use adblockers and I opt out of data collection. But any old-school advertisement such as print, TV, billboard, and prospect ads feel more targeted / relevant to me and guide me to a sales funnel than online ads.
There’s an old perpetual chess podcast episode where he said he has never seen a single ad that was useful :-) Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.