Bad ads just aren't just on the web.

I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.

Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.

I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

haunts the industry.