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Comment by cyborgx7 | Hacker News Reader

>Is generating trillions in economic activity and allowing billions of people to be employed and connected not adding value?

By itself? No, not at all. At least not more valuable than giving the same people the same money for doing nothing.

>What would you rather have people do?

Literally anything not actively harmful.

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You seem to misunderstand how marketing works. Creating customers is how companies grow and requires advertising, so creating those channels is filling a business need. Throwing money at people doesn't change that need.

>> Literally anything not actively harmful.

"Literally" must be the most overused word in English today, but a vague description like that is completely unproductive to any discussion and doesn't even begin to get over the subjective interpretation of "harmful".

You seem to misunderstand what this thread is about. This thread is not about "marketing". It is about personalised targeted ads.

Yea I get it. Advertising is a subset of marketing, and efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting. There's a reason 2 of the biggest companies on the planet are ad networks.

>efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting

The point of this thread is that maybe it doesn't.

What's the evidence? This article? That's not the reason why, the whole EU market is down and there are just fewer but larger ad campaigns which go to the sites with the biggest reach. It's regulation causing consolidation.

The GDPR is a great piece of legislation, that significantly improves people's privacy. Your arguing about how terrible it is will not convince anybody that your industry's practices aren't evil. They will only reinforce it.

Maybe you should look me up first: https://twitter.com/search?q=manigandham%20regulation

I'm one of the few in the industry who actually spent time and money on regulation. I've met with Senators and major CMOs to make it happen. It's not that simple. GDPR has good intent but is poorly executed and has no measurable effect on privacy because those politicians fail to understand the market they're regulating. This is now playing out again in the recent copyright directives.

Marketing and advertising are drivers of the economy and there's nothing inherently wrong with either of them. All regulation also creates and solves problems, one of which is consolidation. Nothing inherently problematic in that either. Targeted advertising definitely needs fixing, but that's separate from privacy and there are ways to do both while also solving for other issues like fraud, political influence, mass surveillance, and more.

"Evil, harmful, just dies" are useless for discussion. I suggest dropping the immature rhetoric if you actually want to have a productive conversation and perhaps create the change you want to see.

>I'm one of the few in the industry who actually spent time and money on regulation. I've met with Senators and major CMOs to make it happen. It's not that simple. GDPR has good intent but is poorly executed and has no measurable effect on privacy because those politicians fail to understand the market they're regulating. This is now playing out again in the recent copyright directives.

I'm reading that you are a member of industry Lobbying to get influence on regulation of your industry. And that is somehow supposed to make me trust you more. GDPR is exactly as far reaching as it should be. The only problem with it is that people aren't following it yet to the letter, and I hope there will be some heavy fines for those breaking the law.

>Targeted advertising definitely needs fixing, but that's separate from privacy

Privacy is inherently incompatible with targeted advertising, and the industry will have to die for us to get our rights.

>"Evil, harmful, just dies" are useless for discussion. I suggest dropping the immature rhetoric if you actually want to have a productive conversation and perhaps create the change you want to see.

I'm not interested in having a "productive discussion" with you and find a compromise if you represent the targeted advertising industry. The targeted advertising industry is the political enemy. And I want it to die.

GDPR is not meant to be followed to the letter, it's legislation on principle and will continue to be ineffective and only cause further problems for the EU, while entrenching the very companies that it most wanted to protect people from. California's privacy act is a much better legal framework in case you want examples.

Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision, and advertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have. We might get some better online ad practices but it certainly won't happen by just calling it all "evil", which is especially ironic considering what evil actually exists in the world.

Anyways, by your dismissals it's clear you are only interested in irrational tirades which is unfortunately very common when discussing adtech so I'll end it here.

>GDPR is not meant to be followed to the letter, it's legislation on principle and will continue to be ineffective and only cause further problems for the EU, while entrenching the very companies that it most wanted to protect people from. California's privacy act is a much better legal framework in case you want examples.

Everytime an advertiser complains about the GDPR I become more confident in its rightousness.

>Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision

So you want to focus targeting completely on the source, not the individual audience member? Than we are in agreement.

>dvertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have

We could also just ban it. Not that I am against changing the economic system.

"Filling business needs" is also not an objectively useful thing. There are many businesses I would prefer not advertise (e.g. cigarette and gun companies) and many more industries that are nearly zero-sum (and thus advertising just moves a fixed pool of money around). I'm not sure where this idea that growth for the sake of growth is inherently good came from. In fact, we've demonstrated many ways it's harmful.

Because the human population grows, so concepts such as societies and economies follow. It's that simple. You can run a small business that remains at a steady state but you still need constant customers to remain viable, and even if every company stayed small there would be new ones started, so growth is inherent.

Marketing spend is a proportion of GDP so it'll scale along with it, and is thus not zero-sum. As for regulation, that is needed in the industry and why we have limits on certain categories.

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