Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Having thought about it a bit recently, smart-TV advertising and tracking seems like it may become more invasive in some ways than smartphone-based tracking. Smartphone ads at least give the perception of being personal.

Watching TV is a social activity - gathering at a friend's place to watch a new episode, or relaxing with family.

The future implied by these developments is that TV-based tracking will take the home audience into account, and the screen becomes -- in some sense at least -- a camera as well as a display.

Instead of being shown subtly inadequacy-leveraging ads on your own device, now they're going to be interwoven into you and your family's home in such a way as to influence thoughts and opinions.

Gradually adtech will - as it has already - erode the ability to have peaceful, genuine social human interaction while enjoying an artist's intended work uninterrupted.

I'd like to think that alternatives to advertising finance are on the horizon, because the ad business seems to further income inequality. Adtech employees deny and avoid their guilt by enjoying the profits they make, while their audience (who are increasingly also their acquaintances, as peer-based referrals and influence marketing heat up) are pressed to spend and consume, often unnecessarily.

I'd wager the trend towards ads and quantified influence is going to continue until it necessitates radical change.

NB: In reality the capability likely already exists to target ads based on who you're currently with, so this is really just an opportunity for the advertising industry to socialize and normalize these practices.

I honestly expect adtech to bust at some point.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of limits on how successful any ad campaign can be. How much budget your target has, how elastic it is, how much demand is inherent to the product type.

Even with perfect 24/7 targeted advertising, Toyota's maximum possible upside is selling me one Camry every two years. Once they reach that point, any further marketing spend is wasted.

There's also the problem of advertising being imperfect. We'll always have faulty data, and importantly an trustless adversarial relationship with the consumer, which will limit the ability to improve ad effectiveness. (Imagine the opportunity to say in one central place "I have bought a widget, everyone I researched with can discontinue the widget post-visit campaign as there's no further chance of victory"-- advertisers wouldn't go for it and consumers wouldn't believe it). I also suspect tighter and tighter targeting increases the risk of catastrophic ad failure-- where it undermines the brand's reputation or creates public backlash. The Uncanny Valley can be one hostile place for brands.

Do expensive, high-tech ads outperform cheap spray-and-pray techniques like TV spots and dumb banners? Probably. But I suspect the price-performance curve is approaching an asymptote pretty quickly. Billions are spent to chase increasingly small gains in actual sales over older, less creepy techniques. Someone's going to do the numbers and start asking questions.

The real advantage of "smart" advertising isn't in better business performance, but of better legibility of the advertisement's performance. The cheap spray-and-pray techniques might work, but you don't know how well they work, so you make a guess and bid on it based off the low end of the range.

With perfect information about how well an advertising campaign works, you can convince the rest of the org to spend up to 100% of the profit margin of a sale on enough marginal advertising to drive one additional sale.

In other words, the end state is measuring ad performance well enough that spending on ad buys wind up cannibalizing all the corporate surplus generated from them.

> Even with perfect 24/7 targeted advertising, Toyota's maximum possible upside is selling me one Camry every two years. Once they reach that point, any further marketing spend is wasted.

Not necessarily. Growing their brand and making it more trustworthy has intangible benefits, but they do exist. The idea is to make you feel better about their company.

Orwell's telescreen is here for years but has a different, more pleasant packing and features because the world we're living takes the best from both "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World" mixing it together.

> Smartphone ads at least give the perception of being personal.

Ads maybe but phones are personal as much as your contacts list and metadata leaks.

> I'd like to think that alternatives to advertising finance are on the horizon,

It will never happened because alternatives wont scale.

Didn't Facebook just unveil their TV offering, complete with a camera "for video chat"?

You know that TV has always included ads, right? And the purpose of an ad is to influence thought and opinions?

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