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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

The images of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... illustrate the difference in a different space.

Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it.

The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals. I imagine ones that would benefit: local businesses, vegetable and fruit farmers, manufacturers of lasting goods instead of fast fashion.

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Online, without personalization it's the other way around

Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.

Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past month or so.

Exactly. Which is what drives the biggest advertising machine anyway (Google Search). That model could be replicated for the open internet.

How would that work for site like Facebook or Instagram or other sites where there is no clear relevant content to target?

Natural language processing for posts and video analysis via machine learning could work.

There's been a lot of work in this area over the last few years, clustering and tagging text and video. Facebook even has an open source library for it called Starspace.

But the point is that Facebook is showing you ads based on your surfing behaviour outside Facebook - not the content you view on Facebook.

If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor related companies.

Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them to facebook. So they can target ads

I think the point is that FB could change to a contextual model. E.g. after seeing a post of a news article by Tractor Daily you would see an ad for a new John Deere.

Can you be more precise to what you means? That sounds like targetting.

You can assert that, but where is the evidence? Tracking exists today and I never see ads relevant to my large American city. I see the same gross out earwax scams as everyone in the world.

"You can assert that, but where is the evidence?"

It's not a remotely controversial statement. If you take a minute to actually run a marketing campaign for your company you'll learn all sorts of things. Including how targeting works.

There are other options such as restricting the type and degree of targetting.

The 'big outdoor ads' thing is not related to targeted ads, it's not part of this discussion. I'm fine with banning all outdoor ads but not targetted ads. There we need regulation.

Here is what I know. I know if I open a newspaper, I see ads for businesses, both local and national. If I go to the newspaper’s website, I see ads for one weird trick, the same ads on every site and in every city, and essentially no meaningful local content.

Yes, things on Facebook are different, but Facebook is not a publisher, it’s a parasite, so who cares?

1) Banner ads on websites are often targeted via networks, often Google.

2) Those 'stupid ads' are often targeted, and they make money, sadly.

3) You're probably not accounting for the majority of ads you see. If you literally tracked/recorded every ad, you might see a different picture.

4) Many ads are not very well targeted, yes, and that's why you see irrelevance. Well-targeted ads are generally more relevant (sometimes not obvious) and this is 100% validated by returns to advertisers. This is not a joke.

5) Facebook and Google represent most of the ad market, so, the people that 'care' are basically everyone who wants to place an ad online.

1 and 2 are not a defense. That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them.

3 is you're telling me not to believe my eyes. I'm sorry, there are some things that are so dumb you have to be very smart to trick yourself into believing them. You don't need a sophisticated statistical analysis to know what kind of advertisements you see where.

4 is circular reasoning. "Targeted ads are better than non-targeted, so if (per 1 and 2) I've already conceded that many targeted ads are garbage, I need to hypothesize (3) that the non-targeted ads are somehow worse even against the evidence of sense."

5: Google and Facebook are separate entities and need separate explanations. Facebook is a pure parasite. It does nothing for publishers except drive them traffic (which is in itself, a cost center, not a profit center). Publishers need to figure out how to convert traffic into profit. If we're talking about publishing, that requires the ads to be on their site, which means Google. But Google is screwing the publishers too because they can track and deliver eyeballs from anywhere.

It's just an obviously sick ecosystem. People have been doing advertising supported publishing since the 19th century, and it was fine until ten minutes ago, when suddenly tracking was possible. Coincidentally, ad supported publishing collapsed at the same time that tracking became possible. Is this really a coincidence? You've got to be pretty clever to convince yourself that it is…

1) I don't need to 'defend' the system. Targetting works.

1b) "That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them."

This is demonstrably false, unfortunately.

The ads power Facebook, Google, much of Entertainment. Almost everywhere you see an ad - that place would disappear without that ad.

So a 'future without ads' is essentially a future without any of those things - and you and anyone else can stop using those things right now, and thereby avoid both the ads and the service.

People chose the crappy ads, with the service, instead of the alternative: nothing.

Granted, there could be more paywalls, but there wouldn't be enough 'pay' to keep the services alive.

2) Yes, I'm 100% telling you that I don't believe your self-assessment of the kinds of ads you see overall. I think most people have no idea of the true inventory they are witnesses, rather, they remember only the tiny fragment that sticks out.

'Your evidence of sense' - is telling you that 'ads are a waste' when 'evidence of a $100B economy' and 'science' is definitely telling you that ads are effective. Even untargeted, or crudely targetted.

3) I don't think it's circular reasoning to point out that many ads are not targeted. You're missing the underlying point - that not all ads land on target, irrespective of how sophisticated the targetting in.

That inefficiency is accounted for in the system.

FYI - as part of 'item #2' not only are you going to be unaware of how many and which ads you saw, you're also going to be completely unaware of their effect on your behavior in most cases.

BMW has been advertising to you since the moment you could recognize their logo, a decade before you could even consider buying a car. That programming 'adds up' to something, no pun intended.

5) Your view of Facebook as a 'parasite' is your own, it's not objective - they have a Billion people who like using it just fine. You're also confusing the collapse of print and the complete commoditization of information, with ads.

I'm going to assume that you've never placed an ad of any kind, and have no exposure to the industry. I'd encourage trying it, even by spending $50 on FB or Google perhaps trying to garner interest in your favorite Open Source Project. You'll learn a lot in the process.

The irony of your ire ... is that better-targeted ads are generally better for everyone - both consumer and advertiser. They are the least annoying and most informative. Though we don't like the invasion of our privacy, the 'targetting' part is really good.

> This is demonstrably false, unfortunately.

You can't just wish away all of advertising before 2005. It wasn't perfect, but it was fine. Publishing has been collapsing since then and the reasons aren't confusing.

Yes, _as an advertiser_, having targeting is great. But as a mining company, dumping waste water in the river is great. Who cares? It matters what effect your actions have on the system as a whole.

Completely different tact here: I want you to think about people’s favorite ads. Many people have consciously chosen favorite ads—like Budweiser commercials or some of the Geico series or Flo from Progressive Insurance or the entire joke that the ads are better than the Super Bowl or “ MailKimp” from Serial or a million other things. People line their dorm rooms with vodka ads from magazines or Apple print ads. Many more things are ads but not consciously perceived as ads, like the Hollywood sign or Instagram influencers, or Rolex watches, or in your example the BMW logo.

What do people’s favorite ads all have in common? No one likes targeted ads. At best, people like when you do a search and get geographically relevant results. But that’s not even tracking, just IP location. Everyone loves ads but no one likes targeted ads.

I think the parties that would suffer most would be the companies that have specialized in providing and generating targeted advertising - ie. Google and Facebook, and the ad agencies which run ads on those platforms.

Regardless, I'm not sure recognizable megacorps would suffer much. A Big Mac is a known quantity, and everyone recognizes the Golden Arches, whether you're in Seattle or Shanghai. It's the local gastropub that would have a hard time promoting themselves to the tiny subset of the population that is 'vacationing foodies' without targeted advertising. At the same time, I don't see them advertising much - perhaps it's the middle of the road regional franchises that have the funds to employ ad agencies for that purpose.

Depends on whether you think Yelp is ‘targeted’ advertising.

> I think the parties that would suffer most would be the companies that have specialized in providing and generating targeted advertising

I don't think they would be hurt that much, they would still provide advertisement, just less. The small niche company is the one that will be hurt... they now will compete in every category which is going to be much more expensive than small niche categories.

If anything, it sound like remove targetting will make much more money for Google. The one paying higher CPM will increase the CPM for everyone instead of his niche.

I doubt that Coca-Cola, Gatorade, and McDonald's would he the ones on the losing side of this. Their products are already everywhere. It's hard not to see them in a city, especially Coca-Cola.

I think you’re misunderstanding why people like soda and McDonald’s. You’re hardwired to love sugar, fat, and salt which soda and fast food provide in abundance. Advertising these products is about capturing dollars that might otherwise flow to competitors products.

This isn’t to say that ads can’t help drive overall consumption, but the lift isn’t huge and the demand has to already be there.

I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades. Perhaps removing ads now wouldn't bring a dramatic change in the next months or even years; But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.

It might be a chicken and egg problem, but at least I think there are ways out of the situation.

> I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades.

That has nothing to do with your innate preference for sugars and calorie density. People liked sweet foods and dumped heaps of sugar into tea long before modern advertising existed.

> But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.

Soda is hugely popular in Asian and Europe. Out of the top 10 per-capita consumers of soda 4 are in Europe, including the Netherlands which has quite a few controls on ads[1].

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/which-countries-consu...

As you point out people putting sugar in coffee or tea might be as old as tea or coffee in the western world. People even add sugar in their fruits when they feel they're no savory enough. I think though that it makes it all the more interesting that soda drinks succeeded in a market with a ton of other traditional alternatives.

In my eyes the very fact that all the other standard sugary drinks have been displaced by commercial soda in so many countries is a reflection of the power of advertising.

Interestingly from your link, in the last few years Chile has become the #1 soda drinking country...and of course:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-to-invest-13-bln...

Aside from the health argument, I think advertisement can have deep and long lasting effects on a society. For a completely different take, De Beers decades of campaign to push diamonds on wedding rings is another example of it.

The amusing irony is that the best way to elevate awareness about soda alternatives might be advertising. So by eliminating certain types of ads, the side effect might be to encourage people to stick with what they know, which in many parts of the world is sugary soda instead of other flavored fizzy water that either has no sugar or very little sugar in comparison.

> TThe parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals.

The example you give are all global, they can pay advertising in movies, in generic website, everywhere. They won't be hurt, by removing targeted advertisment, or billboard.

The one that will be hurt are the one that most person probably want but wouldn't know without advertising. My SO is in the escape room industry, at least 80% of people that come through her door has never done one. It took a long time to take off, because there was no escape room closeby, so not only we had to tell we existed to people, but also tell them WHAT it was. You can't achieve that just by existing.

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