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Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate, advertising is a social good, and better advertising is even more of a social good.

How many times have you heard someone complain, "I just bought a desk lamp, and now I'm getting loads of ads for desk lamps. Don't they know I don't want another desk lamp?" And surveys back it up -- people would largely rather the ads they see reflect the things they're interested in. Because a well-targeted ad is good for the viewer. Sometimes they want the thing, and they buy it, and their life is improved.

If I'm statistically more likely to buy a particular item because of some demographic I belong to, and you have my demographic information, by all means use it to decide which ads to show me.

Maybe you having that information is a breach of my privacy, but if you do have it you should at least use it for something that'll benefit me.

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This shouldn't even be a devil's advocate point of view. Targeted advertisements have been just about the greatest value-add in the world of business in maybe the last twenty years.

Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste. European baby formula manufacturers advertising to middle aged single men in Wyoming shouldn't happen, and it's because targeted advertising that we prevent that waste. We are all better off for it.

Can't tell if sarcastic.... squints

How about this: everyone already knows what they need and where to get it.

That really reduces the infernal waste of advertising completely.

>> everyone already knows what they need and where to get it.

You're overestimating people ability to know what they want, and moreso where to get it.

If they didn’t know they wanted it before an advertisement played on their psychology to make them feel they needed it, then they didn’t really want it.

And if they did know they wanted before the advertisement, then they’d go look for it at a store, online or otherwise, or in a catalogue, or so on.

No one really needs anything except oxygen, food and water.

Everything else is a want.

Sometimes people invent things that others want, but that others don't know about yet. That's what advertising is for.

Why can't they target the ad to content instead of to people?

Wouldn't it be better for the planet if people didn't want stuff they didn't even know about?

That didn’t happen a ton before the Internet anyway, because even if you can’t profile individuals you can profile a readership accurately enough not to make a mistake that bad very frequently. That just requires having a decent guess of who’s reading something and where it’s distributed, not tracking every individual reader. Ditto billboards and such. Don’t advertise your European product on a highway sign in Wyoming and you solve the geography problem. Post your for-sale ad for a tractor in the ag paper you see at your local feed shop. Doesn’t take tracking anyone to do that.

Targeted advertisements on highway billboards didn't exist in 1990 and they don't exist today.

However, on the internet, there is no controlling who sees or clicks on your advert without targeting controls, hence why said targeting controls are a godsend and should be protected.

Right, individual targeting before the Internet was basically limited to mail. But a billboard is still targeted to a population! There are different ads on billboard in Times Square versus a rural stretch of Nevada interstate for a reason.

You can control which sites you’re paying to run your ad on the Internet, just like anywhere else. The idea that internet advertising must be wholly indiscriminate without spying on and targeting individuals is absurd.

> Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste.

Following your argument, the world 30 years ago (when we didn't have targeted ads) would have been a terrible place. Perhaps you should explain why it wasn't.

To me it only means that advertising in itself is not really advantageous, except if everybody else is doing it. It's like a prisoners' dilemma for companies and we are all paying the price in the form of more expensive products, but also in the form of more consumerism.

Advertising was targeted then. TV ads were bought by geography, channel and timeslot. Newspaper ads targeted people who read newspapers, radio ads targeted people by channel and time of day, billboards by geography etc etc.

All of those things made the world a better place, as did the targetability of common-sense regulations around advertising to children during their regularly scheduled TV-watching timeslots.

I'm aware of that, but we're talking about personalized ads based on internet tracking. I think most would agree that there is a huge difference with the type of advertising you are talking about. In fact, I think many people here including me would think that the advertising model of 30 years ago was okay/acceptable compared to what it is now.

Regarding children needing protection against any kind of ads, that's a good point, but dropping targeted ads does not mean we would need to drop targetability of regulations as you put it.

Unfortunately, targeted ads have been around far longer than the internet. The direct mail industry was booming for decades. That said, it's ENTIRELY possible to target ads based on intent or interest without tracking individual users.

If a European baby formula company wants to sell more product they could buy ads that show up when someone searches for baby formula {intent} or run ads on childbirth YouTube channels {interest}.

If a middle aged man from Wyoming sees those ads, he would have been mis-targeted regardless.

>and their life is improved

Is it really though? How many times is it more like, see the thing they don't really want or need, are swayed by an advertisement targetted based on a profile created through data harvested through their phone, their credit card, their social media, their email, etc., they buy the thing, experience a temporary endorphin rush from having the new thing that makes them feel good for a while, get bored of the thing and move on to the next thing provided by targetted advertisements?

Even with targeted ads how often is it that someone actually (1) wants the thing and (2) buying the thing is net good for them and for society?

I'm sympathetic to the argument that ads could reduce information asymmetry, make the market more efficient, and thus count as a social good. The problem is that advertisers' incentives aren't the same as society or the consumer's.

Look at it this way: Google exists. If you know you want something, it's not hard to find online. Ergo, if you often find yourself buying something because you saw it in an ad, what does that say about your rationality as a consumer?

In practice, corporations buy ads to manufacture demand because their products are neither things consumers or society actually wants, nor things consumers rationally choose to seek out.

Spending money is a social good -- it's you giving value to other people.

For an outsider it certainly isn't.

That assumes people spend it rationally, and aren't just hooked on some subtle addiction train.

Broken window fallacy.

And we can have it both ways. If consumers really wanted targeted ads, we could build a website for that: users enter their personal information and the website responds with personalized ads. Like Google-search but with only sponsored results.

> advertising is a social good

I’d say it’s a social negative because it makes people unhappy. E.g. https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy

Agreed. Call it a corporate profit good and that's fair. Social good? Fuck those *s promoting such propaganda. Mark their aliases in your blackbook and forever look at them as absolute demons. Doing their thang.

The quality of products on the market will improve beyond a margin if people buy after research and thorough reviews rather than being told something is good. Then companies might have to compete beyond having the flashiest ads.

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