- What ads did you stay for ?
- What ads did you listen to, or turn the volume up for ?
- What ads did you hear and see 50% of with 50% of the pixels being on screen at the time you heard them?
- How many times did you see an ad ?
- Whats the average times that an ad is seen before you might convert in an offhand channel ( including offline credit card purchases )?
- What ads changed your scroll velocity - if only for a few 100 milliseconds ?
- What content changed your scroll velocity ?
- Where were you when spent less time on your phone ?
- Where were you when you were more susceptible to a type of ad ?
These aren't signals that you might yourself notice, but these are being collected. They are being collected on almost every website you visit, and an incredibly large data set is being collected. This training set is for you and you alone, but similar training sets can be found.
This training set is now used to determine what content to show you next so that you can stick around for another ad.
This is 'optimizing for engagement'. We are well past the stage of "It's the superbowl so lets play an Axe commercial'.
Some of this sounds fairly hyperbolic to folks who haven't spent time in the industry - but I promise you this is very commonplace non-controversial data collection in the adtech space.