If they're using their talents to figure how how to show adds exclusively to those people who actually want to see the ads, that's not such a bad thing.
Example: The advertising emails Amazon.com sends me... they usually have a pretty good idea of which artists I like, based on my history of CD purchases. So when those artists release a new album, Amazon emails me. Win-win... it saves me the effort of constantly trawling the Intarwebs to track down "new album" info, and it gets them a few sales that they probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
Same deal on Facebook... I list a lot of the bands I like in my profile, so I recently got an ad displayed in Facebook, for the new Motorhead album. Great, I didn't know Motorhead had a new album out. But I love Motorhead... now I'll buy that album and (most likely) be very happy about it.
Yeah, sure, I get that some advertising is obnoxious, over-the-top, annoying or whatever. But I think RyanMcGreal is spot-on here. Make it so I only (or at least mostly) see ads I care about, and I'm not going to complain.
I personally object to advertising that is "invasive" in the sense that it interferes with my ability to do what I'd otherwise be doing, or makes changes to my environment without my permission... so in computer terms, pop-ups, pop-unders, ads that play sound or video by default (and even worse, can't be disable), those I despise.
But as far as banner ads, emails, etc. go, I mostly don't have a problem with the stuff that's A. easy to ignore, and B. relevant.
<shrug />
What the Mormons currently do, as best as I can tell, would better be described as "spray and pray." Or "throw something at the wall and see what sticks."
If they actually did target their solicitation based on some insight about who is actually interested in Mormonism, it would be better for everybody, or almost everybody. The people - like me - who are atheist and don't give a rats ass about Mormonism, would not get bothered by them... the people who were predisposed to join up, would. How is this a bad thing, exactly?
"Targeted" in any way, shape, or form is predatory and disrupts the many for the pleasure of a few.
I don't think "targeted" means what you think it does.
Fair enough. My own empirical observation is that some ad targeting initiatives (the aforementioned Facebook example, the Amazon example) DO result in the delivery of relevant ads, which are actually beneficial to both the buyer and the seller. I won't argue that it guarantees that all ads will be relevant. But if I'm going to see a stream of X ads in a given day, I would personally prefer that the percentage of them that are for things I'd legitimately be interested in, be as high as possible.