Advertising Broke the World

Having worked in adtech for 6 years I learned through many-many conversations with friends and family that 1) they don't care to understand how it all works and 2) they don't believe it influences them.

Try to walk people through the Senate report on the 2016 election interference or The United States vs The Internet Research Agency. Most will dismiss it as nonsense.

This problem is like tobacco and sugar. It will only get better through regulation. The masses have no desire to fix it.

My summary: Programmatic ad systems keep delivering ads from squeaky clean brands onto disinformation websites and other unsavory places. The brands don't like this. The programmatic systems try to counter the disinfo sites but have had little success. So they just block certain words (e.g. “Russia,” “Ukraine”). But that ends up catching legitimate news organizations who then lose out of potential ad revenue.

Does this imply humans are programmable to some extent?

It's remarkable that in 2017 advertisers strong-armed Google into the Adpocalypse on YouTube, fearing that their brand would be associated with some non-specific bad vibes - for example, a Geico ad in the middle of an educational video about the rise of Hitler was considered a big no-no.

...Meanwhile they continued serving ads on Russia Today's propaganda websites for another half-decade, directly funding the Russian government's disinformation campaign.

I just don’t get it. Who the hell is buying all this advertised crap? Everybody knows that money spent on advertisement is money not spent on R&D and improving the product, right?

It makes no sense. How is so much of our economy based on shuffling around focus wasting garbage? Some of the biggest companies in the world produce nothing but distractions. We’ve got this absurdly productive system, the greatest well of human ability in history to draw from, and we’re squandering it on convoluted ad network games.

I think this is our generation’s “let’s put lead and asbestos in everything.”