Why does it matter whether it is the advertiser themselves who know about me? The wrong is that I am being stalked in the first place.

Why does it matter that advertisers pay more for targeted advertising? The wrong is that it is an option for them to choose in the first place.

You'll see twice as many ads, and most will be irrelevant to your interests.

It's better to see half as many and have them be able to pique your interest.

The publisher wins, the advertiser wins, and the consumer wins.

I'll see no ads because I run several different ad blockers, as should everyone else.

In the end the consumer pays, because someone has to pay the bill for those ads.

Because you'll end up seeing more ads, as publishers will show more irrelevant ads to make up for revenue lost due to lack of targeting

"Wrong" in your opinion, not in the opinion of others.

Choice is a beautiful thing- that's why with things like GDPR you can opt out from tracking, personalized advertising and be worth less as a user to the publisher.

Ad tech needs to do a better job in making these choices easier to make and persist.

edit- as the commenter below correctly states, GDPR is "Opt-in" not "Opt-out"

No GPDR allows for opting-in into tracking. Of course most websites conveniently seem to forget that.

You're right, I don't live in the EU and forgot the distinction. But the point stands- users should get a choice, there shouldn't be a blanket ban.

Think of TV and other traditional media. The content is created to attract people which are turn sold to advertisers as a commodity. If you're looking at specific content, you are being targeted, by the content and any appropriated ads depending on who is buying at the time. All without individual tracking and targeting.

Seeing an ad for something like a keyboard on a site about cooking is wasteful in so many ways. Mostly due to the inherit waste/loss in the ad stack and market. Too many middlemen taking too many %s of the pie to add what is in essence, a small lift in performance for the advertiser. Who really has no choice but to spend more if they want to increase their goals.

The problem is that the internet became about gaming a false metric to make money. Success was measured by metrics like Impressions...

The entire market is very wasteful and exists without a proper market forces to balance the costs. Facebook, Google make up their pricing. There is no transparency in the demand, they just choose a price, take a large % of the value, (or all) and have no incentive to change course.

Most people better receive random, contextual driven ads than specific targeted ones. They interact with something similar to the content rather than to their specific browsing history. The thing that FB figured out, was they could combine content into ads and also sell ads against that content. Taking hold of the whole enchilada.

I think you're missing a few key points:

1) "Success was measured by metrics like Impressions" - advertisers need to get smarter and link advertising to bottom line results. If you can't tie ad spend to improvement in sales, then why are you spending money?

2) "The entire market is wasteful and exists without proper market forces" - the entire point of programmatic advertising is each impression is sold in an auction, so it can be a very efficient way to buy advertising. The problem is when there are too many middle men between the advertiser and the audience taking a cut, this is why "supply path optimization" is becoming a big thing in the industry by helping you answer "how can I get to my audience with the fewest people in the middle?"

3)TV and traditional media wasn't necessarily the most efficient way to advertise, the "spray and pray" approach. Advertisers and TV networks are beginning to realize this, that's why a more and more of the ads you're watching on TV are actually placed there via programmatic advertising and the percentage is only rising.

Take a look at your microwave oven and ask yourself why it has so many buttons. 99% of the time you are using it for one thing only. To heat an item for 15, 30, 60 or N seconds. On high.

Yet every single microwave is full of dozens of other buttons. Multiple other functions. Lots of features, bells and dings.

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, people thought they needed these extra features to sell their product. They thought they added value. But in the end, they do not add value to 99% of their users or their actual use. They are superfluous and yet, they remain on every microwave oven sold.

This is what digital ads have become. A kluge of processes and jargon chasing a rainbow of perfect, efficient ad delivery. Something that is impossible to achieve.

With the FB and Google and Amazon, owning the sell side market, you do not have a balanced marketplace. They are not adjusting the cost of the imp, conversion, or click or engagement or the N based on efficiency, or competition, or depreciation over time. They are in fact doing the opposite. They are adjusting the price based on none of those things. Only their ability to sell all those buttons, those features and those extras...

And in the end, the advertiser just wants to sell more of X or achieve more of Y for as little as possible.

Microwaves offer additional features because it's really cheap, some of us like them (defrost is great!), and the features don't get in the way for users who don't need them. I don't think this is a useful analogy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but defrost is just a microwave for a very long time, right?

Why _not_ just microwave by typing 5 minutes? Or instead, why shouldn't the microwave have less abstruse buttons like "1 min", "2 min", "5 min" which grant you the opportunity to seamlessly jump to trying to use your intuition to figure out the timing you want instead of this vague "defrost" button which... I'm still not sure what it does.

Defrost is a long time, but at a lower power. For example, if I want to defrost a small bowl of berries I could put it in for 30s on high, but they'd get a bit cooked and squishy. If I put it in as defrosting 2oz it runs for ~1:40 at a much lower power and they're nearly as nice as if I'd let them slowly come up to temp in the fridge.

I could be wrong but I believe that most microwaves operate with a single power. The various settings are just cycling the power on and off at different variables... 5 is half the number of cycles, Defrost is a timer setting, pre-programmed based on weight of food... water content.

Yes, I think you're right, turning down the power level is usually implemented as cycling the magnetron. But you need to be smart in how you do it if you're not going to wear out the microwave unnecessarily by using cycles that are too short. If you are cooking something big you can do 50% with 30s on / 30s off, while if it's small you might need 2s on / 2s off. Hence the relatively complex controls.

That's why these features are on every single one. They are cheap. Their costs went down over time... And just like digital, there are only a few manufactures.

Have digital ad costs decreased over time as supply as increased?

You're assuming that Google, FB and Amazon are the entire supply side of the market. They're a huge part of it yes, but there's about 30% of the internet supply that they don't control and once you get into the TV space it becomes even more open.

TV open? Um. No. I guess if you count the myriad of brokers as supply, otherwise, the linear market is even tighter. Not too mention most of the ads are never seen...and not audited. Leave the scatter out, that's for and local ads and DR. Those are measured in pennys, not dollars.

Traditional TV isn't. But more and more TV is consumed via various types of CTV platforms- these are transacted programmatically, mostly through private deals but a growing share via open programmatic.

Isn't the choice of publisher itself a form of ad targeting?

E.g. many advertisers probably believe readers of "The Atlantic" and "Guns and Ammo" segment into two distinct populations. And publishers themselves certainly target media to specific segments, e.g. fashion magazines for young middle-class women versus middle-aged gay rich men have different content

Context (which is basically what you're referring to) is just one strategy.

Often, targeting is used to narrow in on an audience. Let's say I have a product to sell but I don't know my exact audience- I'd start a very broadly targeted campaign then see which types of people are responding to the ad. I would then narrow my targeting based on response. The broad targeting can lead to insights that I wouldn't have received if I had targeted a specific publisher.

Does targeted vs non targeted really have an impact on sales? And if targeted was gone everywhere would it really cause a drop in revenue?

It seems (from the little I’ve seen over the years) that targeting doesn’t have much impact. And that advertising budgets are pretty fixed as a percentage so revenues wouldn’t go down if everyone had to stop targeting.

You prefer to be manipulated. I do not.

You and I are different. We shouldn't prescribe blanket solutions to nuanced problems.