I agree - I also remember a comment a while back from someone on the google ads team and a lot of the targeted ads help small businesses the most.
Large brands already have a lot of market presence and a lot of money for advertising campaigns. Small businesses that can find targeted customers that might want their thing on a nation or country wide scale get huge benefits from that and would be hurt the most from losing it.
People have such strong and over-confident ideological positions without really knowing the issue in depth or thinking through consequences.
Thinking about my past experiences —- I can definitely see how that may be the case.
That being said — we have got a problem here and we ought to try and solve it. The ability to target people with potent advertisements tuned using machine learning on large scale populations is fearsome in its potential. At the very least it should not be allowed to continue without basic restrictions and oversight. Like it should be obvious that targeted political advertisements in liberal, free-market democracies will lead us to bad places! Yet we do nothing.
The large businesses have priced the smaller businesses out of 99% of the market. They leave only the crumbs from the table and pretend that's how "advertising" works now.
It's not advertising, it's commodification of the machinery of advertising. It's worse than selling pickaxes at the gold rush: it's like franchising the pickaxe stores.
Large brands already have a lot of market presence and a lot of money for advertising campaigns. Small businesses that can find targeted customers that might want their thing on a nation or country wide scale get huge benefits from that and would be hurt the most from losing it.
People have such strong and over-confident ideological positions without really knowing the issue in depth or thinking through consequences.