Posted by freetonik 3 days ago
But that's the "buy this now" type of ads, another big category that I don't see on the internet much (...because I have an ad blocker but that aside) is the "brand recognition" type - Nike and Coca Cola for example, a lot of their ads are passive in that they just want you to see the logo and become familiar and comfortable with it. Product placement in media.
Basically: capture everything I'm putting out and use it to help me.
Can the advertiser (as in "the company paying for the ad") get any of those signals ("we're paying for ads, but they're being shown to randos who are never going to by our products") ?
Or are the online ads so cheap that they don't care ?
"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?
Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."
I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?
I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.
Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2
From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com
In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.