Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.

Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?

I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.

Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)

I sometimes think that people believing targeted advertising doesn’t work is exactly why it does.

In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.

They also can’t really tell apart which product are recurring buys.

If I buy toilet paper and a toilet seat I’m not going to be buying another seat next month. I don’t use them up like that.

Always surprises me that Amazon hasn’t managed to incorporate that into their algo

I always find it amusing when I get a YouTube ad for something completely irrelevant to my life, like an ad for a one-time event in a different city, for over 65's, for a product category I've never exhibited an interest in. Like, I just imagine the marketing dude for that company looking at his incredibly low CTR in disbelief.

Maybe the answer to this is a proxy ‘you’. Like an llm trained to be like you, that you tote around and then ad companies and so on can interact with to find out whether their ad is something you give a damn about? Or the music services can bounce recommendations off?

As ads are inherently adversarial I prefer in fact badly targeted ads.

I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.

"Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."

Programmers :-D

Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.

But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.