I can’t speak to finance but I get confused when people bash advertising in broad strokes. People running businesses need ways to exchange money for new customers. That’s advertising. Making that more efficient might surely be annoying but a complete waste of time?

I think you have a vast disconnect between the reality of advertising today vs. the quaint mid-20th century mental model that you seem to hold. Or you're being entirely disingenuous about what people complaining about "advertising" mean.

If modern advertising 1) did not vacuum up personal data in extremely invasive ways, 2) didn't distort the entire business models of the largest tech companies against the interests of the overwhelming majority of their users, and 3) wasn't a broad attack vector on that same user population (dark patterns, outright malware delivery, just plain terrible UX everywhere, etc.)... then there'd probably be very little complaint about advertising, relatively speaking.

Put another way: no one gripes about the existence of Craigslist. Thought experiment: what if the targeted advertising model was illegal, both enforceable and enforced with teeth. How much of what's detrimental about modern advertising would simply vanish, like a bad memory?

Nitpick: Plenty of people gripe about CL. By giving away classified ads, CL killed a huge cash cow for many newspapers.

This is a direct corollary of the existence of the internet and the effect that had on the scarcity of information that supported the local newspaper model. Ben Thompson has written a number of great articles diving into this topic at Stratechery[1]. I understand why blaming CL seems like it should be a thing, but it's absolutely the wrong target: the very existence of the internet made newspapers utterly unsustainable because the scarcity they depended on vanished.

[1] https://stratechery.com/

Not taking sides but what you described were the natural developments of "making advertisement more efficient", people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers, therefore making advertisement cheaper and more efficient. If this is a net positive or negative for society is something I'll stay out of.

Efficiency is overrated. It's an acceptable rationale for destruction and exploitation (the process demands it), but that acceptance doesn't make it a good thing overall.

>people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers

I mean, did they really? Where can I read about these successes?

I think the parent comment was referring to adtech in particular, which I agree isn't inherently bad, but which currently has a model of: 1. Slurp up as much data as possible no matter how sensitive and no matter the societal cost. 2. Use that data purely to increase the efficiency of wasting an enormous chunk of the world's bandwidth and computing resources (anecdotally, something like 30% of my traffic before I started blocking everything at a dns level) _pushing_ ads to anyone who might match by any means necessary whether they want them or not.

I might even acquiesce to some form of push-based ads being broadly beneficial (e.g. for truly novel offerings), but for almost everything that currently shows up as an ad I would much rather be able to efficiently search for it and find it once I'm actually ready to buy than to be inundated with hundreds or thousands of worthless ads ahead of time in the off chance that they'll bring a particular product to the forefront of my mind and sway my purchasing decisions.

That's kind of the point of frameworks like async/await :) Adtech is using a polling system to try and demand my attention with a, let's say, 1% success rate, but we could cut down the noise 100x simply by awaiting my next purchasing decision.

The parent said adtech, not advertising. What we call adtech today is advertising plus tracking. The tracking part is what most people seem to have a problem with.

Post-war advertising isn't much better itself, being based to make people to want things they might not even need...

Yep, the marketing for diamonds was a prime example of that.

But at least De Beers didn't try to track individual brides and grooms and show them different diamonds based on what they were talking about on the phone. Maybe they do now.

I still say we ignored the Main Street and non-scale non-flow micro-sensitive and disaggregated or rather yet to be aggregated, customers, not whole by reasons superficially readily learned.

Sobel's The First Junk Bond, gives the mechanics of preservation of the vast onshore reserves, until (I don't have the recall but I think Sobel gives the trigger price) $50/B plateaux.

In 95 I wrote the level of inefficiency in agency transactions was 60%.

In 2018, stories on the embedded framework fraud of online advertising buying, gave the same number for the new system's inefficiency.

Print, my world despite the gasping inhalation of every party I speak with, remains almost unchanged in headline volumes, despite the unbroken prophecy of all trade journalism.