I'm sure at some point someone will figure out how to better target advertisements based on DNA. In fact I could think of a simple and obvious one - target based on race or sex. More advanced techniques would be to figure out what proclivities you might have, such as being easily addicted to certain substances and behaviors.
It seems very unlikely to me that there isnt at least *some* genetic information that would be of direct value in advertising. Like if Google took five years of personalized ad performance info and filtered that through the associated individual’s known DNA to develop a predictive model.
Indeed, personalized advertising to match your psychological profile as much as possible, with just the right incentives/brain-hijacking. Then, why not just do this for all "ads" for all industries (politics is one of the most aggressive currently), and, then, why not all information one is exposed to? Let's get extreme, and look at the diplomacy-playing CICERO, that can employ strategic reasoning for how to best shape ads for you. A/B testing will becoming A/(infinity) testing until you've made a "purchase".
Basically, targeted ads are a waste of time in a large percentage of cases but can be quite destructive if you can figure how to target a particular group that might be subject to just the sort of obsession you want to sell.
If think ad targeting should be illegal, because if you know who is going to see your ad, you can easily manipulate them into signing up or buying the product by exploiting characteristics that person may have.
I don't know how precise the ad targeting exactly, but what if you narrow the base group down to your 19 fake accounts and your target user.
If you could the further filter your ad based on gender (as mentioned above), personal interests or other private data, you may be able to use your ad impressions to figure out things about an unsuspecting person.
Transparency in how ads are targeted would go a long way.
Personally, I would appreciate a legal mandate that every targeted advertisement must include a link explaining which demographics or criteria are being used to target the ad.
Ideally the ad would also need to identify which criteria were applicable to the individual who was shown the ad, and where that information came from. That requirement might be onerous to implement, but maybe it could kick in at a certain revenue threshold for the ad network.
Imagine if people had to be told that they kept seeing embarrassing ads because their bank sold their interest in [product category] to a marketing agency. Or if you could inform your aging relatives that they shouldn't trust ads which target them based on their past multilevel marketing purchases. I can dream...
I’m pretty ignorant of the marketing industry, but it seems like maybe you’re lumping demographic targeting in with personalization - broad categories like age, geographic location and gender are probably good ways to target advertising.
Hyper-individualized ads are just plain creepy. I’m glad to hear they’re generally ineffective at reaching their intended audience, and I’d hope that when they are effective, that the sense of invasion people feel causes them to turn the other way.
Those advertising methods don't allow you to micro-target based on people's private behavior. Micro-targeting and machine learning lets campaigns (like Cambridge Analytica's) generate what's effectively a thousand different campaigns, targeting exactly what triggers specific people the most. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from saying the exact opposite thing to two different people. That's what our current institutions may not be prepared to handle.
Advertisers want to divide the population into smaller and smaller and more and more specific groups. Given the technology they absolutely would target individuals.
That's why the public needs to push for advert targeting to be illegal - this way there will be no point to collect such data in the first place.
The targeting should only work in a following way:
- I sell car tyres, therefore to find my consumers I'll buy an ad on the Facebook car group.
Instead of:
- I sell car tyres, find anyone who asked their friends about where to buy car tyres, who is between 20-40, Caucasian, has a good credit score and has autism and is into rubber jokes.
The best targeted adverts I've seen have all required no personalized targeting. Ads for webcomics on another webcomic. Games on gaming websites. Products as I google/bing for them. Sponsors baked into the youtube video I'm watching. Some humans went "hey, you know what, your audience might like our product!". Not exactly rocket science.
Data driven / targeted advertisements are the worst of both worlds: doxxing people, and terrible results. Products after I've already bought them. Junk I'm not remotely interested in. Stuff I'm interested in, but won't touch, because humans are so far out of the loop that I can't trust anything about it.
I can't trust the quality, I can't trust whatever ecommerce site it's taking me to, I probably can't even trust my browser to render because of the threat of malware. No vetting, no accountability.
I’m increasingly thinking that targeted ads are eerily similar to Isaac Asimov psychohistory[0].
E.g. you cannot reliably predict individual behavior, but with right|enough data you can reliably predict how a large enough population will act.
This is why individually we often feel that they’re off the mark, or we’re thrifty enough to ignore the ads or political or other targeting. But like others have pointed out, data is out there, and ‘they’ have infinite tries to get it right. And more importantly, it works already today. And it’s impacting everyone, so as an individuals, we also get impacted in indirect and subtle ways when e.g. friend of ours raves about new toy she bought without even realizing that she chose this product over the other because of all the ads that she never clicked.
Seems dangerous.
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