[usrusr]

Ah, finally someone who shares my suspicion that ad targeting is overrated. Yes, it is valuable for sellers of babystuff to advertise to expecting mothers, but pre-targeting brand awareness style campaigns still have their place/value. Those have absolutely nothing to gain from creepy targeting tactics, no matter how old-fashioned that may seem to those responsible.

I guess that at the buying end of the advertising business, just like in software development, many people just want to use the latest tools (ad targeting in this case) to personally stay on top of the game even if their use case would benefit more from a boring old blanket campaign. Think of a campaign for an insurance company: even if it highlights a product aimed at twentysomethings, it will still be nearly as effective when hitting eyeballs from other age brackets. So how much of a premium per eyeballs should they be willing for targeted over blanket? Very little. Yet I see quite a lot of that kind of advertisement in fully targetable channels and I suspect that is due to the same driving force that makes software people always want to play with the latest toys. One that has settled, the laws of supply and demand dictate that the premium for targeted vs untargeted will shrink.