[hoopladler]

I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash.

That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard.

And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.

[methodin]

"They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at."

I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase.

A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.

[devjam]

Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.

[imron]

Internet advertising sounds horrible. I marvel that so many people still put up with it.

[C4stor]

In my experience, it's because internet advertising is indeed globally horrible, but advertising on internet is often not about global effects.

To give you a perspective, efficient "performance" (the kind which wants you to buy now) advertising is a click ratio of about half a percent on ads, which vastly outperforms the basic performance one, usually having a ratio of about a tenth of a percent. Of those fractions of a percent, a fraction of a percent will actually buy...

That still means ads missed the target 995 times out of 1000, so are still globally horrible.

Nevertheless, since ads on the internet are so cheap (prices are often negotiated by 1000 ads, to make it a bit more tangible, and we're talking like 5$ per 1000 ads here), it's still sometimes worth it.

So yeah, the global experience is crap, but that's often not the point anyway.

[code_duck]

We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.

[pacala]

Paranoid fantasies about 42% of the population being lured into smoking and millions of lives lost to easily preventable disease.

[refurb]

Other factors (e.g. Do your friends smoke?) play a much larger role than advertising.

[verylittlemeat]

It helps that cigarette smoking is physically addicting.

[sien]

Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders from 1957 is well worth a look about how advertising was seen as far back as the 1950s.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3730.The_Hidden_Persuade...