There was targeted advertising in the 90’s. A lot of it uses direct mail, and profiled consumers based upon their magazine subscriptions. But other things like grocery store loyalty cards and the like were used back then, too. Television, radio, and print advertising was and is targeted by demographic.
Literally the entire purpose of the magazine industry is targeted advertising. The only reason to publish something like Cosmo or Hustler is to sell adds targeting the types of people who read Cosmo or Hustler.
Advertising has always been discriminatory. Even in the 90s there were multiple billboards, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations in the world. Advertisers select what, when and where to advertise based on who they think is listening.
The only thing that has changed is how much we know about the "listener" (or page viewer). The nature of advertising is no different today than it was 100 years ago, only the resolution changed.
I don't see how you could even have ads that aren't discriminatory if "proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender" is enough to be discriminatory? If you put an ad next to a barbershop, then that ad is targeting men through "proxy characteristics that correlate with gender", because it's next to a service that men are much more likely to visit. Is that illegal discrimination too? Are there officials that somehow calculate the locations where you are allowed to put advertising so that it wouldn't discriminate (close enough to shops that both men and women visit)?
That's why, among other things, Facebook made "a tool so you can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to you." https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/protecting-against-discrim... So advertisers can target you, but they can't keep you from seeing an ad if you go looking for it.
If this tool exists and allows ads to be viewed with the same visibility as their normal targeting then why are they bothering with targeted ads anymore?
I believe the idea is that while the tool gives you an interface to find those ads, it doesn't replace the ads that you see during usage of the rest of Facebook.
So you're preferring the form of manipulation that works best on you?
I'd prefer not to be manipulated at all.
In fact I loathe the feeling of being manipulated so much that it extends to all but the least obnoxious brands that try to advertise to me.
I can't be the only one who is allergic to advertising that tries to appropriate things from my social groups or background to sell me their shitty mobile data plan, insurance, or phone.
The most recent example is some random phone company trying to sell me their data plan with some shitty pun on "cum laude" on posters at university. Ugh.
Yes. Rather than being peppered with ads for credit repair services, obscure/irrelevant drugs, or other things that I’m not interested in and therefore waste 100% of my time, I’d rather be marketed to about products/services I’d consider buying (or ads that will entertain me).
You can whitelist what they can target, I mean if you really care about marketers, you can allow site owners to generate 'tags' ad networks can use for that specific page and the content of the tags can depend on the prefernces of the user on that specific site.
You can't understand because you're not reading between the lines. The surface message is self-contradicting, but the underlying is clear-cut.
They want a world where advertisers are not allowed to direct messages at their outgroup or the things their outgroup like. You will be allowed to sell perfume to women by putting a model on your billboard, but the same model can't sell ferraris to young men. Shaving razors shall follow only the Gillette model, no glorification of masculinity. Want to advertise your engineering position on FB? Better prominently advertise your diversity programme and paid maternity leave and nothing else. Definitely don't mention beer night.
this is a pretty paranoid view. the restrictions only apply to very specific categories where there have been laws against discrimination for many decades. perfume and razors are not among them.
Specific categories such as employment and housing, for example? Urgh, fine, pretend my examples were about bachelor pads. Same deal: don't target the young men who actually buy them, because we don't like those people and we don't want any part of the economy to cater for them.
The people pushing aren't doing it because they're against any types of tenants either. They want all types of tenants to be able to get housing and take advantage of things that make it easier.
For stuff like "employment, housing and credit", it's illegal to discriminate in advertising. That's why they made a whole new portal to try to avoid discrimination for those kinds of ads. So after a while if you gather data and realize that your algorithm is sexist and ageist, then continuing to use that algorithm to place ads is knowingly using sexist and ageist techniques in advertising. I think the EEOC has the authority to determine how non-discriminating FB will have to be to avoid trouble.
Those regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities. The EEOC has the authority to censure the parties misusing their advertising options.
For example as a marketer who does work in all of the above industries , technology should not limit my use of my dollar.
If i have 10,000 for an apartment campaign, i should be able to spend 5k on ads showcasing my apartment gym focused on men and 5k on the view of the gym full of men targeted to women.( tongue in cheek example)
If the actual top level strategy is not discriminatory but rather is segmented to allow better messaging, any bullshit tech blocks shouldn't get in the way. Let the regulators do their jobs the old fashioned way.
You are right though, there are always ways to define the necessary audience using the the type of qualifiers you describe.
Facebook has been insisting that non-discrimination should be the responsibility of the purchasers, but we've shown over [0] and over [1] again [2] that even when the advertiser targets all groups proportionally (no misuse of advertising options), Facebook subselects who to show their ads to in a skewed way, leaving the advertiser and the users no recourse.
I just read half of the last paper (and skimmed the other half). It is surprising that the paper does not use the term "information theory" even once. The research basically bumps into the established facts that properly hiding or destroying information is really hard.
Advertising industry has known this since ancient times. Military signals intelligence has been essentially built with that tidbit as its core. Even weak proxies are formidable if you have bucketloads of them to choose and combine from.
Now, let's make one thing clear: I am not a FB apologist. In fact, I find the modern advertising systems abhorrent, immoral and outright vile. But even then, this article felt like the authors chose to miss the point. Hiding information is incredibly difficult - and conflating "information theory is damn hard" with "FB[ß] are evil and/or immoral" feels intellectually dishonest.
For what it's worth, I would actually love to see research _and_ well sourced articles about the practical net effects of information theoretical attacks, intentional or not, on the human populations as observed through the various e-stalking platforms.
ß: I'm using "FB" here as a shortcut for FANG+MS+others.
>Those regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities.
Firearm/drug/financial regulations have already ruined that approach for you sadly.
It has been deemed time and again that the easiest place for regulators to apply pressure is on those producing the thing to be regulated. It is much easier to stop (undesirable thing) when the means of making (undesirable thing) happen are either tightly controlled or otherwise forbidden.
The smaller numbers of major players created by the necessarily high capital investment is much easier to control and surveil than having to keep every Tom, Dick, and Harry honest.
It's weird. I've been getting so disheartened as I branch out and diversify into various regulated fields of activity just to realize how much we have to hamstring ourselves to keep everyone honest; or at least to have a snowball's chance at figuring out what happened when something went wrong in order to ensure it won't happen again.
Half of me wants to chew my shoe over the degree of difficulty and implicit frustration encountered trying to get anything remotely compliant off the ground. The other half of just kind of bows it's head at the fact that the rule ended up coming into existence to solve one problem or another.
Cognitive dissonance and I seem to be full-time roommates nowadays, and it's rather exhausting. All part of growing up I suppose.
In my opinion, incorrect bias can happen only if either the input or process is bad. So, if you consider the output undesirable then there is a problem with input or process.
Ideally, ads would not be targeted at all in any way and micro targeting should be a crime (for privacy reasons as well). Short if that, you target people because of their proven individual preferences and tendencies as opposed to using their membership of any larger group of any kind as an input variable. Regardless of how much accuracy it enables, associative generalization is the core problem here, even without protected classes like race for example, I don't think it should be legal for any ad content to target me because I am a member of HN,now if by my explicit consent the ad system discovers I like specific topics which are also common on HN then they can use those individual level inputs WITHOUT associating it with my HN membership.
Essentially, the enemy here is formation of social bubbles as a result of explicitly clustering individuals into easily targtable micro groups. In other words, it is easier to sell ads that target specific micro groups but not so much for specific individuals.
What a silly argument, the magazine is not the advertiser. It's fine for content to target groups but not ads! You can have a men's magazine and the ads on there can target men, you can't have a men's magazine that sends out prints with ads targeting specific subsets of men. Content targeting is fine, user targeting is not.
What part doesn't make sense. Sends out different prints containing targeted ads to specific subscribers as opposed to the advertiser targeting the content. Are you arguing to prove some point?
I did not say anything about the content of articles, my comment was entirely about ads. If the article contains some topic and the ad targets that topic, the ad is not creating any new bubble. If the ad targets the user specifically because the user belongs to some group then ads are influencing specific groups in specific ways and forming new bubbles advantafeous to the highest bidder.
An ad for something men would like on a men's magazine or website targets men because they are already visiting a men specific content. An ad about the same thing on a random news site because the user is believed to be a man influences the user and other similar users to be influenced in the same way, even when they're not interacting with content specific to their membership of some group. This seems harmless but in reality the groups targeted are much more specific. So you may have those ads targeting "white men between 25-30,with college degree and living in an affuent neighborhood" , so in reality you now have that specific micro group being influenced differently, forming new bubbles. Men who don't also fit that criteria are not targeted, and are not influenced to buy nice undies. Replace undies with other more nefarious things (e.g.: food, medication,housing,job opportunities,etc...) And you can appreciate how ads are essentially micro-segregating people into bubbles based on statistical presumptions. Now if a usee visits a content,ads relevant to that content make a lot of sense. The problem is the user being targeted when they don't interact with relevant content and users interacting with relevant content not receiving relevant ads (e.g.: spouse reading about a gift for her husband won't see the nice undie ads).
Ads affect much more than what we buy, they affect out associations,peferences and views on subject matters. Non-consensual surveillance (stalking) should not be used to influence very specific groups of people. Now, I don't get why you have a problem with that?