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by gridland 1579 days ago
I work in advertising. The death of cookies is a huge annoyance to the industry. you are 100% correct that gclid or fbclid are just a means to store "the cookie" in plain text in the url string. All the big programmatic media platforms do it too now (The Trade Desk, Yahoo, etc).
2 comments

Advertising will change significantly in the years to come. All of this surveillance is not useful for both sides. I think we have reached a point where we can use better social networks and more fun concepts to connect with one another. Hint: I work at finclout.io
not useful? The ability to push targeted advertisements based on this surveillance is what is differentiating internet media from TV; actually cable TV is in steady decline, because they don't have this feature.
Targeted advertisement is an illusion in my opinion. We have been made believe that it is a game changer for advertisement. But does it really work?

I can only argue from running social campaigns in the past and while the charges to the credit card were real, the clicks from FB, Google, Twitter, etc did not relate to real world app downloads or website visits. Also there is research which at least to some extent backs up my opinion [1]

Just because someone talks about a vacation in Cancun that doesn't mean he/she wants or is able to go for a holiday in Cancun.

You are correct that TV ads are a shotgun approach to advertising. Yet, at least in my opinion, that made them more engaging in the past.

[1]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190530/10330742303/new-s...

thanks! I don't know much about the advertising industry, I just thought about the following question: if some site is hosting a pop-up advertisement, then the javascript on that advertisement can get the referrer header by means of its own javascript code. Now my question is: do the different advertising networks share that data between one another? I guess that it might be a big business, if yahoo ads would trade the obtained glcid parameter values with google, or vise versa.