I'll vouch and reply because I feel your comment may be in earnest.
Historically, in the US, there have been strict limits on what ads are allowed around children's TV. There has to be a distinction between the TV show and the ads. For example kids TV shows in the US used to (not sure about now) have a very distinct break saying that the show was going to be back soon, indicating that what followed wasn't part of the show.
There is also a difference in that 20 years ago, if a kid wanted to buy a toy, they had to see an ad on TV that happened to be for a toy they wanted and then convince their parent to go to the store and buy that toy.
Now with targeted ads and IAP, kids are being targeted directly to buy shiny goods for games that they play. Cosmetic upgrades in the more "honest" games that bestow social status between peers, or gacha tokens in pay to win games to get needed items/characters to progress. (And some games combine the worst of both!)
Targeting a child with an ad for a game they play gets insidious very quickly. "Hey Timmy, did you know all your friends are laughing behind your back because you don't have the latest and greatest armor upgrade? Better buy it now!"
One nit, I think you mistyped about 'cosmetic upgrades' in pay to win games. Like you probably know, the games become impossibly difficult at a certain point, unless you start paying for tokens or whatever.
And every little Timmy wants the nice shiny cloak and character profile for their Honkai Star Rail account. Cosmetics and pay-to-win offerings both print money.
> Targeting a child with an ad for a game they play gets insidious very quickly. "Hey Timmy, did you know all your friends are laughing behind your back because you don't have the latest and greatest armor upgrade? Better buy it now!"
Those ads cannot cater their content and their timing towards your vulnerabilities based on behavior analytics, such as metadata indicating that you might be depressed, going through a breakup, etc. An app can shoot varied content at you and determine that if you view happy cat content, then enraging political discourse, then sexual stimulating content, and then and ad, you're more likely to click on the ad, or stare at it for longer, etc.
Social media ads are essentially interactive, but their mechanics are hidden and there's no winning state for the player.
And just to play with dark ideas: what exactly (besides technological limitations) would stop any of the big companies from basically running a long social experiment to determine whether, over years, you can shape a kid to become an adult that's a big consumer?
An ad on TV has no information on who you are when you view it. An ad on SM has detailed information of who you were years ago, who you are now, and there's no reason why it can't make predictions about who you'll be based on the growing data. Nor is there a reason not to try to shape that to their benefit.
> An app can shoot varied content at you and determine that if you view happy cat content, then enraging political discourse, then sexual stimulating content, and then and ad, you're more likely to click on the ad, or stare at it for longer, etc.
Yeah, no. Facebook ads are mostly pay per impression, not click, so there’s no reason to even do this. Ad targeting is controlled by advertisers for the most part, not algorithms - they want to target specific demographics, not some random cross-section of humanity. It’s very different from the kind of algorithms that power your news feed.
Huh? A demographic is a random cross-section of humanity. The only thing that matters is if the way you're determining the group yields more sales.
The final goal is obviously a sale, but the real commodity is attention.
I'm not saying "this is how it is", I'm saying "show my a reason why this is not the case now or where we're heading.
Like, if FB could do this, and it yielded more money for them, what would stop them? You sound very convinced, so I'd be glad if you can go into detail as to what that conviction is founded on. Have you worked on these algorithms?
Like a lot of things, I expect the only difference is time and space. There are adult generations where large swaths don’t remember Saturday morning cartoons now. If you’re a millennial with tech savvy parents you may have grown up with streaming entertainment only. Though today ads can show up there as well, so maybe this will be another way where children and grandparents bond over things the parents don’t understand.
Historically, in the US, there have been strict limits on what ads are allowed around children's TV. There has to be a distinction between the TV show and the ads. For example kids TV shows in the US used to (not sure about now) have a very distinct break saying that the show was going to be back soon, indicating that what followed wasn't part of the show.
There is also a difference in that 20 years ago, if a kid wanted to buy a toy, they had to see an ad on TV that happened to be for a toy they wanted and then convince their parent to go to the store and buy that toy.
Now with targeted ads and IAP, kids are being targeted directly to buy shiny goods for games that they play. Cosmetic upgrades in the more "honest" games that bestow social status between peers, or gacha tokens in pay to win games to get needed items/characters to progress. (And some games combine the worst of both!)
Targeting a child with an ad for a game they play gets insidious very quickly. "Hey Timmy, did you know all your friends are laughing behind your back because you don't have the latest and greatest armor upgrade? Better buy it now!"