[Alupis]

I don't see how your cited article is "worse" in any way. They used intuition to deduce what items a customer might be interested in based on their other purchases.

> One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers. When you check out at the grocery store with pizza dough, pepperoni and cheese in your basket - the cashier might deduce you're making pizza and even suggest trying a particular brand of sauce or whatever.

Relevant, targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.

[mossTechnician]

I personally don't buy into the notion that advertisement is inherently good or necessary. Especially when the "best" ads effectively manipulate emotions and remain in people's subconscious.

A corner store cashier does not have the raw processing power and money of an ad network. If they tracked one customer with as much of vigilance as the average ad network, they should probably get slapped with a restraining order.

[Alupis]

The article you linked to, regarding Target, is exactly what your corner store cashier is doing. There is literally no difference.

You are conflating two different things - stores retargeting existing customers and recommending products they think are relevant vs. ad networks like Google that track you across channels so that they may serve the most relevant ads to you based on your interests.

Neither are bad, and both are necessary. Tampon advertisements, for example, have no effect on men - men would find it annoying to see tampon adverts constantly because they are not part of the market.

Why would an advertiser want to advertise to people who will never make a purchase or care about their products? If you're a hiker though, it's really fitting to get advertisements for hiking gear and equipment.

[mossTechnician]

> Neither are bad, and both are necessary.

Ad networks that track you are necessary?

[Alupis]

Define track please. You seem to assume they're doing something nefarious or that they couldn't observe if you walked into a store.

To answer your question - yes. If you want relevant ads for items you might be interested in, then advertisers need to know what you are interested in. It's that simple.

Your own cited article about Target is evidence of why this is a good thing.

Your position that advertising is manipulative and unnecessary is disconnected with reality as well.

[eesmith]

> A cashier at the corner store can deduce as much by paying attention to their customers.

Yes, you've just explained why people may go to a different store, where they are a stranger, when they want to buy something they don't want the local cashier to know about.

The classic example is a 16 year old who buys condoms at a store where no one is likely to recognize him, but others include buying adult diapers, buying a single plunger, and buying hard liquor.

The cashier at the new store might figure out what's going on, but does not know who "you" are.

Which is why the example you quoted is called contextual marketing - it's based on a very small context of the things you are currently buying.

That link, however, expands beyond that to user profiling with 'So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores'.

> targeted ads are actually a lot less annoying to most people because they're relevant.

"Targeted ads' includes targeted based on context advertising and targeted based on user profiling.

The g'g'parent comment was specifically about advertising 'without personal information', which is only one type of targeted ads. Please do not use language which confuses the two as it makes it seem like you don't understand the relevant issues.