[prescriptivist]

I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM.

FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.

My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.

[ToucanLoucan]

I genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me.

I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?

Just my 0.02.

[LaundroMat]

I have a similar annoyance: the obvious ways marketeers try to get me in their funnel (I call it conversion aversion). It's hard to measure, so it's not taken into account by marketeers, but I'm quite certain the amount of people annoyed by conversion optimization tactics represent a lot of potentially lost sales.