Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
Comments
Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.