A question:

As Zeynep Tufekci remarked, we’ve built the machinery of an authoritarian dystopia to get more people to click on ads.

An astonishing percentage of our technology, our industry, our energy, our human inventiveness, our •lives• pour into this. Targeted advertising is now a dominant force in our world.

The question: Does this pay off for the advertisers?

Leaving aside all the social costs and the moral questions, did it •work•? Is advertising radically more effective than it used to be?

1/

I’m not even sure how to properly formulate this question. What would it look like for targeted advertising to be radically more effective? Well…

Do companies spent a much smaller fraction of their budget on advertising than they did 20 years ago, because it works so much better now?

Or do consumers spend a larger percentage of their discretionary income on things they’d never have bought without advertising?

Or are people vastly happier with things they buy, because advertising is making their purchases so much better informed?

(Reply speculation is not useful here; I’m looking for things we could actually gauge from empirical data.)

2/

I’m much too far out of my depth to know how to approach this, but surely there’s some way to study this question. Has anybody done that?

The extraordinary quantity of resources whole industries and subindustries are burning to expand hypertargeted surveillance capitalism suggests that •somebody• thinks it pays in a way that, say, boring old magazine ads — or even old-school search keyword ads — don’t.

But does it work •better•? Or is it just…FOMO? People stuffing money into the slot machine? The market soaking up sloppy investment overspill from failing businesses? Ad biz soaking up small-biz / individual dollars from the newly lengthened long tail?

/end