When you hear personalized ads, you think the ad itself has been personalized for you. However, it’s the distribution of the ad that’s been personalized. The company can choose to offer you a different ad based on user group preferences. While I believe having the granularity of user group preferences is great, I think it misses the point - we need to flip the model. This is not to say that all advertising is broken or ineffective. My point is that some means of advertising can be more potent.
Suppose I need shoes. Nike makes shoes. However, I don’t buck to peer pressure and I couldn’t care less which basketball player was shilling the next shoe. I care about function more than form. I want orthopedic shoes. Can Nike still sell me the same product? Their shoes are great and might even fit the criteria but I’ll never consider them because they don’t advertise themselves as such. What if Nike made an ad for the same shoe but framed it in a way that was more amenable to me? What if there was a way to make this procedurally?
This is a fairly contrived example so let’s talk about Salesforce competitors. There’s a lot of CRMs out there and they basically do the same thing. Why aren’t real estate brokers using Salesforce, as opposed to a bespoke real estate CRM? I imagine it’s because the new CRM is easier to use and fits their use cases better. But also because they don’t associate Salesforce with their use cases.
I believe that the reason adblocks are gaining so much popularity is simply because ads suck. They’re not interactive, personally meaningful and generic. If an ad decides to leverage a social movement, they sometimes grossly mischaracterize the movement. They have all the refinements of a good production but without any of the substance that merits it so much screen time. At this point, I will remember an ad simply because I’ve seen it so often. I would argue that it’s wasteful to show me 10 forgettable ads than one memorable ad.
This is where I take a bit of a tangent because I have a solution in mind that solves many problems, including this: privacy-preserving digital identity and generative AI.
[TODO - talk about how privacy preserving digital identity can make it possible to serve truly personalized ads]