You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programatic Advertising
https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/
You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programatic Advertising
https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/
6 Comments
An excerpt by Steven Brill:
Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.”
What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage. The process is like a stock exchange, except that the buyer doesn’t know what stock he is buying, meaning that the advertiser doesn’t know whose advertising inventory he is buying.
The product is you—the person whose data has been harvested so exquisitely that you are the advertiser’s target. You are the “stock” that the advertiser is buying. The core idea of programmatic advertising is that where you are seeing the ad doesn’t matter.
This marks a sea change in the advertising industry. And it’s absolutely ripe with misinformation.
Read the full excerpt: [https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/](https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/)
Television was free, and we were the product then, too.
What has changed other than the scope and degree of marketing aggression?
They put in a lot of effort for these ads that I block 100% of.
Maybe we should just ban sponsored psychological manipulation, aka advertising…
Advertising is the common theme here. Everything online has become a vehicle for marketing & advertising; but they’re not just selling products anymore. They’re selling ideologies with the same lack of ethical restraint…
Taking a shot at developing time travel might be worth it simply for the opportunity to literally take a shot at Edward Bernays to stop this shit right from the get go.
Since that sadly seems unlikely, this calls for legislation making advertisers accountable for where they place what when. Accepting that nothing can be done regarding what is essentially a violation of economic sanctions because it’s an algorithm doing it, is accepting the complete dissolution of responsibilities. We already have more than enough of that as it is. Just as with other obviously dysfunctional developments surrounding the political sphere, accountability is the antidote.