I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways.
"Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take.
There's a view, perhaps not universally shared, that humans may not actually be as complicated as all that. That if you have a person play a short game, engage in a chat session a few minutes long, swipe on people they find interesting, or even just pay careful attention to how much of a video someone watches -- that discerning their personality and interests is challenging but totally viable.
Let's remember: the Cambridge Analytica debacle didn't stem from a full dump of someone's private Facebook history - it was mainly personality tests that were very quick to complete. It turned out that such a quick & casual test is mostly sufficient signal to be actionable re: how they were likely to vote and how to influence that vote.
In this mode, we'll see the rise of superapps that have rich ways of engaging and rich telemetry to discern your interests without having to "snoop" on you. They'll just engage you directly.
In this way, privacy is preserved nicely but ads can still be well-targeted.
I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil.
But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good?
In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how would these superapps make advertisement good?
> Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good?
I think there can be. The fundamental idea of advertising is certainly a win-win sort of deal: informing people of products and services they may not be aware of.
But most advertising is not that. Most of it is not informative or useful for making purchase decisions, most of it is manipulative to the extreme, and a lot of it relies on surveilling people without their consent. That sort of advertising isn't anything I can support.
Inherently there's a conflict in advertisement. The consumer expects entertaining and unbiased information and the advertiser expects the consumer to buy something.
One example how this conflict plays out: The youtuber Colin Furze tells people about Surfshark, a VPN solution. The way he does is funny (being in a bathtub with a shark mascot and his dark grey tie on), but I am not sure whether this is enlightening and useful information,
Because of this conflict I think there will always be some tension. One example is that one extension for Youtube marks these parts as advertisement and enables skipping it. And sometimes I feel the need to skip it. When thinking about it, it is because I don't want to listen to it and try to separate the information I am after from advertisement I am not willing to listen to it.
So I still think that the pull model is the best way. When I am ready I am willing to listen to what companies tell me.
It's like learning. If your mind is ready, learning is quick and easy.
We've definitely seen a rise of "advertising as content" where the ad itself is just so good that people will watch it for its own right vs having it imposed on them.
The Superbowl is a classic example here - some meaningful fraction of those watching are doing so for the ads vs any interest in football! But YouTube, TikTok, etc have all seen great success in organic/viral campaigns (Old Spice comes to mind).
To answer your question - how might a superapp make advertisement "good" would probably be not only showing you an ad that you're likely to commercially engage (to purchase the good/service) based on your observed interests but also where the ad itself is something you're likely to find interesting/educational/amusing and not annoying, because in the latter case you'll like/comment/reshare to percolate it "for free" and amplify their campaign. And the interestingness can be judged based on your history of interactions.
I can imagine a world where advertising is good in the sense that it's always relevant, but such a world places heavier weight on ad "fit" than on the advertiser's bid for that ad inventory. For example, it's a bad user experience when you search for a product/vendor and the first result is their competitor instead because they bid more for that ad placement.
Unfortunately, I don't see how "good" advertising can exist outside of small niches with the economic incentives being what they are.
In concept advertising is good, I'd love to know about good products that serve my purposes for good prices, the problem is that as far as the people in these companies are concerned they just want to sell stuff.
Many companies don't make great products, so what ends up happening is they compensate with advertising that's just borderline false. Filled with emotive words, gish gallop etc that doesn't actually provide very useful or accurate info but hopefully convinces you to buy anyway.
Your second model of advertising ("humans may not be as complicated") is how advertising worked for thousands of years, and how it continues to work today.
Even for Google and Facebook, the vast majority of ad spend is not narrowly targeted.
What you call "Ads 1.0" is a snakeoil fad and isn't successful in the industry.
The reason the big Internet giants collect user data isn't really for advertising (that's only a justification), they do it to have leverage when dealing with nation-states and governments.
t. Working in the ad industry for the last 17 years.
"Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take.
There's a view, perhaps not universally shared, that humans may not actually be as complicated as all that. That if you have a person play a short game, engage in a chat session a few minutes long, swipe on people they find interesting, or even just pay careful attention to how much of a video someone watches -- that discerning their personality and interests is challenging but totally viable.
Let's remember: the Cambridge Analytica debacle didn't stem from a full dump of someone's private Facebook history - it was mainly personality tests that were very quick to complete. It turned out that such a quick & casual test is mostly sufficient signal to be actionable re: how they were likely to vote and how to influence that vote.
In this mode, we'll see the rise of superapps that have rich ways of engaging and rich telemetry to discern your interests without having to "snoop" on you. They'll just engage you directly.
In this way, privacy is preserved nicely but ads can still be well-targeted.