I have had some professional experience in marketing. It’s a job, you know? Targeted advertising is a very common data science application. Specifically, I’ve built models that use credit data to decide who to send snail-mail. Was this a positive contribution to society? Eh, probably not.
In the title I ask, “good or evil?”, but obviously most people think the answer is “evil”. I’m not here to convince you that targeted advertising is good actually. But I have a bunch of questions, ultimately trying to figure out: why do we put up with targeted ads?
For the sake of scope, I’m thinking mainly about targeted ads as they appear on social media platforms. And I’m just thinking of ads that try to sell you a commercial product, as opposed to political ads or public service announcements. These ads may be accused of the following problems:
- Using personal data that we’d rather keep private.
- Psychic pollution–wasting our time and attention, or making us unsatisfied with what we have.
- Misleading people into purchasing low quality or overpriced goods.
Meanwhile, here are a couple possible benefits of ads to the user:
- Ads support the continuation of the platform.
- An ad might lead you to a product that benefits you.
Social media platforms
Social media platforms aren’t free. There are costs to hosting, development, and moderation. However, if a platform were to charge all its users a fee, this would chase most users away, which diminishes the main attraction of social media: other people. This puts social media platforms in a precarious position, needing to draw in freeloaders, while trying to convert them to not be freeloaders anymore.
So it’s generally to the benefit of platforms to conceal the costs. For example, many platforms have relied on investor funding during the growth phase, only to later cash out by ramping up ad revenue. Users are like the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pot, unable to tell when everything got so shitty with ads.
Some small platforms try to go without ads. Pillowfort and Cohost, for instance, are based on premium subscriptions and donations. But this business model seems to depend on the charitable instincts of its users, and charitable instinct doesn’t scale with the size of the platform. Nobody feels a charitable instinct towards Facebook. And it seems it didn’t work out for Cohost either.
So then we have ad-supported platforms—take Facebook as an example. Advertisers pay Facebook for impressions or clicks or purchases. Presumably, advertisers do this because it leads to increased sales to Facebook users. So, Facebook may be nominally free, but ultimately users are still paying money in the form of buying products that were advertised to them on Facebook. So it’s not actually free.
The price of ads
So I have a simple question: is it cheaper to use a social media platform with ads on it, or is it cheaper to pay a social media platform directly?
You could say, being shown ads is free! Because you, intelligent consumer, know how to ignore the ads. But statistically, this obviously isn’t true of every user. Even if it’s only a small fraction of users, somebody is paying for it one way or another. Users may not even realize what they are paying. For instance, if you’re shown an ad for Coke, you might think “Everyone already knows about Coke, what was the point of this ad?” But the ad may still prompt you to buy more Coke–or the ad contributes to the environment where “everyone already knows about Coke”. If Coke believes they’re making money from ads, who are we to disbelieve them?
In terms of the raw amount of money being transferred, advertising is obviously more expensive than a flat subscription. That’s because only a partial cut of the money goes to the platform, and the rest goes to the company advertising its product. On the other hand, under an advertising model, people aren’t just spending money for nothing, they’re making purchases, getting something they wanted in return.
We may ask, are people receiving a good product? Are the Facebook advertisements improving people’s purchase decisions by showing them beneficial products they were unaware of? Or are they worsening people’s purchasing decisions by selling products that are inferior to their competitors, or making people want things they don’t really need? I don’t know the answer, but I know that advertisers don’t really care, as long as they make the sale.
And what about the psychological costs of advertising? As with the Coke example, it can be hard to say when exactly an advertisement has failed–but suppose that an ad isn’t focusing on brand awareness, and is simply trying to making a sale, nothing more. If this ad doesn’t make a sale, then it failed, and did not make a profit. And yet, the ad still took up your scrolling space, your brain space. These are psychological costs which are paid by the user, but not truly “received” by the advertisers.
In my work, we sent lots snail-mail spam to people, but we didn’t truly want to spam people. It costs us money to print that spam! If it were possible, we’d rather only send it to people who would actually buy our product.
To advance a personal opinion, I suspect that effectively maintaining and moderating social media is just more expensive than we give credit for. We have been fooled by investor money and untransparent ad revenue. Social media platforms will continue the cycle of growth and collapse—or growth and enshittification—until we are willing to pay a higher price for higher quality platforms. And I’d rather the price tag come in the form of an actual price tag, instead of ads.
On the other hand, ads may not be free, but they can be free if you don’t have enough money to buy any of that stuff anyway. If advertising is a hidden cost, then it is a cost that is not distributed evenly. Perhaps ads are like a progressive tax, costing more to people with greater wealth. Switching to a subscription model may be like replacing a progressive tax with a regressive tax.
Ads vs targeted ads
I’ve asked a lot of questions, and provided few answers. Here’s another question: Does it make it better or worse that the ads are targeted?
Targeted advertising doesn’t necessarily mean more advertising. It could very well mean less advertising. When the advertising is targeted, each individual impression is more likely to lead to sales. So a social media platform could, in principle, support themselves while serving fewer ads. Alternatively: the platform could continue serving the same number of ads, and just make a bigger profit while doing so. (Most likely it’s a mix of both, with the mixture depending on the platform’s monopoly power.)
The funny thing is, I always hear people complaining about failed advertisements. People are always asking, “Why did Facebook show me that? There is no earthly reason I would want that!” It’s rarer to hear people complain that an advertisement is successful, perhaps because it’s embarrassing to admit that an ad held power over you. So if failed advertisements are the worst kind, then you must prefer targeted advertising, right?
On the other hand, the failure rate is probably pretty high either way. Maybe only one in a thousand people responds to an ad. Suppose we create a targeting algorithm that doubles the success rate. That’s huge, from the perspective of the advertiser! But from the perspective of the consumer, the failure rate decreased from 99.9% to 99.8%. Really when people complain about failed advertising, they’re just not thinking of the 99.9% of ads they ignored. They’re thinking of the ads that disagreed with them on a more fundamental level. Advertisers mostly don’t care about these spectacular failures.
My impression is that targeted advertising is better than untargeted advertising by a significant margin. When I think of untargeted advertising, I think of the ads that show up on the typical cooking recipe website. These websites have extremely obnoxious ads, extending for miles before ever showing you the recipe. The ads aren’t targeted well, so they don’t make much money, and they need to grab your attention by being obnoxious. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook sucks too, but there are worse things on the internet.
Some people don’t like the loss of privacy, but that’s an aspect that I can’t speak to, because I don’t share those values. Privacy is not of great value to me personally. Still, it would be foolish to give data away for free, and get nothing of value in return. So perhaps I feel the fool when I gave it away and all I got was Facebook.
So what do you think? Is targeted advertising evil? Which parts are the most evil? Why do we put up with it?
socialize social media and pay for it with taxes. this opens up a massive can of worms and is somewhat off-topic, but it does solve the instability and ad issues. i favor a mixed model where sexy young platforms can be run by techbros with ads and boom-bust, while the future equivalent of facebook, simple style for boomers, would be run by the USA.
re: your questions at the end, i don’t have an answer except to say pondering the issues involved makes me tired. we put up with it because proles in the market do not have nearly the level of choice libertarians believe.
Having a state-funded social media platform to compete with the private ones would enforce a minimum standard. It does open a lot of cans of worms though. They’d have to have some level of moderation (at the very least, don’t do illegal things, probably more if we want the platform to actually be good), which raises the specter of state propaganda.
One-dimensional metrics are no more than heuristics, at best.
Put it this way: thinking that way implies that any increase in good is perforce equivalent to a decrease of bad, which is not necessarily the case. As a general, um, observation.
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Concrete example?
As I recall, somewhere along the line there was actual consideration of a micropayment system instead of our current ad-supported system. The social, technical, and banking systems weren’t ready.
Now, well. Be a brave billionaire that tries to leverage that.
I run firefox with noScript, and manage to avoid a fair bit of ads through that. I’m frequently caught off guard when I get a slow day at work and check a site on my work computer, and realize how many ads I’m avoiding at home.
Most of the ads I end iup seeing are the ones on Youtube, and their “targeting” is pretty questionable – most of the youtube stuff I watch is various leftist channels, some bicycle stuff, and the occasional music video. I have no idea what is going on with their algorithm (either for ads, or for suggested videos), but it’s almost always way off.
I don’t know how much I’m actually influenced by ads, but I think less than the typical person? I don’t buy a whole lot of stuff – I’ve currently got most of what I need, and am in the process of trying to declutter and reduce how much I own. I’m aiming for less, better stuff, and I feel like most advertisements are for the opposite of that – more, crappier stuff. And I feel like a lot of the higher quality stuff, doesn’t rely on advertising/marketing as much as having a reputation for quality and being recommended by “experts”, etc.
My big purchases of the past year have been a Rohloff Internal-geared hub for a bicycle, and a Framework laptop, both of which I heard about through messageboards/third parties, etc. my smaller more frequent purchases have mostly been band/comic tshirts and CDs, most of which I don’t think has been influenced by advertising/marketing.
You’re missing the main problem with ads, which is that they give advertisers control of media. Once they’re the ones paying for things, they can choke off any content that’s unfavorable to them.
And your dismissal of privacy concerns is shortsighted. The surveillance networks that feed ad algorithms are already being used for more sinister purposes; see Cambridge Analytica.
I am not dismissive of privacy concerns, I simply cannot speak to them. I encourage commenters to speak to those issues, and to discuss other problems that I did not cover.
BTW, my understanding of Cambridge Analytica, was that they were able to extract information about Facebook users for free, using a Facebook app. However, it’s ironic because Facebook already sells this data as part of their ordinary business. I tend to think the Cambridge Analytica scandal is overblown, and people are missing the larger scandal that this is just how Facebook operates as a matter of course.
As I understand, the original concept of advertising was to inform people that the product existed. (The contemporary form would be listing it on Amazon/Ebay/Etsy/Ali Baba, or putting up a website so a search engine can index it.) It’s developed into trying to persuade you to buy s product.
Informing potential customers of a product is a win for both the producer and the customer, which would make accurately targeted advertising good. But my experience is that advertising is inaccurately targeted (but I do try to limit how my data gets out there). My biggest complaint about internet advertising is the prevalence of financial, healthcare and other scams. The financial scam ads led me to abandon the Yahoo Finance website; I would have hoped that a least a finance website would have attempted to control quality.
I work for a company doing online and cable advertising so I am aware of a lot of these issues in that specific context.
Online advertising is due for a bump of some sort. The problem right now is that the people running the ads are ignoring ad density issues. If you display one ad that is worth 10 cents then putting 2 ads on the page makes each ad worth less then 10 cents because the viewers attention is divided and the viewer is annoyed. How much less is an open question and as far as I know has not really scientifically analyzed and isn’t tracked. There are also page quality issues, how smoothly does the website flow around the ads. Sites that work well are less annoying the ones that work badly.
Lightly targeted ads are good. This insures you get ads in a language you likely know and favors products you are more likely to want. Highly targeted ads are not, for a number of reasons.
The profile they are targeting ads off is often not good enough. If you are being shown ads for stuff you are not interested in buying the advertiser is wasting money and your time is being wasted. The profile often lags a bit, showing you ads for cars because you have been searching for cars online. But by the time they are showing you ads you may have already made your decision. Even if the profile is correct it may result in you being shown ads for stuff that your not going to buy. There is no point in showing me ads for computer parts because it isn’t going to influence what I buy, it’s a field I know a lot about. Again wasting time and money. A really precise profile likely includes information that should be private, such as medical information or your home location and contact information.
JM, ads are definitely trying to target the location of the computer (except at least in my case they end up targeting the location of the store where the computer was bought) – I get messages specific to a zip code.
Many sites now offer to choose what kinds of cookies to allow – I usually allow only essential cookies, so at least from those sites I don’t expect ads to be targeted.
The ads I am most likely to actually look at with some care are the coupons sent in the mail by Valpak. That’s because those envelopes are likely to contain a coupon to Big 5, which we are likely to use, so we see some of the others while searching for that one.
In my work, we were sending snail mail, so obviously we had location data. I also mentioned using credit data–and honestly, I don’t know how people feel about that as a privacy issue. I was taught to use credit cards for every transaction, specifically because it produces credit data, which improves my credit score. So at least in theory, my credit data is something that I have actively sought to make available.
So that’s another reason I can’t really speak to the privacy issues. Because I’m speaking from a bit of work experience, and in my domain the privacy issues weren’t quite the same.
This is a definite, and pretty much a necessity for social media. Having an up-front fee is exclusionary, as most people not only won’t but can’t pay it, and almost none can pay one for each and every separate thing they ever use online. As you noted, network externalities mean that paywalling a social media site will kill it.
Besides ad-supporting them, the only other options seem to be to go the Fediverse decentralized route, to eliminate some of the scaling costs and get more of the remaining costs borne as in-kind contributions of volunteer labor (though this can still be done in some cases with centralized sites, for example Reddit’s moderation), or to publicly subsidize it, which leads to …
This has a giant problem: we don’t want the USA, or any other single country, controlling an important thing for the whole world. It would have to be subsidized through some international org, with countries chipping in based in part on ability and in part on population or something. A bit like how NATO is funded, then.
As for ad targeting, beyond a bit of geographic and perhaps demographic targeting I suspect it’s nearly 100% worthless. This is also the considered position of Cory Doctorow, coiner of the word “enshittification”.
Bob makes an important point, and in connection with the above, and the high failure rate of ads to produce a sale, I think it may even be understated. I suspect that the primary function of advertising is, and always was, as payola/bribery for favorable editorial stances. The existence of ads that can’t possibly lead to a sale lends credence to this. The classic example is a full-page spread for, say, Boeing in a daily newspaper. How many readers are going to come across that ad and decide to go out later and buy themselves an airplane? Seriously. Then you’ve got ads like that TV spot that keeps incessantly asking “Do you know what Contrave is?” No, I still don’t, because you never get around to telling me. I don’t know if I am in the market for whatever that is or not because I don’t know what it is even for, because you’ve never said. And if I don’t know, it’s unlikely any typical random person who saw the ad does either, since you’ve given them the exact same information.
These ads aren’t meant to lead to a sale. They’re meant to buy influence with, traditionally, media organizations. Boeing and the newspaper have a tacit understanding that the big, lucrative Boeing advertising account will disappear if that paper doesn’t maintain a firmly pro-war editorial slant. The Contrave ad presumably keeps the TV station in favor of political positions that favor big pharma, and so on. With social media, it’s the moderation policy: notice how Facebook and most others have a strong conservative bias. You’re far more likely to have a post removed for supporting Palestine or opposing Cop City or pushing a nonviolent (or even antiviolent) moderate left position on some issue than you are for overt racism, Holocaust denial, or even violent ideation directed against minorities. They will much more often remove something that says “Black Lives Matter” than if the stated color were blue, or white. Some of this might be the inherent class inclinations of Facebook’s owners and principal stockholders but I bet much of it is bought and paid for. The wealthy will spend a lot to ensure that any popular social media site is a hostile environment for leftist organizing, in particular.
You might want to re-examine that assumption.
A new piece of research suggests publishers make just 4% more vs if they were to serve a non-targeted ad.
@10 anat: Yes, location is useful and easy to get. Unless you are using a VPN to hide your location the advertisers should be able to pin it down to roughly where you are. No reason to show you ads for stores in a particular city unless you reasonably close but I would rather they can’t pin down a person’s exact location.
@12 Bekenstein Bound:
The idea of advertising mostly as payola doesn’t work because much of the time the advertiser doesn’t buy the ads directly. What happens is that a company that wants to advertise a product on cable goes to a middle man company and says this is the profiles we want to show our ads to across the country. The middle company then works out what set of cable companies and channels will get the best coverage for the lowest price and runs the ads.
Even within direct orders there are a number of reasons for ads like that, including favorable editorial stance. Sometimes they are really aimed at investors, to get people to consider at buying Boeing stock. Sometimes they are aimed at politicians to get them consider Boeing for government contracts or to soften them up before Boeing asks for something.
Some ads are run just to improve a companies general reputation. A company that has been hit by bad news might take out one of those big positive ads just to soften the blow.
Sometimes it’s to make people aware of Boeing as a big successful airplane company. A lot of car advertising works that way. An ad for a specific car is unlikely to make a person go out and buy that car but it is likely to make them consider that company when they are looking for a car.
When it comes to snail mail ads, those ads could not possibly function as “bribery for favorable editorial stances”. We were, in fact, interested in making sales. And printing mail is expensive. Imagine how many more companies are willing to pay for ads to make a sale when they don’t even need to print anything.
@sqlrob,
Your link is broken. Also, highly skeptical of generalizing from a study that says that, because it’s extremely dependent on what is being advertised.
Siggy, broken, yes. But, easy enough to copy/paste-search: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/
At a high level, as I see it the advertisers have three possible, different, goals. And there can be some overlap, but not necessarily very much. First, to introduce customers to their product (people don’t know about it). Second, to grow the market share of their product (people have heard about it, but not everyone who could use the product is using it). Third, to protect against other products taking market share (everyone knows about the product and uses it, but there is a new product claiming to offer the same benefits).
A advertisement for an automobile may be doing a couple of these things. Everyone already knows about Ford, but to make certain people still consider Ford as an option Ford needs to keep their products in public view. That’s the third goal from the list above. But Ford may also be introducing a new vehicle model, the 2025 F150 Pickup, so the advertisement may also be serving the first goal and introducing a new product.
At a high level I think this is the idea. Company has a desire to advertise it’s products, for any of the three reasons above. Company finds media the company thinks potential buyers will view. Company purchases advertising space from that media company in order to reach potential buyers.
But things go a little sideways when the media sees selling advertisements as a way to make a profit. While the goal of the advertiser doesn’t change, the goal of the media company is to convince companies that their media will reach potential customers for the company.
From what I can see, “targeted” advertising is an attempt by media companies to convince potential advertisers that they will more effectively reach their potential customers. They are offering complex algorithms to use partially known past behavior to predict future desires. What these algorithms don’t have is the motivations for past buying choices, which means they are largely operating on assumptions of aggregate behavior patterns. This makes it unlikely to accurately target individuals.
Does targeted advertising work? Probably in some cases. Does it have a higher response rate than other advertising? I doubt it. There are many factors leading to a consumer making a decision about which product to purchase, advertising is only one of those factors. Paco Underhill has studied a lot of these factors, and things like shelf placement in supermarkets can have more of an effect on which of similar products are purchased than price differences or out-of-store advertising.
Does advertising have an impact? Certainly. If people don’t know about a product, they won’t purchase it. Even if a person is searching for something to fill a specific need, if the product cannot be found it will not be purchased. Even if the product is never purchased, the advertisement can change a person’s behavior. I was recently looking at an advertisement from 1915 for a portable cider mill built in York Pennsylvania, but advertised in an paper in Australia. It is not inconceivable that this advertisement encouraged someone in Australia to plant some apple trees. The advertising changed behavior even if they never purchased the portable cider mill.
Is the impact of advertising diminishing in our modern world with advertisements interrupting and interfering with the activities we are attempting to be engaged with? E.g. popup advertisements, sidebar advertisements which require scroll-by to reach the article you are interested in, animated auto-play advertisements? I suspect that those types of advertisements are seen more as an irritation and given little attention. Advertisements which are suggesting items based on previous internet search behavior are likely ignored as well, either the consumer already found that product in their previous searches, or has made a decision and purchased the item they were looking for.
If you really wanted to do targeted advertising from previous internet searches, the way to do it is to identify peripheral items related to the original search. If someone is searching for motor oil and an oil filter, send them a targeted advertisement for some spark plugs. If someone is searching for vacuum cleaners, send them a targeted advertisement for carpet spot removers. I hate to say it, but that’s probably a problem which a LLM algorithm would be pretty good at. Would such a targeted advertisement generate more purchases? Maybe a little. But there are a lot of factors in a consumer making a decision to purchase something, and advertisements are probably not the driving factor.
Finally, a surfeit of advertising isn’t unique to our time. It is reported that when G.K. Chesterton saw Times Square at night for the first time he said, “How thrilling it would be, if only one couldn’t read!”
@John Morales,
Thanks for the link.
At a glance, I concluded that a single glance is not enough to really understand what’s going on. The paper focuses on “behavioral” targeting, so we would need to understand what that is in relation to other kinds of targeting. It talks about value to a “publisher”–this appears to mean a single anonymous “large media company that owns numerous newspapers and magazines, along with the related online websites.”
If the publisher is receiving little value, that’s not necessarily a statement about the effectiveness of targeted advertising, it could be a statement about how the gains are distributed among different actors. The TechCrunch article appears to be taking this angle, saying Google and Facebook are taking the lions share of value. I don’t understand how this rebuts my (completely unsubstantiated) opinion that targeted ads are “better”, since I clearly wasn’t taking the perspective of a publisher.
In my work, we had empirical data showing the value of targeting. That’s somewhat of a prerequisite to applying data science to the problem. Granted, sometimes we use proxy metrics which aren’t always accurate. Obviously I was working in a different domain, and we weren’t using “behavioral” targeting. But that’s just the point: there are all sorts of domains, and all sorts of targeting. Sometimes it will be ineffective, yes, and sometimes companies will overestimate the value, yes.
The value of targeting likely depends strongly on the cost per impression. Your prior work was in snail mailed flyers, which have a comparatively high unit cost. Targeting would be more valuable there than in print or TV, and much more valuable than online, where cost per impression is minuscule.
But it would also depend strongly on the accuracy of the targeting, and broad targeting would be more effective than narrow targeting. Say your direct mail campaign is in an area with 100,000 people. If you can narrow down to 10,000 people who are far more likely to be interested in your item than any of the other 90,000, you can slash 90% of your costs while losing only a few percent of your sales, a win if the margins on those sales are much lower than 90% of your advertising costs. Narrowing further to 1000 people is probably hard to do without losing a significantly bigger percentage of your sales, with only 1/10 the cost savings of the previous narrowing. Much less likely to be a win. In this case, no targeting (all 100,000) and narrow targeting (1000) are both probably worse than broad targeting (10,000). Again, in print and TV the cost per impression is much lower and online is much lower still, so slashing 90% of your advertising costs is much less likely to save more than you lose in margins on lost sales than in direct mail. Targeting is likely almost worthless there, and almost surely worthless online in particular. Given how people ignore (and outright block, much of the time) ads online, the only reason advertising online isn’t itself worthless is the extremely low cost per impression, combined with those non-sale desiderata like buying influence over editorial policy (which absolutely can be done through middlemen, given that middlemen evolve who cater to particular political/lobbyish wishlists, e.g. pro-war, so military-industrial advertisers can advertise via pro-war brokers who will pressure buyers to adopt pro-war slants/moderation policies).
As for search behavior, the thing that would seem likeliest to me to be at all effective is to advertise consumables that are related in some way to the previous search. If someone searched for barbecues recently, pitch them briquettes, propane, barbecue-friendly food items and associated stuff, such as sauce, and maybe nonconsumable associated items like barbecue tongs or a barbecue lighter. Lighter fluid would be another consumable to offer. But offering them barbecues is a bad bet, if they already purchased one. They probably don’t need two and it will be a long time before they need to replace the existing one.
The advantage with consumables is: you know they’ll need some, and even if they have some right now you know they’ll need more soon.
Individually-targeted advertising is pure, unalloyed evil.
When you look at a “traditional” advertisement — on TV, on a billboard or in a newspaper — you know everyone who looks at that advertisement sees the same thing. And if there is anything wrong with such an advertisement — perhaps it contains material that is offensive to some minority, or factual inaccuracies — then someone is bound to complain audibly. This social filtering mechanism ensures that traditional advertisements cannot contain offensive or inaccurate material without receiving pushback.
But on the Internet, where users have already identified themselves, it is possible to show an advertisement to just one person.
And if you can create a Social Media page which is used by a diverse group of people, all of whom know it’s a diverse group of people, you can create the false impression that they are all seeing the same advertisements, and cement it by really showing them some adverts that are the same, and some that depend who is looking at them.
And this is where the social filtering mechanism inherent in the operation of traditional advertising media breaks down. Your reactionary neighbour knows you post on the local gossip pages. One day, and — by the magic of targeted advertising — unbeknownst to you, he gets shown an advert that is a bit racist, or just plain false. You would certainly have said something if you had seen it. He does not see you post any complaints about it, and mistakes your innocent silence for assent. He is now a little bit more emboldened to repeat in public what was shown in the video. The sentiment has been successfully laundered.
This is how people can be radicalised in plain sight, and it has already cost the UK its membership of the European Union.
@21, bluerizlagirl,
You make a good point, in that while generally companies who are looking to sell product for a profit may not benefit from targeted advertising all that much (in as much as there are a lot of factors which influence a purchasing decision for a specific good/service), groups which are interested in changing people’s opinion could use targeted advertising in much more subtle ways. With potentially longer term affects.
I don’t think companies like Coke-cola is likely to be interested in doing more than maintaining its market share. However, political and social issues could both be easier to target and easier to influence. As far as the targeting goes, people who may be sympathetic to an issue might already be posting or sharing their views on an issue. Even if those views are being developed and are open to change. So identifying people who may be marginally interested in social change may be easier than identifying a person who might want to purchase a new vacuum cleaner. Please note, I’m using the term ‘social change’ in a neutral sense, the desired social change does not have to increase personal freedom, it can be quite the reverse.
As a possible example, a person who cares a little about the issue of abortion, but has doubts about details of when a fetus is viable, or what a zygote is in the first place, could be identified by comments mentioning this. That same person could then be targeted with advertisements appearing to be truthful, but really subtly or not-so-subtly suggesting that a six-week old fetus feels pain. Advertisements which claim that most doctors feel abortion kills children. Advertisements which claim that woman who have abortions are doing so for entirely selfish reasons.
We typically call that propaganda, not advertising, but the same tools and the same methods are used. What makes it actually worse is that the tools of targeted advertising are probably more successful when used to disseminate propaganda than in selling a product.