OK Maybe I just don't see ads often because I have them blocked so hard but the little box that shows ads in the CurseForge start up screen on Minecraft caught my eye. It's google adsense. I saw:
Ad from local college they want people to apply to teach STEM
Thriftbooks
Discount on makeup and brown foundation
I was disappointed there were no ads for antkeeping products. But this is CREEPY. Is this the current typical state of ads?
@futurebird One morning I sat with my son and his friend to watch a Formula 1 race. The mortgage ad featured a Black couple. The car ad focused on a Black driver. The food ads? Same demographic. I was wondering if there was something I didn’t know about Ferrari’s fan base, when I realized that my son’s friend was streaming it to my television from his laptop. While the scenes were a refreshing change for this white guy’s eyes, having the thoroughness of ad tailoring revealed was unsettling.
It also totally misses what made some of the ads in the 80s and 90s so popular with black consumers. It's not that I need to see a black person using your product, it's that you choose to show that to EVERYONE because why should it matter?
When they put "diversity" in targeted ads it's not really diversity at all. (I guess for a makeup foundation ad it makes a little sense but the rest of it is just bunk. )
When My Little Pony had a black girl in their ad in the 80s my mom broke her rule about "plastic junk toys" and let me get it. It was THAT big of a deal. I'm certain they noticed the way such ads could drive sales in new markets.
They didn't understand what was making it work. It used to be that I could be happy that a black model got a job from such ads, but now they are probably all just generated so it just feels like being stalked by a creep who won't stop asking you out.
@futurebird ~15 years ago I worked on a product that did targeting advertising. We honestly had no idea who we were showing ads to, and we didn't care, because the targeting we could do was orders of magnitude more creepy than that. In practice it wasn't, but the specificity with which we could target people was... 🤯
Since then GPUs have gotten a lot faster, and there's a lot more data to feed into the system. So...
I've learned why no co should have this data / power since then. ;)
Someone suggested pi-hole. Yes, it'd probably work, but if you want the same functionality (plus some) with no geekery & in a form that will work on ALL your devices, check out https://nextdns.io/
@masukomi@futurebird the funny thing is that the ad tech firms are selling the idea of targeting by making themselves look more competent than they are, real profile data is messy and error prone, targeting often just sells ads for the thing you just bought, which is laughable.
@raven667@futurebird that’s sloppy low effort ad targeting. We were showing people ads for things they weren’t even thinking about yet, but that they WOULD start shopping for in the near future (even if we didn’t show them ads). And again, that was 15yrs ago.
@raven667@futurebird to be explicit: this was not hype or speculation. We had the data to back it up, and we were constantly testing the validity of our predictions against actual user behavior.
@futurebird YUP, the Trouts use Curseforge too. My ads are random af though, as I have personalized ads turned off. I haven't de-googled yet, so I figured I'd at least do the bare minimum.
We played RLCraft into the dirt. Youngest fry likes skyblock and compactClaustrophobia, old one likes BedWars. Can't say I'm a big fan of any of those, but I try. What're you folks playing, I'm searching for a new pack, and I trust your taste!
Add comment