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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

There is also a flip side

There is also a flip side. While the point of advertising is to take your money, better advertising can also help you discover products you really need. For example, if they can guess when you car scheduled maintenance is, they can send you an ad related to it, and remind you that you need to do it, which is better than forgetting about it. I also have been notified of events I ended up attending and enjoyed, or received ads about food I really like. Did I spend more than I would have if it wasn't for these ads? Probably, but I don't consider going to an event I enjoy and eating well a loss of money. As for insurance companies, adjusting your premiums can also mean lowering them. Maybe not directly, but identifying risky customers allow them to propose a lower base rate because of the lower risk. Overall, that's unfair to those who are in the high risk group and can't do anything about it (normally that's when the government is supposed to intervene), but for you as a customer, it can be a good thing. …

Original discussionForget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You232 source comments · at import
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TeMPOraLHN

> Is there any foreseeable bad outcome for customers? Mostly: better advertising means you're most likely to be duped into wasting money on things you don't want, or making suboptimal purchasing decisions, making your life worse over time. But also: insurance companies and banks could use your grocery purchase habits to adjust your premiums or loan rates based on e.g. whether or not your purchases indicate a healthy lifestyle, a pregnancy, having kids, having some kind of medical condition, etc.

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mrguyoramaHN

Which is why ads have been getting clearly better, correlated with more and more tracking. Wait what? That's not the case and companies make way more money selling you heavily advertised, white-labeled goods that are stupidly cheaply made and not even by the brand selling them to you, than they could ever make by actually advertising to you with exactly what you need? People don't "need" or even "want" that much. That's why every advertising campaign basically forever is always about making you feel inadequate as you are.

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JohnFenHN

> better advertising can also help you discover products you really need. They can do this without spying on me. > A bit of advertising is a good thing I have no real beef with advertising as such (although the vast majority of it is unhelpful). My problem is just with the spying.

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TeMPOraLHN

You're right about the positives that could happen, and that occasionally do happen. The problem is what happens most of the time . As you mentioned yourself, advertising is adversarial. It's a negative-sum game between competitors, and has a lot of nasty externalities. I have some more specific thoughts on this, and after posting them on HN many times, I eventually collected them in a blog article: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

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