Traditional advertising was famously opaque. As the old adage went – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” So when digital advertising came about, the initial siren songs were about the promise of precise targeting and reducing the ‘wastage’. That siren song has not lost its appeal. More and more ad-tech firms pile on with newer and newer ways to target/ retarget by usurping personal data of unsuspecting consumers in morally repugnant ways, even if legal.
IoT, mobile phones, smart TVs, alexa…. the spying glass now comes in various shapes and sizes. And there are thousands of companies trying to incrementally increase the creep efficiency with each of these surveillance windows.

But to what effect?

1. A vast majority of ad-tech firms are not making much money. A ridiculously large share of the profit pie goes to only two players – Google and Facebook. So the prospects for ad-tech guys don’t look all that well. Their hope is for the laggard holding companies to buy them off.
2. Brands -Brands are waking up to the reality of indirectly funding fake news, hate mongers, trolls, sexual predators and so on with their programmatic buys. Even as the ‘inventory’ gets cleaned, they are getting a terrible deal on the rupee spent – for every rupee spent, merely 3 paise actually amounts to something useful. The rest goes to middlemen. So much for efficiency.
3. Trust – and most insidiously, more and more people are looking at media, at devices, at brands with suspicion. All the tracking, hacking, retargeting efforts have left people uncertain about the faustian bargain. the deal perhaps was not all that good. free apps, it turns out, are fairly costly. The utopia of ‘Choices of brands’ is turning into dystopia of incessant, insidious and inescapable commercial propaganda.
   How insidious you ask? Here’s an interesting article telling you exactly how insidious – apps, ad exchanges pervasively track  (beyond your permission, your imagination or your awareness of it) your behavior in hope of ‘monetizing’ your behavioral data.
   The creeps go so far as to use sonar or wifi to monitor your every move in a store to figure out your preferences. Without your knowing ad tech guys are monitoring where you are, what you do and much much more. The ‘big data’ then gets traded around to ‘third parties’, mixed with and analysed so as to know you better than you ever can know yourself. Right now, no can say for sure who in the world has what information about you and how could it potentially be used two years from now.
   Things you wouldn’t care for ten years ago like your routine, your choice of retail shops, your click streams, your idle time on phone etc, are now data points that can be weaponised to influence you. We are being forced to care for our inane details.
   A lot of ad-tech is built by people who either can’t fathom the societal context of what they are doing or don’t care. They are at best naive, at worst slimy scumbags who profiteer at the expense of ruining the internet for everyone.

Most likely, like EU, many other countries will tighten consumer laws (or worse! Use these surveillance system for government’s use like in China) and put an end to overt targeting.
This can’t end well for ad-tech guys for sure.

Essentially we must realise that targeting is a false goal. 1:1 connection might be desirable, but is sustainably possible only in certain ecosystems – physical, amazon prime perhaps to an extent and such. That means  monopolistic powers might gain further, but not without them too getting under the scanner.

Stop obsessing over Targeting.
Make advertising great again. 😛