Future of Advertising

As the blog should make clear, the header image is the opposite of what I expect advertising to be. This is because the advertising is on the extreme of being untargeted. But the ability of users to select what they see is likely to increase. If it does, organic advertising will triumph, and other forms of advertising will lose value.

In advertising, there is a spectrum of being intelligent and targeted, the intelligence of advertising is inversely correlated to privacy. That is, the more you know about a person, the better you can target advertising toward them, but also the less private is their information. This means that the most intelligent advertising knows everything about you, but you have very little to no privacy. Facebook and Google stand upon the extreme of completely unprivate. Minds on the other hand, stands on the side of privacy. It knows very little to nothing about you, as a consequence, paid advertising on Minds is will always tend toward being less effective.

I expect technology to go through two stages of advertising in the next 30 years. 1) Firstly, it will become partly specific and partly private, oscillating between the two, but ordinarily it will not go to the extreme of being completely intrusive, if it does, it will be considered a privacy breach 2) Secondly, it will become mostly organic. These two stages will most likely overlap, but I think the former will become dominant before organic advertising.

1) Advertising will become a mix between specific and private. There could might be money here right now, for those who put work into anonymous identity verification and connecting those identities with advertising.

As consumers, we actually want advertising to become more accurate, because then we receive suggestions for only the products we are likely to care about and we are less likely to get dozens of Viagra emails per day when this might not be particularly relevant to us for whatever reason that might be. Yet, telling an advertiser that we like music and Intergalactic wrestling(let alone anything regarding our hypothetically turbulent relationship with Viagra) will compromise our privacy, so we want to be able to tell advertisers separately that we like each of our interests, but without the advertisers making a connection between each of the different profiles. This is a compromise between better targeted advertising and privacy.

In order to control the level of privacy and security that each one of us want, everyone concerned with this issue will have dozens, hundreds, thousands of profiles per person, each with different, often overlapping sets of personal information, much of it will be fake, this is ok, this will be assumed, this is not fraud. These individual profiles will not so much represent individual people, but subscriptions, even projections of different parts of oneself, to advertisers. We can submit our food preferences to the supermarket, hobbies to the sports advertisers, and our Viagra requests to some dodgy guy called Sergei who is eerily close to his babushka. We already do this today(😏), but we generally do it with one Internet connection, one browser, one search engine, one profile. Each search request should ideally be performed by a separate personality, not I, but a part of I, a "monad" even, or an imitation of another. Each personality should have an employment history, a back story, a parent who never loved us, or maybe loved us too much and which might add rationality to our need for Viagra and lack of scruples in resisting Sergei in what increasingly appears not to be a purely business transaction.

This is step 1), and some of us(hypothetically) might be doing this right now(not that I am).

2) However the above is only step 1), if consumers gain the ability to protect themselves from advertising, then all directed advertising will become impossible. Examples of this consumer protection is improved server side rendering of websites and usability settings along with freer APIs and Open Source code, add blockers, aggregation of Social Media and probably most importantly, private search engines. These technologies could make advertising as we know it obsolete. This means that advertising will be fully to do with improving your search rank on various search engines, as well as building up a loyal customer base that will spread the word through their respective channels.

This has not happened previously because in the physical world, land exists. Physical space is limited. The digital world however, is magic, it is as you think it is, if you so wish that it is as you think it is. In the digital world, you can have anything you can imagine, ponies, rainbows, successful Marxism, even a woman who truly loves you. Thus, the barriers that the physical world had to advertising do not exist in the digital world. One can avert ones gaze from a website(theoretically) in ways that is not possible with physical land within your visual proximity.

Epilogue

This future world might seem as a dream world. A world of privacy, where no advertising except the organic has any effect. We may in fact appear as liberated from our captors. Yet, this might only come about in limited places and communities. If Governmental power prevails over the people, or rather, people prevail over other people, such technology might not be usable. Chips can be implanted. People can be tracked with Satellites at all times. There is likely to be an inevitable war between humanity. As the potential of neuroscience increases, perhaps even the heroic addage will vanish, you can destroy the body, but you cannot destroy the mind.

Gospodi pomilui.