I take it that you are speaking for your generation, yes? If so, I think much of my generation would not like gopher and does like facebook etc.
Re: advertising - you hate on data collection and at the same time call out "useless advertising." A core goal of data collection is to make advertising more relavant and with things like retargeting, I think things have improved for the better.
What targeted advertising means, apparently, is that if you look up Warby Parker once to see what they do, you'll get nothing but Warby Parker ads for the next month. I'm getting so sick of empty eyeglasses staring at me, you can't even begin to imagine. If that's targeted advertising, you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with it.
Amen. I don't think more than 10% of the targeted advertising I was exposed to ever appealed to me.
Buy some jeans on Amazon for a gift, get ads for all kinds of crappy jeans from Amazon. I like and wear one type of Levi's jeans. Not one Levi's ad ever hit me.
Buy some Little Mermaid crap for my niece, see above.
Buy Alabama Shakes debut album on ITunes, get all kinds of ads for music I wouldn't listen to in a dentists chair.
As much as you'd like to say that is not targeted, most people would agree your example qualifies as targeted advertising. More importantly, the conversion numbers agree. Retargeting is known to get 3-5x more clicks than non-re-targeted ads.
Could it be even better? Yes. Is it better than before we had adtech and data collection that make this possible today? Absolutely.
I guess saying "my generation" is accurate though I know a few in their 20s that dislike the social media crap.
Have you used gopher? You get the data you asked for and nothing else. 90% of the time, that is what I want. You like Facebook because you haven't been exposed to anything of higher quality with less money-grubbing involved.
Targeted advertising gets it wrong, at least for me. As a comment below stated, one look at Justin Beeber (my child looked up something quick on my computer) and I'm targeted with teen girl crap for weeks. And I really mean weeks. It drove me to spend part of a weekend setting up opt-out plugins for 3 different browsers.
I take it that you are speaking for your generation, yes? If so, I think much of my generation would not like gopher and does like facebook etc.
Re: advertising - you hate on data collection and at the same time call out "useless advertising." A core goal of data collection is to make advertising more relavant and with things like retargeting, I think things have improved for the better.