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Comment by biztos

4 days ago

> Advertising requires good user models to work…

…and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…

3 comments

biztos

Reply
neya  3 days ago

Yes, but still, targeting is done even in billboards based on the location's demographics based on census data. It's not random. Some countries in Asia (like Singapore, Malaysia) have digital bill boards to target certain demographics based on the time of the day or the estimated crowd demographic at a given bus stop. And a few of them even track eyeballs to count "views" of the ad.

  • biztos  3 days ago

    I admit this is a factor I hadn't much considered. I'm sure at some point, if not already, the data collected by your phone will enable the equivalent of a tracking pixel on your physical location, so you can get personalized ads when you step into the subway car: the system will quickly evaluate which rider is most likely to spend money based on ads, and on what, and then an auction will be run in two nanoseconds and the winner will show their 10-second transit clip. Oof.

    The saddest part is, the old kind of advertising worked just fine, before all the companies got addicted to AdCrack.