>US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara,[3] who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important.
Sentiment analysis is a real thing. Of course collecting poll data on questions like "How much do you approve of the US Air Force turning large parts of your country to a moonscape? Rate from 1 to 5" probably wouldn't have gone over so well.
On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
... but if you can't collect data on them, you can't target ads to them or sell their data elsewhere, and therefore they're worth nothing to you.
At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.
Actually I think it's the opposite - online advertising is so ineffective all this micro-targetting is the minimum required to persuade people to throw their money away. In reality how do I target someone in New York? I buy an ad in the NYT.
It's frequently ineffective because it's frequently done mindlessly, because it's possible to do so at enormous scale for low cost.
The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and pay the site. That does happen, and you can find quite a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the majority.
A: There’s no way to gather data on that so it’s not a thing.
This is the problem with “data driven” decision making in a nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I’ve worked for.