“any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services“
This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
> most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product
If we look at the top 10 commercial for this super bowl[1], which is arguable the most money spent on advertising, it's Booking.com, Ram Trucks, Made by Google, Yahoo.com, Marvel Studios, Bud Light, NerdWallet, DoorDash, Doritos, Squarespace.
I'm sure all of those companies know who their competitors are, and the audience already knows about their products. The ads are just trying to jump to our forefront of attention.
> and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.
This is very true.
However, as Facebook ads are showing me both dick pills and boob surgery offers, and legal advice for giving up a citizenship I don't have (and even then only available in a country I don't live in), and foreign government announcements that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned in that country…
I'm not convinced that this is in any sense "solved" by the huge quantity of surveillance that even Facebook has.
I mean, these advertising profiling errors are what I'd expect in a university student project introducing AI as a concept, not a megacorp whose main monetisation strategy is selling attention to advertisers. Even a classifier itself built by an LLM ought to do better than this when using only my name and GeoIP data.
This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.