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Advertising as we’ve always known it — large-scale campaigns predicated on instilling subconscious intuition in consumers — will die. What will rise from its ashes [will] be unlike anything we’ve seen before. It will not condition us to select from a menu of mediocrity, as it has done for centuries. Rather, the algorithms buried within the walls of companies like Google and Facebook will deterministically present us with our best options for everything from dinner to marriage, given the troves of user data they have at their disposal. At first, consumers may rebel, like they did with the advent of GPS in cars, or online shopping [4]. But as they realize that they are better served by allowing algorithms to take care of the decisions they once relied on their own autonomy to make, they will make the shift. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.
This new world will be marked by a monumental shift away from branding, which is already happening, a shift away from search, which is about to happen, but most important, and perhaps most unsettling, a shift away from trust in the user as the final indicator of their own desire. As we make this shift, and move towards a world in which data — and the mastery of its use — is king, ads will become deterministic. The companies that define this future will master the use of consumer data to inform ad delivery, and as they continue to amass user data, both their advertisements — and in turn, their data — will improve in tandem, until both are perfect. As this happens — and it will be a process, given that new consumers enter the world by the hundreds of thousands every day — our world will become one in which every consumer will be deterministically paired both with what they want, and what they need. In this new world, whether there will even be a difference is far from clear.
"every consumer will be deterministically paired both with what they want, and what they need."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday March 29 2017, @01:43PM (2 children)
This is possibly the most horrifyingly dystopian thing I have ever read. I hope not to live in a world where I am pressured to submit myself to the machine for my own good. Unfortunately, with targeted advertising likely to become exactly this good, that hope is now vanishingly small. And unlike most sci-fi, this future has a realistic, if not inevitable, path to soon becoming reality.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:06PM (1 child)
What could be wrong with all people doing exactly what machines tell them to do? Or replace "tell" with "subtly suggest". What could possibly go wrong?
Now assume that the algorithms are no longer created by humans.
People ordered around by machines. But the people think it is advertising and purchasing. Eventually the people wake up and realize they are pawns in the real world. Just a cog in the machine. And unnecessary cogs at that.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:25PM
Manna.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek