Just because personal targeting is not used as often is not evidence it doesn't work.
Like I said, advertisers control their own campaigns and often start wide open to optimize, and they also don't want to pay for precise targeting. There's also a giant market for performance pricing is pay-per-click or other action. This means impressions are free so showing your ads to as many people as possible is the better approach.
If you want to see what personal targeting can do then you should look at lookalike modeling which finds similar people based on interests and behaviors and their propensity to carry out the same action. This technology has created many millionaires in the affiliate marketing world as campaigns would automatically keep finding similar people.
There are trillions of ad impressions and it's impossible for every single one to be perfectly tailored to you. That's just not how the industry works but business practices are completely different for technical capabilities. That's what this blog post and commenters do not understand, and your limited and faulty human memory is not somehow proof otherwise.
I'm sorry but you keep lecturing everyone here how big and sophisticated the ad industry is. Nobody denies it, no doubt there are billions in circulation and no doubt you can build something and sell it upstream to one of the giants (no matter how useful the giant will find it).
However I'm yet to see one good recommendation or ad shown to me. Like I said, very close to 100% of all advertisement shown to me, just as well as "friend" recommendations on social networks etc etc - all those things are so stupid and irrelevant that I refuse to believe there's something going on under the hood other than just plain stupid algorithms that probably work for some categories of consumers but not the others. The most relevant things happen only when I look for specific consumer products on Google and what I get is some ads in French which I don't even speak. Seems to me like tens of billions wasted. But of course capitalism is capitalism, they earn their money and they are free to spend it the way they like it for as long as it doesn't cross certain privacy rules in my country of residence.
Why do you say that "nobody denies it" when that is exactly what this blog post is doing?
You are claiming to remember all ads seen over decades. Even people with eidetic memory cannot do this, and in my experience people who claim to never see a perfect ad are the most susceptible to advertising. Influence is a lot more complicated than a simple banner ad that you think you've foiled by not clicking.
And I've explained several times why every ad impression is not perfect relevancy for you. What ads you see are a highly complex mix of the platform, running campaigns, targeting chosen by advertisers, optimizations in play, predictive analytics and propensity to action, pricing models, 3rd party data providers, inventory supply chains, creative formats, and many other factors. Trying to take trillions of ad impressions and derive the state of tech from it is both inaccurate and nonsensical.
Like I said, advertisers control their own campaigns and often start wide open to optimize, and they also don't want to pay for precise targeting. There's also a giant market for performance pricing is pay-per-click or other action. This means impressions are free so showing your ads to as many people as possible is the better approach.
If you want to see what personal targeting can do then you should look at lookalike modeling which finds similar people based on interests and behaviors and their propensity to carry out the same action. This technology has created many millionaires in the affiliate marketing world as campaigns would automatically keep finding similar people.
There are trillions of ad impressions and it's impossible for every single one to be perfectly tailored to you. That's just not how the industry works but business practices are completely different for technical capabilities. That's what this blog post and commenters do not understand, and your limited and faulty human memory is not somehow proof otherwise.