The Washington Post is preparing for post-cookie ad targeting
All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads.The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context.What is the true purpose of this? The true purpose is psychological control and manipulation, as well as making additional money with the data beyond ads.Psychological manipulation gives the ability to actually create demand. And this is what this is about, because that's the only way to actually increase revenue in a meaningful way.If you can target a person everywhere on all channels, and all the time, you can do things that are not possible with simple contextual ads, and the profiles that are being created are for lots of different purposes, not for ads.I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$.