Pretty much every digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this. All the major digital ad platforms let you put tracking beacons throughout your page's sales flow so you can measure conversion rates directly and know exactly which ad campaign led to a sale; that's one of the major advantages of digital over print or TV.
You can certainly debate the ethics of advertising in general, and whether it's ethical to psychologically manipulate people into buying products they don't need and wouldn't have bought otherwise. I personally don't really want to first because I hold opinions on both sides and second because nothing's going to get resolved by such a debate on HN - it's a debate that's been going on for 120 years, though the media hegemony described in the article silenced it for many years. But as an objective fact, there's little room for debating the effectiveness of advertising. Ads work, even if they might be evil.
HN has been here for 120 years? I thought I was new to the game. I'm not sure ads work, or what data digital marketers use "digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this" other than the demand price which is a real time price that fluctuates way more than the 500 index stock market which, to justify their prices is still something that is of high debate much less a more voltatile market. I would say there is an overall input and an output, and if the financial output is multiple times that of the input the digital marketers can say theyve done their job, but they have very little data to show the objective intermediaries of linear data measurements for the flow of this information, which is why big data kafka and spark shops currently pitch over $300k/yr to anyone who can make sense of this data to a digital marketer in any consumable format on a monthly not even a weekly basis, mind you.
I'm not debating the ethics, just the reality of what granularity of data they can actually sign their id signature hash next to and say they verify this data, as opposed it to it being a roll your own analytics shop to meet whatever objective analytics data you are looking to meet for that quarter. I think we have all learned from the news on both sides in recent years that you can spin a story or a set of data however you want to, so I am not nearly as concerned with the anecdotal motives of any particular digital advertiser in the first place as much as I am with how not only your response but the entire industry in general shuns the idea that there is any alternative to this whatsoever and justifies all movements to the counter as "the only way" or the only logical ways and evil as such. I understand saying something is evil and those are the only companies who pay me six figures, and so therefore its okay for me, is very easy for most engineers to say now, but it's not something I'm willing to say.
I think if you want to justify this statement in general, you should explain to everyone how bidder as a service works, how its not a monopolized industry when it comes to ad spaces on websites ranked by domain popularity (3 players in the market 2 of the CEOs from Google SEO team) and how it correlates with rationale decisions from a digital marketers perspective and have measureable outputs other than "the extremely volatile price of this adspot which varies every 6 seconds was worth it based on the outcome this time, based on how targeted this ad campaign was, which was targeted based only on harvesting user data the user would not be ok with if they knew we were using this data". Honestly, justify your case here....and make sure you include the consent forms included in the onboarding process of every 12 yr old who has to click yes to create a facebook profile and what the implications are for the default oks in this case are...
Pretty much every digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this. All the major digital ad platforms let you put tracking beacons throughout your page's sales flow so you can measure conversion rates directly and know exactly which ad campaign led to a sale; that's one of the major advantages of digital over print or TV.
You can certainly debate the ethics of advertising in general, and whether it's ethical to psychologically manipulate people into buying products they don't need and wouldn't have bought otherwise. I personally don't really want to first because I hold opinions on both sides and second because nothing's going to get resolved by such a debate on HN - it's a debate that's been going on for 120 years, though the media hegemony described in the article silenced it for many years. But as an objective fact, there's little room for debating the effectiveness of advertising. Ads work, even if they might be evil.