I did have other things to do tonight than write about advertising. Again. But g’damn, folks. Can we get our shit together?
I know Google thinks it is doing something about it. But that Chrome feature you call ad blocking? Well, OK, there’s some good in it — it even addresses the issue I’m on about right now, sort of*. But come on. It has no power unless you block ads in Facebook’s feed, amiright?!!! (Wink!)
Read MoreArtificial intelligence is making its entry into our lives right now — and, as with so many other innovations, it isn’t coming in through the door everyone expected. Sure, eventually we’ll all ride in self-driving cars on our permanent vacations from our jobs that are being done by machine intelligences. But for now, the AIs in our lives are going to be very busy with far more mundane work: delivering — and blocking — ads.
You already know that the ads you see in your browser and on your phone are selected via the complex interaction of bidding algorithms working from targeting data. You may also already be running an ad blocker that tries to speed the loading time of pages you want to read by bypassing all of that advertising machinery.
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