03 Apr 2026 Search

Eaon Pritchard writes,

By way of a short recap, a big part of the problem of tracking and targeting is information asymmetry. When a brand appears to know more about you than you’ve consciously shared, it triggers the same evolved instincts we use to detect threat, manipulation, or social imbalance. In evolutionary terms, that’s not a ‘conversion opportunity’. That’s a red flag to our stone-age minds.

What is designed as ‘relevance’ is not the same as trust (implicit as it is).

Personalization and trust tend to have a negative correlation. Rory Sutherland uses the example of a wedding ceremony. You don’t go around and tell people one by one that you’re together, you make a big deal of the celebration. And possibly the worst-personalized advertising medium, Little League sponsorships, is the best at trust building. Leagues keep photos and records, making team sponsorship a bad deal for a fly-by-night company and a good deal for a business that expects to offer win-win products or services in the long term.

Where did it all go wrong? Michael Farmer, in Why Have Most Advertisers Suffered From Slow Brand Growth Rates Since 2009? Ten Major Reasons, points out the problem of advertiser growth since 2009, when 2/3rds of major advertisers saw their sales growth rates fall to well below the nominal GDP growth rate of 4.7% (2.4% inflation plus 2.3% real growth).

Dr Augustine Fou writes, Complementary case evidence of large advertisers cutting significant portions of digital spend with little or no impact on business outcomes suggests that a meaningful share of digital investment is often non‑incremental.

A legitimate company like P&G (2009-2024 CAGR 0.6%) can, to use a polite expression for slop ads, create fast cycle content to drive traffic, but a scammer can always do it better. A scammer can use the best AI slop service and surveillance advertising available this minute, but P&G is always going to be a number of steps behind, because of the levels of approval needed to use some new AI slop service or ad personalization scheme. Often, by the time a big company can get on something, it has already been superseded or EOLed.

Any advertising medium that’s

  • worth paying for from the seller side and

  • worth paying attention to from the buyer side

has to be based on something that a legit seller can do better than a deceptive seller. Too often, legit companies are trying to compete with deceptive ones in a “move fast and break things” fight that they will lose. Christina Garnett writes,

Customers are more selective because we taught them to be. Their trust is thin because we diluted the very concepts that once signaled honesty and care. They can see when outrage is manufactured, when vulnerability is scripted and when belonging is offered only to drive metrics.

The tricks aren’t tricking anyone anymore. Consumers just feel manipulated.

P&G can make better dish soap than other companies, but they’re at a disadvantage in AI slop and surveillance advertising. Brian Jacobs writes,

If you believe everything you’re told, advertising is really very straightforward. Give your budget to META (insert the name of your favourite platform here). Send over your objectives and brief. META (or whoever) will deploy a magic AI tool, which will design a selection of ads. The alternatives will be pretested. They will then place the winning execution across their individual channels.

Meta advertising works better for a random drop-shipper than for an established firm with an actual detergent research lab. Meta ads work fine for a while, if the point is to trick people into voting for crooks or buying crap. A recent Meta success story, the “fastest growing company in history”, is a weight loss scam that makes up physician testimonials and uses face-swapped patient photos. (See The back story behind the first “$1.8 Billion” dollar “AI Company” by David Marcus.)

Meta’s personalized advertising is auction-based, and we have known since 2006 that auction-based ad platforms eventually bid up rates to extract all the profits from the advertisers that use them (Jakob Nielsen’s analysis applies not just to search, but to other auction-based designs including RTB and social). If typical advertisers on Meta’s sites and apps were anywhere near as successful as the outliers that make the news, then The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs wouldn’t be a thing. And it’s not just the small-timers. Relying on auction-based advertising is showing up as a problem for well-funded firms too. Allbirds are canaries in the Meta coal mine, along with Oddity Tech, which went all in on personalized cosmetics on Instagram.

The winners in the surveillance advertising game are the Big Tech platforms that design for scams and the scammers they enable. In The Myth of the Unwanted Internet, Julian Morris asserts that the Internet “solved for trust” by adding user-tracking features. But that doesn’t describe the Internet as we currently experience it. In fact, we’re in an economy-wide trust collapse because of decisions to add surveillance features that give deceptive companies advantages over legitimate ones. A 2025 FTC report showed a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024—before the change of administration to one that’s more friendly to large, deceptive companies. Thanks to decisions by politicians to prioritize “innovation,” the scammers even have their own payment platform, “crypto ATMs” and music scene.

It’s time for a more market-aware approach to privacy legislation and regulation. Instead of making the unrealistic assumption that surveillance advertising has some kind of economic benefit that needs to be balanced with user privacy interests, we have to recognize that consumers and legitimate companies are not on opposite sides, but cooperating players in a game with the goal of making win-win deals. The opponents are the Big Tech companies and the scammers. And the problem isn’t specific data practices that could be replaced by clever but pointless math. Privacy people need to bring more and thicker PDFs to the privacy bill hearings. More: advertising personalization: good for you?