squarewave said:
It's not clear that ad is political actually. My guess would be that it's for a mortgage re-finance but they threw in a Rump reference as click-bait.
The unfortunate reality is that 90% of ads have some kind of issue whether it be click-bait, deceptive or just downright fake. Everyone should just know that at this point and ignore them completely.
So that makes my "honest" ads the exception. 8)
I often keep a TV set running in the background and when the ads are too irritating to just ignore I FF through them with my DVR. The few I inadvertently see make me wonder how dumb is the target audience for these (ASSuming the advertiser is profitable, not always a given).
The logical solution would be to just require a small payment from each user to disable ads but because it's impractical to do that with every site people just use an ad-blocker and that ruins the whole model.
Sometimes I click on irritating ads to waste more of their money.
My hope is that one day all activity can be attributed to ISP accounts and then do micro-payments. Meaning your ISP will just charge you a tiny amount of money based on what you're viewing and then some service handles payments from ISPs to sites and downstream to content owners. Of course that's a little tricky because it would require some kind of global authorization service which has privacy issues and breaks decentralization. But in reality it would just be a reorganization of what we already have (Google and Facebook and whoever are authorization services and CAs and DNS centralized services) and there's no reason why someone could not have multiple identities with varying levels of anonymity.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. I have long suggested micro postage for sending email to crash the economic business model of spam, if robo callers had to pay for calls that model would collapse too. Alternately we could receive credit for accepting emails or calls to offset the cost of personal emails we send. This would likely be zero net cost to normal users with only large mailers incurring costs.
I have to wonder sometimes if it is just me (I'm old and cranky)... I get really irritated by targeted advertising, but perhaps the generation raised while glued to screens suggesting what they should watch, listen to, and think(?) are less offended. Targeted advertising is rationalized as a benefit (for whom?).... no thank you.
JR
PS Ironically perhaps I suspect the big advertising brains these days are working in politics. You can tell how similar the words and language used by like minded talking heads and politicians are, changing talking points almost daily, suggests to me that precise words and messages have been vetted by focus groups to paint the intended emotional picture, and coordinated if not officially, informally through opinion leaders. I suspect both sides perceive this from the other.