Yeah, this is true even today. Many advertisers are competing to be the thing that people buy. This is why many ad systems have naturally evolved into a bidding based system.
All of this just increases the base bid. If you don't pay the ad platform whatever they ask, you are simply invisible to whoever uses chatgpt to search for things they want to buy.
This is true for all improvements in targeting ads. Because the platform is in a position where they can rent-seek.
The marketing costs of running any consumer company simply "inflates". For example with LLMs, people can control the number of results they see, which is a stark difference from previous ad serving systems. Meaning the bids get even more fierce since if you're not in the top three, you might as well not exist.
The question is whether or not increasingly better targeted ads provide increasing value to the consumer. If it does, then great, the ever "inflating" ad economy is justified. But my opinion is that they don't. This is why I think major ad agencies have to bolt it on to an existing useful service. Amazon, instagram, google's services, etc,. In that sense, it is unaccounted inflation. A "correct" economy would involve paying directly for the service they are using based on what they value that service at. Instead of a random disconnected marketing economy inflating without account to cover their costs. If someone is actually keeping track of this.. and increase in cost or reduction in quality of every product we buy (due to the company passing on marketing costs to us...) actually is <= the cost we would otherwise pay instagram, google, etc,. then great. I think it would be wildly off the mark though!
Yeah, this is true even today. Many advertisers are competing to be the thing that people buy. This is why many ad systems have naturally evolved into a bidding based system.
All of this just increases the base bid. If you don't pay the ad platform whatever they ask, you are simply invisible to whoever uses chatgpt to search for things they want to buy.
This is true for all improvements in targeting ads. Because the platform is in a position where they can rent-seek.
The marketing costs of running any consumer company simply "inflates". For example with LLMs, people can control the number of results they see, which is a stark difference from previous ad serving systems. Meaning the bids get even more fierce since if you're not in the top three, you might as well not exist.
The question is whether or not increasingly better targeted ads provide increasing value to the consumer. If it does, then great, the ever "inflating" ad economy is justified. But my opinion is that they don't. This is why I think major ad agencies have to bolt it on to an existing useful service. Amazon, instagram, google's services, etc,. In that sense, it is unaccounted inflation. A "correct" economy would involve paying directly for the service they are using based on what they value that service at. Instead of a random disconnected marketing economy inflating without account to cover their costs. If someone is actually keeping track of this.. and increase in cost or reduction in quality of every product we buy (due to the company passing on marketing costs to us...) actually is <= the cost we would otherwise pay instagram, google, etc,. then great. I think it would be wildly off the mark though!