Now, more than 90 percent of spending on digital display ads happens through automated software.

In the past, buying a newspaper or television ad usually involved calling up a representative who would manually review and place the ad. “Anytime you lower the barrier to entry, you’re going to get lower-quality entrants,” said Jessica Fong, an assistant marketing professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. And the technology is supposed to filter out misleading or dangerous pitches. People interested in shoes are intended to get ads for sneakers and loafers, and not repeated pitches for courses teaching seduction techniques. On YouTube, ads impersonate popular video creators to scam viewers, a phenomenon that has irked Elon Musk and that YouTube says it is addressing.Īdvancements in digital advertising technology were meant to improve users’ experience. On Instagram, ads from Amazon promote unrecognizable contraptions from obscure merchants, echoing the shopping site Wish, which was notorious for bizarre ads.

Also: fraudulent ads for discount drones, spots hawking crude gaming apps and promoted posts from people ranting about “puppet masters” and “the slave mind.” There were ads for T-shirts printed with a horse’s head superimposed on a heartbeat line, served to someone who does not ride horses nor particularly like them. Recent ads on Twitter, as described by users, have made the platform feel like a tabloid magazine or the haunting ground of Ron Popeil, the inventor of wares people didn’t know they needed including the Veg-O-Matic, the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler.

Link advertising