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(I've worked in adtech for over 15 years.)

Advertising is just applied sociology, and sociology is just applied statistics. So statistically significant and unbiased sampling is what makes advertising work.

Highly-targeted and personalized ads are a crutch due to the fact that unbiased sampling is pretty much impossible on the internet. (There's a joke about this: "an online poll has shown that internet penetration has now reached 100 percent".)

Neither advertisers nor publishers actually want to collect high-resolution data, it's a huge cost with very little benefit.




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