Category: Inquiry

As I write this, the weather is a lot better than it was since I wrote my first post back in mid-February. So why not take a gander at some literature about digital advertising ethics in the great indoors?

Just as a reminder, the question that we’re posing is “is it really so bad for digital advertisers to have our data since it’s curated to our interests?”

Here are the conclusions we can draw based on a general literature review!

Conclusion #1: Advertising in general has always been ethically questionable

In an article for the Journal of Promotion Management, Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart and Jan Griffin note that consumers have always had negative perceptions of advertising.

In particular, internet advertising has been compared to gigantic billboards on highways, and with no regulation for how ads can be placed and displayed (note that governments can regulate the content),¹ while consumers feel bombarded by these ads, advertisers feel motivated to create ads that are catchy and acceptable by their audiences.

Millennials, as the cohort who has lived through the most digital advertising in their lifetimes (internet advertising began in 1994), hold particular negative views on digital advertising, since they have also lived in the heyday of television advertising in their childhoods, then a time of cascading internet advertising as they enter into adulthood. Interestingly, they also are the cohort the most tolerant towards internet advertising, accepting it as part of their realities of being digital citizens.²

It’s this laissez-faire attitude that advertisers are able to penetrate and exploit by creating avenues for more addictive content and campaigns that approach the line of being ethically questionable, since there is no other alternative that has such incredible accuracy (and in most cases, also with precision) than advertising.

Conclusion #2: Digital advertising is incredibly effective

I bring up the point on accuracy again here. Charlene D. Elliott and Emily Truman from the University of Calgary note that food advertising on digital platforms amongst teenagers in Canada is incredibly accurate.

From being able to target specific genders of teenagers depending on what their platform of preference is, exploiting trends or using their favourite influencers to promote products from Starbucks, Skip the Dishes or Circle K, there have been studies that suggest that this relationship between teenagers and food advertising that food intake in this cohort increases along with these advertising campaigns.³

The federal government has identified a dramatic increase in childhood and youth obesity in the last 30 years. With internet advertising starting 31 years ago, I don’t suggest an explicit correlation between internet advertising and increased childhood obesity, but I also don’t believe that it is out of the question to suggest that this effectively accurate advertising is going to bring the number down anytime soon.⁴

Conclusion #3: Everyone has ethical responsibilities when it comes to digital advertising

Being in an election cycle means that we’ll be getting lots of conflicting information through digital platforms over the next two weeks. Just like with all advertising, misleading digital advertising has its consequences too.

Other countries have strict guidelines that regulate online advertising that originates from their country. The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority takes responsibility for policing ads to ensure their accuracy:

For the most part in Canada, advertising, including and especially those online, is an unregulated industry, meaning that neither the government nor advertisers have oversight over claims made in advertising. It’s what makes ads like this one I saw on Facebook this morning possible:

When I clicked on this ad (knowing it was probably fake, considering the incredibly partisan headline allegedly from the CBC and the poor photoshop job), the page looked like this:

This is a pretty convincing ad. If I wasn’t so vigilant, I would have thought it was actually the CBC, but take a look at the URL at the top of my screenshot… that doesn’t seem like a CBC URL. In fact, this entire page is an ad for a shady financial trading platform.

Yet despite that, no one except the consumer is responsible for this. Meta is complicit in allowing this ad to be published, this trading platform is equally unethical in their dealing of impersonating a reputable source.

In 2025, it might be hard to impose a sense of responsibility on corporations, but research in the area of digital marketing basically begs for governments and the advertising industry to create any sort of regulation and restore balance from the consumer to sift through what is true and what is not in an ad to creating honest, equitable claims that actually make advertising more tolerable.⁵

1. Faruk Tanyel, Elnora W. Stuart & Jan Griffin, “Have “Millennials” Embraced Digital Advertising as They Have Embraced Digital Media?,” Journal of Promotion Management 19, no. 5 (2013): 652-673, https://doi.org/10.1080/10496491.2013.829161. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Charlene D Elliott and Emily Truman, “Food marketing on digital platforms: what do teens see?,” Public Health Nutrition 27, no. 48 (2024): 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980024000235. ↩︎
4. Government of Canada, “Childhood obesity,” accessed April 14, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/childhood-obesity/childhood-obesity.html. ↩︎
5. Sonia Dickinson-Delaporte, Kathleen Mortimer, Gayle Kerr, David S Waller, Alice Kendrick, “Power and responsibility: Advertising self-regulation and consumer protection in a digital world,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 54, no. 2 (2020): 675-699, https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12295. ↩︎

I’ve stumbled upon a genre of videos on YouTube where people purposefully engage with targeted ads on social media and review the products, usually in a humorous tone.

This got me thinking: what message do these types of videos say about our relationship with targeted ads: both in the way that these videos portray them, and the fact that they are used as content?

Video 1: Safiya Nygaard (consuming ads)

Beauty and lifestyle creator Safiya Nygaard’s video bought the first five products that were targeted to her through TikTok ads:

• Butterfly pea loose-leaf tea
• Pizza Hut tracksuit
• Refurbished electronics bundle
• Personal earwax camera and extractor
• Wireless automatic curling iron

The first half of the video was her establishing her methodology, but more importantly, trying to contextualize it through statements like this:

“Though I wouldn’t say that buying returned electronics fits perfectly into my interests, we have been [making content about] an Amazon return store (like a liquidation store), and I have liked/saved a few videos on this topic for use in our YouTube video: so maybe that’s why TikTok think that I am into deal-tok.”

I don’t buy a lot of hair irons, but I do interact with beauty content a lot, so I feel like this is a decently well-targeted ad. In general, TikTok seems to be full of hair curling hack products, and I am someone who really has no idea how to do my own hair, so the idea of a self-curling iron appeals to me.

What struck me about this is the uncertainty. As a content creator, I would presume that Nygaard is not a stranger to internet algorithms, yet I observed that she was not able to justify the reason why she got the items that she did with certainty. Nygaard attempted to connect the ads with her work habits, content consumption habits, and even launched the app multiple times during the day to see if that would make a difference. It is striking how elusive the “almighty algorithm” can be.

The second half of the video was about the products themselves. Two moments stuck out to me:

• The alleged low quality of these products

All of the items seemed to have some sort of quality issue: the Pizza Hut tracksuit was a poor quality, the earwax extractor didn’t extract as much as expected, the butterfly pea tea smelled poorly.

• Vague or unknown vendors

The names of all the vendors in the video: Pizza Hut, What The Box, Bee Gone Wax, SUMMERSKN, Harney & Sons. Other than the first and last brand on that list, these brands are pretty elusive. In fact, the three other brands no longer have an online presence, which Nygaard predicted were actually dropshipping fronts.

What Nygaard’s video about targeted ads tells us is that targeted ads are opportunistic: companies or individuals hop on fads perhaps without making due diligence of their actions in order to make a quick buck and disappear – a pathos and ethos appeal.

Video 2: Danny Gonzalez (creating ads)

Danny Gonzalez is a commentary YouTuber. The above video is part of a series called “BadAds” where he analyzes outrageous mobile game ads on social media; this video in particular has him creating three separate Google Ads on YouTube utilizing three of the advertising techniques he identified during earlier editions of this series.

Gonzalez’s perspective of creating Google Ads is unique and unprecedented on this scale, where many digital creators, especially those without external investment or capital, don’t typically use pre-rolls to advertise their niches, let alone to show their audiences the process of creating a campaign. The frustrations of creating these campaigns comes through in the billing issues, which makes me understand the work that goes into the process of these campaigns.

Speaking of these billing issues, it’s very interesting to understand the value that our attention has. At one point, Gonzalez reveals that an investment of $2,222.22 guarantees him between 570,000 to 1,700,000 views, at the cost of $0.01 to $0.03 a view to capture our attention for at least 5-15 seconds.

If we do the math correctly, our time is technically worth more: the BC minimum wage will be $17.85/hr on June 1, 2025, which comes out to $0.02 to $0.07 per view for the same amount of time. What do you think this could reveal about the value we hold to advertisers?

Of course, these two videos do not capture the entire story about our relationship with ads between the consumer, the creator, and the agency. But it is an interesting thought experiment to reflect on why we believe the world of targeted ads is so elusive that it would make for good content (Nygaard’s video has 8.1 million views; Gonzalez’s has 16.5 million).