In the physical world they get those from the technologies we call clothing and shelter. There are no equivalents yet online. But ad and tracking blocking point in a civilized direction. More about this under the next item.

First, we aren't just "consumers," which Jerry Michalski calls "gullets with wallets and eyeballs." Nearly everything that makes us human is not reducible to an appetite for "content." And our gullets (which yes, we do have) are gagging on advertising we already hated and are being forced by adtech to hate even more.

"Curating" is a strange word for what ad blocking does, which is actually prophylaxis.

That's half-right. The battle is definitely going on, but what people are mostly not interested in — and hate at this point — are advertising and spying.

Actually, it's called Content Blocking, and it's only for supporting developments of apps that add selective forms of blocking to the Safari browser on iOS 9. Still, it's one form of chemo for the cancer of adtech.

Correct.

Almost none of the dialogue between companies and customers is conducted within advertising, which has been engineered from the start as a one-way thing. Even direct response marketing, the direct ancestor of adtech, was never about "dialogue." That job belonged to other corporate functions, especially sales and service.

No they don't. They assume you know shit, want to spy on them, and spam them with ads that are unwanted 100% of the time, irrelevant 99.x% of the time, and creepy the .x% of the time they're on target.

True. But that is not an invitation to spy on them, or to intrude into their lives with presumptuous and unwelcome messages.

I also suspect that much of what adtech sees as a crumb trail is really what they harvest by surveillance tech.

"Collected" makes it sound like marketers just follow people around the digital world, collecting leftover debris (which they do), rather than spying on them constantly with tracking files, beacons and other invasive tech that no person asked for and few welcome.

As for "less than stellar," yeah.

Do customers want marketers to have "better pictures" of them? Really? Most customers want the companies that serve them to have the information necessary for that service, but not much if anything more.

This is delusional marketing vanity.

There are a zillion ways for a company to connect with customers, starting with sales and service people and systems. If marketing loses "contact" based on spying, it's little if any loss (and mostly a relief) for the individuals being spied on, and possibly no loss at all for the company doing the marketing, given better ways to actually connect with customers.

No they don't. At least not from advertising, which is irrelevant or off-base most of the time.

We also got along fine without advertising on phones from 1876 to 2008, and as we get more control over our mobile devices, expect advertising to be the first thing we'll wipe off them.

It is insane (meaning disconnected from reality) to assume that more than a small minority of people will want ads of any kind of their phones, much less more relevant ones.

Even Google Maps' ads in the results of a search for "coffee shops" are rarely more helpful than the tiny red dots that mean "look at this one too."

No they don't. They expect to see retargeted ads for what they just bought, up to months or years after they bought it. Unless they use an ad or tracking blocker.

No, they expect marketers to know nothing other than how to push crap at them constantly, based on scant, inaccurate, irrelevant and abundant data that's harvested by unwelcome surveillance.

No, they expect marketers to want to know all kinds of crap about people, by every means possible, regardless of the manners (or even the legality) involved, and to assume what Nixon's team of creeps (way back when) called "plausible deniability" when asked if they know a person's actual identity.

Demands? Please.

It's simple. They want you to go away. Please. Go away.

You mean camouflage? When hiding already isn't working?

Or maybe a less targeted one. See Separating Advertising's Wheat and Chaff.

No, it happens because millions of people don't like being tracked and targeted — or any advertising at all.

Maybe. Good luck with that.

Actually, generated impressions have built brands from the beginning. Heard of Coke? McDonalds? Kodak? (Well, at least the branding worked.) The thing is, those impressions did not carry the burden of "engagement," and that was their charm. They just impressed viewers, listeners and readers. Simple, and effective.

You want engagement? Try doing brand ads that are so good they go viral and the market talks to itself about them without additional help from marketing dweebs. Example: Volkswagen of America's TV ads with the old ladies.

This is the sound of marketing smoking its own exhaust.

People don't want to be looked at, unless they have a damn good reason to trust who or what is looking.

This tells me something is for sale. Being a curious type, I see Pat LaPointe is the Chief Growth Officer for Resonate, which "makes marketing more relevant by uncovering why people do what they do." I'd rather stay covered, thank you. So would everybody else who would like to block whatever it is Resonate does to uncover them.

Wrong. If people have a real relationship with a company, they want it to be with sales or service. That's it.

For example, I have a great relationship with the service department of East Coast Volkswagen in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. I'm on a first-name basis with the guys there, who know their shit and have earned my trust and affection by treating us honestly and well. I've also seen and received the dealership's marketing materials, and couldn't care less about them. What matters is who I get on the phone when I need them, and how I'm treated. That's it, for approximately everybody who owns a car.

If companies took half of what they're wasting on adtech and put it into service improvements, they would have better (and more real) conversations with customers, and earn genuine loyalty, rather than the coercive kind that comprises every "loyalty program." (If you need a program to obtain loyalty, you're not eligible for the real thing.)

More smoked exhaust.

Who wants any company's message to be part of their "curated online persona," whatever that is?"

What's causing that alienation? Hmm?

And how about giving us back the "crumbs" you've collected from us? Betcha we can do more with it than you can. (We did with computing, networking, and much else.)

That's not a cocoon. It's my house. Stay out of it.

Those are points @AdContrarian and @DMarti have been making for years. Good to see it coming from the inside of adtech.

I just wish Ari hadn't wrapped his points inside a slam on IAB chief Randall Rothenberg. Randall has been in at least some degree of sympathy with what I've been saying here, for years, which is why he invited and paid me, twice, to give talks to IAB conferences. I didn't pull any punches at either of them, but I also made no difference. Adtech is a mania, and you can't talk a mania down. You just have to let it fail.