Targeted advertising: wasteland or panacea ?
"Consumers are continually making choices among products, the consequences of which they are but dimly aware. Not only do consumers lack full information about the prices of goods, but their information is probably even poorer about the quality variation of products simply because the latter information is more difficult to obtain."
-- "Information and Consumer Behavior", Philip Nelson, 1970.
See also, Kihlstorm & Riordan, "Advertising as a Signal" from the Journal of Political Economy (1984).
In today's world of data driven custom targeted advertising,
the better online advertising is, the less valuable it is.