No, your free will isn't zombified by digital advertisers

That's the ultimate philosophical takeaway from this long piece about the lack of effectiveness of online advertising.

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

But beyond snark, there are real points.

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

And the authors go on to tsk-tsk best-selling pop philosopher Yuval Noah Hariri:

An essay by best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari on "the end of free will" exemplifies the genre:  according to the Israeli thinker, it’s only a matter of time before big data systems “understand humans much better than we understand ourselves."

Now, Harari may have been operating in part from a starting point of traditional social psychology, which talks about the "blind self" or similar, being a part of ourselves that others know better than we do.

And that's true.

But, that's people. 

Not algorithms based on selection bias. More on that? 

The authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

Because the target audience for a lot of ad sales is small, you have to run large sample sizes on testing before you can figure out if you've got something real. The audience for some new Max Factor lipstick is nothing like presidential polling. Rather, going the other way, the authors compare the rarity of many product needs to that of cystic fibrosis.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

In other words, you, I and Yuval Noah Harari can all relax. We still have something similar to free will. It may have some psychological constraints, but nothing more than those "nudges" above.