By C C Pung
Justice of Peace
Tokoh Wartawan Sabah and FT Labuan
‘If the online commercials were intended to irritate, I think they are doing well.”
WE spend so much time everyday on one screen or another and are bombarded by all manner of commercials.
Not a single one of these has prompted me to a purchase.
In fact none had caused me to switch away from what I was watching.
If the online commercials were intended to irritate, I think they are doing well.
The people monitoring the agrorithm should be recording a super high irritation index.
Picture this: you’re watching YouTube and a certain Jay Smith talking about, in English, Prophet Mohamad and on came a woman with headscarves telling, in Malay, how she and her benefited benefited from a cure for erectile dysfunction.
In the quiet of the night you’re watching anti Trump people being berated on the Megyn Kelly Show.
Out of the blue a voice blurts out from your screen “Shoppe!” And caused your heart to skip a beat up and you to almost drop your phone.
I don’t even know how Shoppe got there.
Maybe one of the little ones at home got to work while gaming on my phone.
I never shopped on Shoppee.
I’ll likely never shop there.
I hate it for giving me the unsolicited cardio jolts everyday.
Everyone I know from ages five to 80 is online everyday.
I don’t know if anyone of them ever paid attention to the endless commercials to kept interrupting their entertainment.
Worldwide, on line platforms earn billions in advertising revenue. I’m obviously not the target customer.
I don’t know if my category has a name.
And what kind of agrorithm tells an ED medicine maker to put up commercials in Malay In the middle of an English broadcast.
And, what genius prompted Shoppee to think that shocking online users is a good strategy?
I recently groaned about people talking about digitalisation as if it is the panacea to everything, as if things digital the path to eternal bliss.
I think that’s naive.
Computer is a great tool. Super computing is even greater.
But the algorithm coming out it still depends of the raw data fed into it by humans. No?
A long time ago some maverick came out with four words to describe the potentials of the computer.
It is “garbage in, garbage out’.
Editor: The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of talantang.com
