Goodbye FLoC, hello Topics

Advertisers certainly want the most bang for the buck, but how do they know what that is? Google's incentive is to get advertisers to spend as much as possible, and their reporting on how well their own advertising works is suspect. All advertisers really have to go on is Google's reports vs other ad agencies. I don't have any reason to think Google is outright lying to their clients, but incentives work behind the scenes to distort things invisibly. I have no doubt Google analysts routinely come up with many marvelous ways to emphasize their most expensive advertising's benefits without any explicit bias.

Marketing departments also have the wrong incentives. Like all bureaucrats in unmeasurable fields, they operate on hunches backed by selective data. I imagine the old saying "you can't go wrong with IBM" has a Google counterpart today.

Don't get so excited by your own superior imagination. Your idea of majority and minority is just as wonky as what you claim as everyone else's delusions. Follow the money, follow the incentives, and remember that everyone is biased and usually doesn't know what invisible incentives they are following.