Terry Gross Quotes

The idea that somebody would go to my YouTube channel and want to watch movies and then be subjected to some terrible car commercial - I don't like that.

Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.

Online advertising may not be much more successful than an old double-barrel, but - like a good spray of buckshot - it makes up for its lack of accuracy with sheer volume. There are 10 unique ads listed with every Gmail message in your queue, each tied to the message content. And a paying sponsor.

The world is changing... I don't, as a consumer, want advertising that's not relevant. If we're going to take a side, let's take the side of the consumer.

In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.

You can't show me an ad on TV with hard bodies and say I have to buy that car. You have to tell me why that car is better and safer than another car.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

Over at Barb Bowman, she's arguing that we should turn off Facebook's tracking of ads. I totally disagree; those trackers make newsfeed filtering work better and potentially could help bring me better ads, which improves my life.

Ads get a bad reputation sometimes because they're not useful. They're not relevant, or slow.

Google is a business that gets paid when users want to see - want to click on - the ad. If we show ads that no one wants to see, we don't generate revenue.

For the most part, cookies aren't dangerous. They were created so advertisers could get a better idea of who you are and what you're interested in, so they could send you ads you're more likely to find relevant.

Never think of your car as a cold machine, but as a hot-blooded horse.

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

Google's AdWords, they allow you to bid on words that people will type into the search engine, and they cost more or less. For example, I think mortgage refinancing can cost - now, it's probably hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. So, in other words, they are allowing you to bid on what people are going to type, and that is the AdWords program. So you own certain terms, and then your ads show up as opposed to someone else's.

You're picky about the car you drive. You're picky about what you wear. You're picky about what you put in your mouth. We want you to be pickier about what you think.

When you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.

Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?

I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.

"What makes a man a man?" a friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

I think people are still conscious about how the car looks, whether they're going to be driven in it or not.

Actually I think I have forgotten how it was back then. Or probably not - I didn't qualify. There were only 16 cars in the race.