The cereal analogy is to prove my point about marketing wanting consistency.
Children of a certain age and height are the main consumers of cereal. So they did marketing research on colors and images to catch their eye. And the boxes are placed at their eye level so they can reach it.
Game of Thrones came with 8 new episodes every Sunday. Marketing knows the average age, sex, and interest of the people who watch it. So they can turn around and sell the show to to advertisers who will fit those demos.
With VOD they would lose a lot of information about who exactly is watching those movies. Eating habits. And things they also might like.
You use your mom’s account to purchase 5 comic book movies over spring break and once you are gone your mom isn’t going to be getting the types of ads she is interested in. She’s getting yours.
I can see this being a problem for a small indie film trying to find it's audience, not for Endgame which is made capture as many demographics as possible.
Also VOD has data, they just don't make it public. It's an evolving field. But it isn't hard to get locations pinged to servers and match that up with other available data to form a market profile. Data is literally everywhere.
Not to get too in the weeds but, for example : Ping location, find nearby grocery stores, zipcode demographics racial makeup, income etc etc. Is there a McDonald's nearby? Yes? Okay maybe we'll pay to run an promotional tie-in ad.
Targeted advertising is done all the time, and it's getting more sophisticated.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, they all have algorithms.
The train isn't coming off the tracks.
Oh and the comic book example is an outlier when looking at all purchases made. It just doesn't happen enough to call into question, who's account it is.
Not only is that pretty funny it highlights the march of progress. The acceleration.
