They are categorically not just about informing people.
And saying you received value from ad-supported stuff strikes me as very backwards. You still pay, but you pay through being manipulated into buying stuff you don't need.
So 1st order problem: Adverts are harmful in that they distort markets increasing the effort required by consumers to make good decisions & increasing poor decision making.
But they also create a whole bunch of activity that is now not a buyer / seller interaction. Why do you get click bait and fake news? If the viewers had to choose to pay for it then this would never occur but with advertising the viewer is the product. So you get content that is compelling but worthless. Fake news & clickbait. You even get HSBC dictating content to the Telegraph [1].
I honestly think Google originally had good intentions "Don't be evil" but their business model is fundamentally at odds with the wellbeing of their users. If you have a market optimizing for user manipulation you will evolve effective manipulators.
So the 2nd order problems of advertising are that advert supported activity doesn't have it's interests aligned with it's users. Even if the people in these industries want to do good the market will eventually evolve corporations that harm their users since the more efficient the harm the greater the profit.
But the biggest problem in my mind is the 3rd order effect of wasted human capital. Much like the biggest problem with wall street is all our gifted peers who ended up doing zero sum bullshit for banks. Advertising, regulatory capture and other corporate innovation that isn't making a better product signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...
Car manufacturers specifically optimize for this effect, which is why car ads are targeted at people who already own said car, not potential new buyers.
You correctly point out that the human waste caused by ads, like our banking industry, is monumental. What fascinates me about your view, though, is that I have always viewed the cause for US banks' human waste factor to be the absurd regulatory environment and the close ties it maintains to the upper echelons of government.
Media/Advertising, on the other hand, feels much more sparsely regulated at the government level, but it does maintain its own absurd regulatory environment in the private sector, and its own ties to the upper echelons of government. I think it's hard to deny that this industry's self-regulatory environment is as ineffective and chaotic as the politically-instituted regulatory environment enjoyed by the banks. But little research has been done into the impact of the media industry's self-regulation. Makes me wonder what exciting secrets may be out there to uncover.
They use all kinds of sophisticated socio-psychological techniques to do so.
Unfortunately, most people (including yourself) don't even realise this, hence they become more prone to such techniques.
Sadly, when it comes to manipulation, human kind has already lost this battle.
> improve the public impression
Someone trying to influence your impression IS manipulating you.
That is what I think was meant by the comment above yours.
When I rip on the agency of consumers please consider that with any small amount of agency they would search for the best product to suit their needs and advertising would be worthless. In fact advertising makes the product more expensive. Entire product lines are sold on advertising alone despite the existence of better cheaper alternatives.
None of these decisions are forced by the advertiser, and "influence" as a concept is pretty plain on the face of it. The psychological hacks that advertisers use are mainly restricted to trying to make you under-price or over-value a product in your head, or in the case of late-night shopping channels, to get you to impulse-buy things (which I would consider to be fairly exploitative but is in the minority in terms of advertisers). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a good book on the subject.
> When I rip on the agency of consumers please consider that with any small amount of agency they would search for the best product to suit their needs and advertising would be worthless.
I think you're conflating agency and rationality here. A rational agent would indeed shop around, but any old agent can choose to buy or not buy something based on whether they think it has value to them.
They just need to get to your not so gone weaknesses.
The extent of the grey area differs for each individual.
It's not force, but almost nobody will ask for the thing behind the counter. It's the effect that matters.
Pavements don't force you to walk on them, but I'd bet you tend not to stray off them. Pathways through the park don't force you to stay on them, but most people tend to stick to them.
By escalating the bar that advertising needs to reach to influence agents to "force", you're proposing a binary relation where there is a continuum. I think it's disingenuous.
> They are categorically not just about informing people.
> And saying you received value from ad-supported stuff strikes me as very backwards. You still pay, but you pay through being manipulated into buying stuff you don't need.
This was the ancestor comment I was responding about. This person is suggesting that an advertiser can make you buy things you wouldn't otherwise want. My point is that it isn't true - you have to want the product at some level to be interested. If you'd read my comment you'd realise that I agree that they can influence your decision, but not if you weren't at least mildly interested in the product in the first place.
But to suggest that a wife, husband or parent cannot influence our choices is naive. Even if we were perfectly rational actors these people have far too much insight into our inner mind and too much control over what information we observe.
Surveillance capitalism of the type google and facebook are currently trying to engineer is about putting this level of understanding & control over information sources in the hands of people with a massive incentive for you to make bad economic decisions.
With machine learning & big enough data sets it would be surprising if their ability to manipulate you wasn't eventually orders of magnitude better than the average partner or parent. You think playing Go against a top ranked player is harder than feeding lies to your average rube?
Do you claim that everyone always needed what they are enticed to buy by advertising? Because I'm pretty sure there's a boatload of psychology research that says otherwise.
Put yet another way, if ads weren't effective at making people buy shit, then why would companies make Google and Facebook obscenely rich?
If people would merely be informed by ads about the existence and benefits of products, why would the ads have such strong emotional messaging and be so free from actual solid information?
If you want to get informed you don't read the ads, do you?
Ads have one primary purpose: To make people make more irrational decisions.
Seems like you don't seriously disagree with that either, just over-interpreted my original statement.
I would also argue the idea of "genuine" needs is a fallacy. Unfortunately one that is common in economic thinking. There is not fixed hierarchy of external needs that we want to satisfy one after the other. That's a really bad model for human consumption behaviour.
If all your friends start having something most people will find that they start wanting it, too.