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Comment by emgee_1 | Hacker News Reader

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emgee_1

Marketing is evil.

It is lying on a massive scale.

If I want something I’ m go to look for it not the other way around.

If you track me I will dispise you and will root you out. Sort of /r

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> Marketing is evil. ... It is lying on a massive scale.

"Marketing" spans a very large area of activity. At one end, it's the signage in front of a store, or even on the door, that tells you what the place is.

You probably aren't trying to insinuate that store signage (or the online equivalent, a domain name), is evil, but that's essentially what you're saying by being so broad. That doesn't help the argument, doesn't help you, and doesn't result in useful discussion, so it's probably worth being a bit more concise.

Marketing isn't _intrinsically_ evil. If you buy widget A from FooCorp, but wish it had some piece of functionality it didn't and make a post on their feature request tracker saying you wished it had that functionality and then, upon the release of widget B they email you telling you they've released that and it does that thing you wanted, then that's a) marketing, and b) not evil.

Not only is it not evil, it's a targeted ad! You were _tracked_ to produce that ad!

In reality, that isn't how a good 90% of marketing really works. Instead, you got an unsolicited letter about widget 1 from a different company who bought your data from FooCorp, and widget 1 doesn't even do what you want, and because you don't buy it they sell your data to even more unscrupulous companies to get some return from their purchase.

I think it's important to recognise, though, that this didn't happen because marketing is evil. If everybody had just stuck to ethical forms of marketing then everyone would be better off, and we wouldn't need extensions like this which do screw things up for the people trying to be ethical.

It's just like ads: You can do ads well, and we _didn't_, and now good ads need to be thrown in the trash alongside everything else. The next thing we try and do we should _remember_ these common stories, and maybe next time we can be a bit more ethical and not poison our own well.

I suppose it depends on your definition of intrinsic. Marketing is certainly ubiquitously evil because the people that produce it are strongly incentivized to con you, and there are no penalties for doing so.

That depends on the business selling the items. If they are stable, known and looking for any sort of repeat business, they are strongly incentivized to not con you, at least not in a way that leaves you upset with them later (if they trick you into buying something you like, I doubt that generally has negative consequences for them regardless of those other factors).

There's a big difference between the random online e-shop and the downtown storefront, or even big names like McDonalds. Many places are only successful because they've established a good, or at least reliable, reputation and people know what to expect.

> If I want something I’ m go to look for it not the other way around.

And how are you going to find it? And how will you know that it's the right solution to what you need? And how will you compare it against other alternatives?

Marketing is about all these things--not just advertising.

>And how will you know that it's the right solution to what you need? And how will you compare it against other alternatives?

Since when has marketing EVER given you an honest outlook of these two questions? If you listen to the marketing of a product or service and make your judgement solely on that, then I have a bridge to sell

Do you get angry at small brick-and-mortar businesses that print their logos on their walls/windows so you can quickly identify them as well? What if they have small signs on the sidewalk listing their specials so you know what they offer? Or if they give you brochures with information about their company and what products they offer? Are you saying you'd rather them not do all that, and tediously go around window shopping for yourself, or force independent 3rd parties to go around cataloging everything just so you know what the options are for whatever it is you're shopping for? Because all of those conveniences businesses currently provide count as marketing.

I'm no fan of invasive tracking or obnoxious sales techniques either, but marketing does serve an objectively useful purpose, as any small business owner will tell you. Demanding to do away with it entirely is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If a mom and pop shop paid someone to follow me around all day and suggest their products/services for every little thing, and constantly remind me that they exist and what they do, and even recruit other mom and pop shops to do the same and share the info about where I was, I would ABSOLUTELY hate them.

I'm not asking independent third parties to do anything. I'm asking companies to let me do what a Free market is supposed to let me do: Let me make my own educated choices about what I purchase/use, untarnished by psychological tricks and manipulation and tracking.

The free market is also supposed to let businesses do just about anything legal they want to get more customers. So basically kinda like how it is now already. And just as you would expect in a free market, the consumers are reacting to these business practices with ad/tracking blockers.

I'm not defending shady tactics here, I'm being realistic about the functionality marketing provides despite the bad stuff. I get the annoyance, but there's no need to be calling all of marketing "evil" when the free market seems to still be working as it should. When a critical mass of consumers begin blocking all tracking utilities, businesses are going be forced to innovate around it one way or another anyway, and you'll get what you want. It may take a while for that to happen, but that's not a reason to be angry at marketing as a whole. Just continue voting with your wallet (or browser extensions in this case).

EDIT: really, downvotes? I don't even think we disagree, but whatever man. I wish I could be surprised at HN downvoting people trying to be calm and rational instead of emotional and hyperbolic, but that's just cliche at this point. I try to avoid commenting on controversial topics for this reason, but I guess I'll have to add "marketing" to my blacklist of topics as well now.

FYI - HN does not allow users to downvote direct replies their posts. So it's not the person you're responding to who downvoted.

All three of your questions can be answered by either using my own judgement, or reaching out to people more familiar with what I'm trying to accomplish with the product/purchase.

I'd trust a mechanic's opinion on what tools to buy much more than a tool company marketing department. I'd expect this type of thinking (being sceptical of "marketing") is pretty much common sense these days.

How will that mechanic learn about the options?

Can you really not imagine any way to learn about things existing without some marketing department telling you so, or do you just want me to say that not all marketing is bad or unnecessary, which I have no problem doing.

Well, the only entity who knows about a product's existence is the product creator. Without them marketing it (organic or otherwise) nobody else would ever know.

>It is lying on a massive scale.

What is marketing? Your local farmer's co-op overproduced corn and is having a sale, they want everyone to know.

How do they tell you? Run an ad! But ads are marketing. This means they are lying?

Your perception of marketing seems really narrow and confused.

You're cherry-picking examples here. The "local farmer's co-op" is not a good representation of the advertising industry in general, and not likely to be very interested in utm tracking like that discussed in this thread.

Using "evil" like the upstream comments is a bit strong imo, but it's certainly not known for being a particularly "honest" industry.

The upstream comment said marketing is evil - a broad ranging statement. The comment you're responding to picked an example of marketing - not an unusual instance, just a common example of the thing the parent called evil. This seems like a reasonable response.

"Everyone passed the test" is generally understood, in the context of a classroom, to mean "the members of the salient set [students in class] passed the test".

Saying "marketing is evil" in the context of a comment thread about GA stripping, replying to someone defending a specific brand of tracking-marketing, can reasonably be taken to refer to that variety of marketing: the contextually salient variety of marketing, which this submission and the current thread are about.

this is the motte and bailey argument technique: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

Interesting in this case that you could maybe apply it to both situations:

Motte 1: Marketing is valuable and helps people spread information. Bailey 1: Tracking your every move against your will is fine and also profitable.

Motte 2: Tracking my every move is unacceptable and evil. Bailey 2: All marketing - even writing a blog post or website copy about products or approaches to problem solving - is inherently evil.

I don't know which you were referring to, and I kind of like it this way.

'Everyone' in a classroom meaning 'everyone in the class' is reasonable.

'marketing is evil' meaning 'tracking based retargeting is evil' is not.

You can feel that way if you want, but moving the goalposts when OP was talking about tracking tokens and cookies so that you can interpret their responder as being opposed to eg graphic design on webpages or post-conference conversations is dishonest in my mind. The kinds of 'marketing' you would try to defend are probably not the kinds of things they were calling evil.

You can feel that interpreting

> 'marketing is evil'

> 'marketing, in general, is evil'

is "moving the goalposts".

But I'd suggest you're putting a spin of your own on things here.

Well, what did GP say? It was a post entirely devoted to tracking-related modern marketing techniques. This post was a comment on a link entirely about defeating tracking-related modern marketing techniques. I'm not saying you're being intentionally disingenuous, just that my initial understanding of their post was apparently quite different from yours.

Maybe that's worth reflecting on? To me, it seemed pretty straightforward that they were referring to marketing as it was being referred to in the post, comments, and link that we're ostensibly discussing.

Sure, but if I wanted to make the point that tracking is evil, I'd say that. Obviously (due to the other reply that interpreted 'marketing as evil' as meaning exactly that) I'm not alone.

>not likely to be very interested in utm tracking like that discussed in this thread.

I am a digital advertiser that works direct with large and small clients. I use UTMs on every ad campaign I run.

Everything we do to hurt these big companies in online advertising also hurts the small ones. They all use the same technologies.

This is so disingenuous. It’s like comparing an organic family farm to stuff like industrial hog production[1]. At some point a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind. For example - no farming coop in the world employs psychologists to help them better manipulate human weaknesses[2].

[1] https://boingboing.net/2007/01/20/big-factory-pig-farm.html

[2] http://www.psychologist-license.com/articles/marketing-psych...

The comment you're replying to was, in turn, replying to a comment with the blanket statement that all marketing is evil, with no further explanation. Why do you say it's disingenuous?

You added 'all' — he didn't say that. It was a generalisation, but not a universal statement.

And there was further explanation.

Many marketing people want to pretend the vast majority of ads are pure statements of factual information like that, when the vast majority of ads are about targeted surveylance, manipulation, factual misrepresentation, omission, or just outright lying and trying to make people feel inadequate so they buy some crap, especially online.

I wasn't aware anyone from the marketing department of any company was putting a gun to my head. Power of the purse. Don't like it. Don't buy it.

It's easy to decide how to vote with your wallet when the marketing efforts are visible and aboveboard.

Not so easy when it's a company selling their CRM DB to another company with no notice and no recourse. Or the spammers and call spoofers and... and...

Do we stop buying everything everywhere until backdoor data brokers are all revealed and shut down? All the tracking shops too? How do we get control of the rest of the iceberg?

I don't think that's the point. Sure you can vote with your wallet, but it is still pretty annoying to have an insurance salesperson or a telemarketer make an irrelevant sales pitch to you every few minutes.

While targetted ads should technically alleviate this annoyance, in reality it doesn't really work as well as advertised (pardon the pun).

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