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No, don't backtrack. You hit the nail on the head.

It is abuse. It is manipulation. It is deceit. Mendacity at it's most essential form. It's predating on a limited resource (attention) in an attempt to push out any other options by hooking you through as high a mental form of stimulation as possible.

There is no need or excuse for that type of behavior. We just justify it because we've allowed an entire industry to spring up around it unchecked. Only halting that industry's ability to exploit unchecked in the most vulnerable populations after extraordinarily drawn out legal battles.

Tobacco and alcohol are about the only two markets I can think if with explicitly constrained marketing practices. Gambling too, in terms of game design, which I still think is close enough in desired effect to be considered a marketing practice.

Can marketing be a good thing? Yes! When the consumer is actively searching for it. In it's current form? It represents an unwanted, unwarranted invasion of privacy often foisted on users with no recourse.

Whenever I see people complaining about ads I commiserate. I worry about what happens as things like google glass actually become mainstream and I am always drawn back to this video that I think is a fairly realistic portrayal of what could be in the future: https://vimeo.com/166807261

I have a three year old and he gets so absorbed in screen time and then he goes nuts whenever we tell him it's time to turn off the tv/phone/games. Within a couple of minutes he is usually much more relaxed and I am working to curb any usage that isn't during a road trip/flight.

That is an awesome (horrific) vision of the future

Edit: the video, not your three year old :-)

Why do you keep giving him screen time when you can see it is hurting him?

> Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

Nah, call it what it is.

Consider it in the context of lotteries, how they're advertised, and who they tend to mostly affect. Or fast food. Abuse, for sure.

The problem with ads (and most of marketing too) is also that it turns into an arms race at scale and often at the expense of product quality.

Imagine two cities; one allows billboards and transit ads, one doesn't. Everything else being equal, which product wins in the ad-city? Usually the product with the ad dollars, unless there is a substantial difference in quality / price.

Which product wins in the non-ad city? The one that is better or cheaper.

The insidious thing is that brandable food products have to be processed in order to be unique. Anyone can grow an apple, but only Coca-Cola can make Vanilla Coke. So not only are we burning away attention / psyche with all these ads, we're also naturally incentivized to activities that aren't good for us or the planet.

If I had my way I'd ban it all. No advertising / marketing other than product demos and maybe search results[0]. There's too many downsides.

[0] Search is a special case because people are working to find a solution to their problem. For example, you may snore at night and search "nighttime snore mouthpiece" not knowing that there are other solutions like devices that detect snoring and automatically adjust your pillow. So in the search case the incentives are much more likely to be aligned.

I agree - except that Pompeii had adverts 2000+ years ago, now preserved in the ash. If it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

Perhaps Google's original mission is the best one - accurate, impartial search.

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont have solved billboards.

> it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

That's a terribly defeatist attitude, especially for someone who is writing a message on a colossal web of copper and forged glass, powered by lightning and runic commands, who probably doesn't live under the thumb of a king or suffer from polio, smallpox, or plague, and likely travels in a chariot drawn by elemental fire and oil extracted from the bones of the Earth, and who is far less likely to die from violence than at any point in history.

There's been a lot accomplished in the last 2000 years, and plenty of that achievement is fairly recent, scientifically and sociopolitically.

Your comment about leaning makes me think that advertising might be a positive (ish).

This situation becomes a repeated lesson that not everyone has your best interests in mind. For advertising aimed at kids the stakes are low (bugging your parents or wasting allowance on toys, games, candy, etc). Would kids/young adults be at a disadvantage if they don't learn to "tune out" that kind of manipulation?

I'm not sure it is a minority opinion, I just think it's so ingrained in us at this point we don't stop and notice. Perhaps it's having a kid, but I've recently been thinking on a regular basis that at some point in the future people will look back on the Advertising Age and wonder why anyone put up with what is essentially lying to encourage you to do something you probably don't need to.

I get why advertising exists and I think it probably did and can fill a need in a limited way but the incentives are all wrong. Ideally advertising would be a way of leading all buyers of mousetraps to the best mousetrap. Instead it is a way for the lesser mousetrap manufacturers/ the lazy/ the actively evil to foist inferior products on people via emotional appeals. We have homes filled to the brim wth crap we don't need because advertising suggests this next product will remove that existential dread or feeling of emptiness or impostor syndrome from your life.

> essentially lying to encourage you to do something you probably don't need to.

That's the best case scenario. More often than not, advertisers are actively malicious.

By that, I mean they are attempting to manipulate people into taking actions that are actively damaging to their health/finances/etc in order to enrich the advertisers. The fact that this is so accepted by society that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent doing it each year is absolutely repulsive.

Even the news/media industry is complicit in advertising. How can you tell the advertising bias in news articles etc? It's a tough problem to solve...

>Ideally advertising would be a way of leading all buyers of mousetraps to the best mousetrap. Instead it is a way for the lesser mousetrap manufacturers/ the lazy/ the actively evil to foist inferior products on people via emotional appeals.

I think this shift was largely due to the influence of the ideas of Edward Bernays, cousin of Sigmund Freud and arguably father of spin/Public Relations., which is largely a re-branding of Propaganda.

As an example of his work in an effort to get more women to smoke in public they were re-contextualized as "torches of freedom" and women were paid to smoke at the Easter Parade in New York. Somewhere along the line a shift towards selling a product (cigarettes) and selling on someone's unconscious desires and motivations. (to be seen as hip and with it)

Car marketing is one of the easiest places to see the change. Looking at early 20th century advertisements more of a focus is placed on qualitative benefits, such as cubic inches of trunk space or longevity of the engine or value for your money, compared to modern advertisements that focus convincing you that the car will make your roadtripping family happy, or make you appear successful, or environmentally conscious.

I agree, but you probably meant quantitative instead of qualitative in the last paragraph.

That said, There are plenty of car ads about how safe or reliable a car is, and hatchback ads routinely mention how spacious the trunk is. When 99% of cars are good enough for 99% of people (numbers made up) why should you buy any specific car other than the most cost-effective one? The experience that the car gives you. That's what car manufacturers are selling.

> Advertising is almost always an attempt to emotionally manipulate people by lying to them.

Advertising does not inherently rest on lying to people.

The problem is, once you strip away this you wind up with a definition of abuse that is essentially "emotionally manipulating people to feel what someone else wants them to". Which is an excellent description of the vast majority of human interaction.

> The problem is, once you strip away this you wind up with a definition of abuse that is essentially "emotionally manipulating people to feel what someone else wants them to". Which is an excellent description of the vast majority of human interaction.

Not if you notice that for vast majority of human interaction, that sentence ends with ", done in good faith and for mutual gain". Most individual interactions like this. Advertising definitely isn't.

In my admittedly sharply limited experience, at least one party to any such conversation genuinely believes they are acting in good faith and for mutual gain. This even includes things like people trying to get me to vote for a candidate I think is unsuitable. Or for a policy I think more likely to worsen the problems the canvasser wants to solve.

I think there may be more room for subtlety here. I've known plenty of marketers in my life. Most of them have genuinely believed that what they were marketing was something to improve the lives of the would-be customer and were acting in good faith to make the prospective customer aware of this. This ice cream? It'll taste good! This salad? Nutritious and filling! This video game or book? Hours of entertainment! This cheap beer? It can lubricate the social events you value!

Are there exceptions to this? Absolutely! Philip Morris springs immediately to mind. It may be excessively cynical to dismiss all advertisements as deliberately deceptive, not for mutual gain, or in bad faith is all.

Ads are more effective when they try to make the receiver feel inadequate. The vast majority of human interaction doesn’t have that goal.

I think they should ban the use of emotional sounding music in advertisements, that stuff really messes with your head cause instruments like violin or piano really grip you and paired with a paid advertisement it's hitting you with that information in a somewhat alerted state (music releases a cocktail of neurotransmitters [1])

1. http://www.audiocura.com/the-impact-of-music-on-neurochemist...

> Advertising is almost always an attempt to emotionally manipulate people by lying to them.

And lying is similar to violence in that both can be used to make you do what you otherwise would not do, and in particular can be used to make you act against your interests (an observation due to ethicist Sissela Bok). So the description of "abuse" is appropriate.

> Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

To the contrary, I think abuse is rather weak. I’d go further. Advertising is raping of the mind. Regardless of the medium (billboards, mail, spam calls, video, audio,..) the mind and senses are deviously polluted and raped with unwanted content without any consent.

The word you're all looking for is 'exploitation'. Advertisers and their clients are trying to exploit children for their personal gain.

Please don't abuse words like 'abuse' and 'aggression' by exploiting them. But even if you did, that wouldn't be an aggression.