Ads just work, no matter what you think
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
This isn't entirely due to branding. Pepsi is preferred during sip tests but Coke is preferred when drinking a whole can[0].
[0]https://www.wideopeneats.com/difference-coke-pepsi/ *This article does refer to the branding "New coke" and "Coca Cola Classic", but the branding was to ensure adoption for an actual change to the drink they had already made.
Not only that, Coke from UK, US, HK, Japan and Mexico taste different as well. Big Bottle 1.5+L taste different to 330ml can, along with Glass Bottled Coke.
And I don't drink them often. May be once every few months or a year.
Note: I never tasted the US version of Pepsi though, so may be they are similar.
Even adding animal-based products like bone meal should be fine, since the bones are made out of processed vegetables.
But that might be because I rarely drink either.
Human variance being what it is, I'm sure the result will still be indistinguishable to some people, but I also think there's a lot of people who will suddenly be able to tell the difference quite strongly after this exercise. They're certainly in the same "genre" of drink, but quite substantially different. After this exercise you may also understand why Coke is strongly favored for mixed drink applications. (I mean, to the extent that either is favored. Still, "Rum and Coke" is a thing; "Rum and Pepsi", well, it may get you what you ask for, but you may get a bit of a "look" from the bartender.)
(I was raised fairly typically midwest American, and the injunction to keep your mouth closed while eating was rigorously enforced. I have often wondered if the resulting non-inhalation of the food's volatiles has contributed to the generally poor quality of American cuisine at the time, and its slow progress since then. I've also wondered if "don't inhale your food!", which figuratively means not to eat it too rapidly, also has the literal meaning resonate in our brains and prevent us from doing the good and proper kind of inhalation.)
I presume this is common knowledge on the one hand, but on the other, I've literally never encountered anyone talking about it in a general food context. (YMMV of course.) One of the best kept secrets of "common" knowledge?
I'm honestly baffled that there are people who have trouble telling the two apart...
Dr Pepper is independent, neither a part of Pepsico or CocaCola Company. Part of their (successful) marketing campaign was making everybody believe that there are only two choices when it comes to soft drink: coke or pepsi. Dr Pepper (and other extinct brands) got left out of the public consciousness this way
This doesn't happen to me with any other diet drinks, not sure why this one isn't "consistent"- I guess maybe because Diet Pepsi I have more often from fountains instead of containers, since it's usually a backup when a restaurant has no other diet options
When I first tried Coke Zero, I found it better than Diet Coke, and closer in flavor to regular Coke. For me, Diet Coke has that strange Nutrasweet after-taste, which I have never liked.
I didn't find that with Coke Zero when I first tried it, seeking something that was nominally "zero-calorie" without having the bad aftertaste I associated with "diet" beverages (and other foods for that matter).
Now, though, when I drink a regular Coke (or worse, a Pepsi), I find it extremely overly sweet. I can still drink other "regular" colas, but they're not my go-to beverage choices any longer.
I do wonder how Jolt Cola would taste to me now; probably absolutely vile or something (I've also found that Grape Crush - which was already ultra-sweet - is almost unbearable to drink from a sweetness perspective).
>>The difficulty with interpreting the Pepsi Challenge findings begins with the fact that they were based on what the industry calls a sip test or a CLT (central location test). Tasters don’t drink the entire can. They take a sip from a cup of each of the brands being tested and then make their choice. Now suppose I were to ask you to test a soft drink a little differently. What if you were to take a case of the drink home and tell me what you think after a few weeks? Would that change your opinion? It turns out it would. Carol Dollard, who worked for Pepsi for many years in new-product development, says, “I’ve seen many times when the CLT will give you one result and the home-use test will give you the exact opposite. For example, in a CLT, consumers might taste three or four different products in a row, taking a sip or a couple sips of each. A sip is very different from sitting and drinking a whole beverage on your own. Sometimes a sip tastes good and a whole bottle doesn’t. That’s why home-use tests give you the best information. The user isn’t in an artificial setting. They are at home, sitting in front of the TV, and the way they feel in that situation is the most reflective of how they will behave when the product hits the market.”
>>Dollard says, for instance, that one of the biases in a sip test is toward sweetness: “If you only test in a sip test, consumers will like the sweeter product. But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying.” Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so right away it had a big advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavor burst, unlike the more raisiny-vanilla taste of Coke. But that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can, and that is another reason Coke suffered by comparison. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test. Does this mean that the Pepsi Challenge was a fraud? Not at all. It just means that we have two different reactions to colas. We have one reaction after taking a sip, and we have another reaction after drinking a whole can. In order to make sense of people’s cola judgments, we need to first decide which of those two reactions most interests us.
Which is to say: essentially one guy's (informed) opinion which even he doesn't seem to commit to that strongly.
This is then followed by about two pages talking about branding/sensation-transference concluding with the punch line no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind
The difference in flavor isn't really considered cut and dry by either of them and Gladwell focuses on branding.
The author of the article I linked paints the anecdote you've cited as Gladwell's "research". I had thought it was more exhaustive than that.
None of them should be taken as factual; he cherry picks and often writers stories well after the source material has been disproven.
For example, Gottman's marriage research in blink that could predict divorce with extreme success was an overfit model without a validation set that didn't generalize well.
The very name refers to the coca plant they based the drink on. In contrast, Pepsi and "generic" brands are essentially sugar water. This is likely why Coke had that campaign for a time: "Coke -- the real thing."
People drink coffee primarily for the caffeine. This is generally acknowledged. People joke about being unable to focus because they haven't had their coffee yet, etc.
So, we drink coffee for some meaningful active ingredient. I see no reason to believe we drink soda "for the flavor" and not for the actual active ingredients. Coke has active ingredients that other brands lack.
In a restaurant or cafe tap water is never advertised unless it is being charged for. This applies to all restaurants, cafes and bars. But you are familiar with the product as you have taps with water in them at home. You don't have to guess the name.
Now imagine if all cafes had big signs with 'free water' advertising the tap water product and rival carbonated beverages were hidden from view out the back. How would you know what the magic word was to be able to get one of these things if the staff just offered you the choice of a glass of tap water or a cup full of tap water?
Then, if the carbonated beverages had to be plain labelled, with no fancy graphics or slogans? What if they just had a big sticker on them warning that they caused death by diabetes? With extra warnings about how second hand cola can kill too? With extra extra warnings of how the sugar in the beverages caused cancer and made you impotent?
Would you still drink the stuff if you were addicted to Coke/Pepsi and had these extra hurdles to obtain the product?
Some thoughts...
Humans, in general, seek to improve their environment. One might paint their home, put out plant pots, tidy up, whatever else. In private spaces this all works out.
Advertising goes against all of that. It effectively states 'I can put this ugly thing here, and it'll increase my local happiness (because I don't have to see it), so screw the global happiness'.
I stated a similar form of this argument in another thread. There's a huge banner ad (larger than a person) close to my home, on a bus stop. The last I saw it was some sort of advert for supplements of dubious medical value.
My nice walk to the post office or whatever gets interrupted by this nonsense every time I go outside, big colourful unnatural full-face things reminding me that people are being duped into buying crap they don't need by other people that don't care about them.
I think, and hope, that one day we'll realise that many forms of advertising are effectively mental abuse.
I think that advertising is on dubious grounds when it exists as a substitute for payment (dubious because of the extremely low payout compared to the inconvenience / damage caused).
In public spaces, on transport systems and so on, things that can't be avoided and are either already paid for or aren't even being used (e.g. walking past an ad on the pavement which pays for nothing other than the land it sits on) it's completely inexcusable.
We're trying to encourage people to use public transport.
We need to do _everything we can_ to make it a better environment, more comfortable, more homely, etc.
Knocking out advertising would be an easy win. (Killing off the OTT announcements would be another one... but I digress...)
I was going to refute your claim about these things just paying for the space they use, by stating figures that show advertising provides a significant subsidy for Transport for London (which operates the tubes and buses in London).
But I was wrong: annual advertising revenue is just 142MM GBP, or about 16 GBP per London resident. This seems low given how much time people spend looking at ads on the tube.
Fare revenue is approximately 3bn GBP. A 1:20 ratio.
In the worst case assuming no-one additional travels due to it being more pleasant, fares would have to increase ~5%.
My bus fare would go from 1.50 to 1.57.
This is a distraction, though. It's not relevant, because we shouldn't allow damaging activity to occur regardless of whether it might look marginally better economically if we zoom in far enough.
If the tube system funded itself by stealing wallets from random passengers, it would still be right to stop that program, even if fares went up, because it wouldn't be right or good.
A related concern I hear often is that if something becomes n% more expensive, then some people will be priced out.
The correct answer to 'poor people can't afford the bus' is not 'perform strange indirect forms of abuse on slightly less poor people'. The answer is 'fix the fact that people are poor'.
Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships.
25% of TFL funding comes from government grants anyway, increasing that to 27% from local property taxation in London seems the most sensible thing, but in the age where people only care about the bottom line and don't factor in externalities I can't see that as an option. The Met are now selling themselves because people won't pay taxes to fund them (London's police budget is 20% lower today than it was in 2012/2013)
My standard example is, I strongly suspect that the added bandwidth consumption of ads translates into a greater cost to me (via increased hope and cellular Internet service prices to cover the extra bandwidth consumed) than what people are actually making off of the ads.
It's almost like a version of the tragedy of the commons, where, in this case, the "commons" is everyone's personal space.
TFL says daily ridership is 5MM people, and based on your figures, daily advertising revenue is 390k GBP. That means that for every 1000 users, they're earning 78 GBP in ads revenue.
From my experience on the tube, I see maybe 10 unique ads in a given day (sometimes less, sometimes more), which means that CPMs on the tube, for an untargeted audience, are about 7.80 GBP. That's a huge number!
- TfL gets ad revenue from buses, bus stops etc., so almost all ~9MM Londoners see their ads every day
- you might see 10 ads in a day, but they're much more eye catching than online ads, due to position and size, and the fact that an average tube journey is about 50x the time we spend on an average web page
- ever sat in traffic behind a bus? those ads are targeted at people who own a car, live in London, and speak English
(As an aside it's trivially explainable by the fact that on the Tube you are basically forced to look at it, likely for 10-20 minutes. You either stare at the person opposite, or you look up, where oh, there's a convenient hair loss advert).
What matters is whether the person being forced to look at the shit gets a good deal or not.
They don't. I get _nothing_ from an advert on the street, and from an advert on the tube I get a discount of pence, which could _easily_ be made up for in improved mental health outcomes.
You've even quoted it.
> That means that for every 1000 users, they're earning 78 GBP in ads revenue.
So 7.8p per person. It would disrupt my day less to pick that up off the street. That's not a joke, it's serious.
You think it's a lot, because you're mentally multiplying (it's already in this bloody euphemistic "CPM" term) by loads of people and imagining how much you can make from mass abuse.
Funny, and true.
While reading the parent post, I found myself imagining Mr. Burns from the Simpsons rubbing his hands together as he considered what an awesome 'CPM' he was getting.
Like you, I also think some concepts are bullshit and totally deserving of willful ignorance.
I don't know what CPM is either, aside from an OS I used 30 years ago, but if it makes advertising seem reasonable or desirable, I'm sure I don't want to know.
I suspect that's 5 million journeys, not people, and it's tube only, not all TFL as a whole.
£390k a day of advertising income, and £13m a day of farebox revenue, means that every £2.60 ticket would be £2.68 without the barrage of adverts.
I don't understand people that listen to non-premium spotify either.
Agree 100%. In north america you typically pay your cable bill and still get adverts.
Better off just ignoring the whole thing, or stick to public stations.
Call it 50p a minute after tax.
A typical hour long TV program will have 18 minutes of adverts, or £9. The cost of watching the 40 minute program about £20.
The question then is is this TV program worth £20 to me
If no, I won't watch it.
is this TV program worth more than £20 but less than £30 to me
is this TV program worth more than £30
Typically the cost of buying a TV episode is very small - on the order of £2, so it rarely makes sense to watch with adverts. Back in the 90s I paid the equivalent of £10 an episode for tapes of DS9 season 6 and 7
When I listen to Spotify (non-premium), I usually only listen to albums and music in my lists, and not anything random. I am not sure if that plays into things.
But what I have on my browser is uBlock Origin, which seems to block the majority of "interstitial" adverts they stick sometimes in-between tracks. Occasionally one or two sneak thru; many times they are ads for Spotify Premium (kinda hard to block those).
I just don't listen to enough music or anything to justify spending money on the premium offering; the $10.00 a month isn't an issue for me, but I've maybe have listened to the music I have on Spotify a total of 1-2 hours for the entire month of October, and that was kinda random for me - prior to that I hadn't listened to it for months.
I have the majority of the music anyhow as MP3s on my phone; I don't really like non-premium Spotify on my phone because I haven't found any easy way to block the adverts, plus the player in non-premium mode doesn't support "play the album in track order" - it's stuck on "random", which isn't something I like for all of my music (I prefer to listen to albums, rather than songs).
I don't understand how people cope with free Spotify either, but maybe with large enough collection of ads, it just isn't that annoying.
In services where you can avoid adverts by paying, yes. Pay the protection money and you're sorted. It works.
Whether it should be legal to give free sandwiches which has a 1% chance of poisoning you, while charging $5 for a sandwich that's poison free is another argument.
They are advertising, but the point isn't that all advertising is inherently bad. The point is that we've normalized a really unhealthy amount of daily exposure to it and it turns out we are way more susceptible to it than we like to admit.
(That's what they actually do).
If your examples did it - it'd be flashy, colourful, gauche, impolite, nonsense. Scammer grade low class bullshit.
No-one likes having evangelists knock at their door, because they're annoying and interruptive.
I mean, maybe in Ulm? [0] But I can rarely see a church tower over trees and other buildings within a fraction of a mile away.
Generally it's a pretty sight though, not like billboards at all...
No...instead, I can walk down almost any street, and find a sign out by the road imploring me to come find Jesus, or some other pap - and I can usually pass by 3-4 within less than a mile of each one (we have more than one street here where there seems to be a church of one form or another every few hundred feet for a couple of miles - not even joking).
Welcome to America, I guess, where churches are big business (that's putting it kindly).
I've often hoped that skepticism and recognition of manipulation techniques such as propaganda and advertising were formally taught in schools. Social media is a more recent scourge on the gullible.
Which is completely unsurprising. Consider a human as a biological computer. We have bugs, glitches, buffer overflows.
Eventually someone will work out that if you show a human a certain series of images, they'll do something in response.
(This might be a limiting example and a bit absurd, but reduce it a bit and I think my point is clear).
Even if everyone is maximally skeptical, the industry still works.
Whether people are affected by it or not, we shouldn't have to tolerate vulgar nonsense on our streets, in our buses, trains, movies, etc.
I think that's putting it too strongly. It's more like an epidemiology problem, where we know that it is not possible for everyone to be maximally skeptical, so change from the status quo will not be achieved at the individual consumer level.
A few habitual cigarette smokers quit abruptly, with no apparent difficulty or later relapses. A few smokers never quit yet outlive their non-smoking peers. Some people try cigarettes once or twice and never develop the habit. However, despite the existence of individuals who can overcome, endure, or resist the common effects of cigarettes, epidemiological evidence shows that it takes regulation to reduce smoking and its ill effects at an aggregate population level. It's similar with advertising.
Advertising targets populations. It works on populations. It is neither necessary nor proven that it is possible to craft an advertisement so powerful that anyone who sees it will eventually buy the advertised product. Analogizing human brains to unpatched computers, rife with exploitable buffer overflows, confuses more than it clarifies. (As an example, I saw my first Coors beer ad more than 30 years ago. I have yet to buy Coors beer. I don't drink beer. Nor do I drink sodas, so no Coke or Pepsi in my house either.)
This actually happens. There was a reporter who had epilepsy and was disliked by some group of people. Eventually one of them sent him a twitter message with images that caused him to have a seizure.[0]
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/17/fb...
Social media is even worse, because it co-opts regular people into doing the advertising.
Now it's not just ad execs in office towers dreaming up ways to fill your perceptual space with cues and prompts, it's your friends, it's the surf shop down the street, it's everybody advertising to each other all the time.
I wonder about the broad-scale psychological expense to humans to continuously endure the cognitive load of advertisement inundation. I feel like it's like a psychological tax on humanity, literally dampening our potential. If you consider that people like Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day to have "one less decision to make", you can easily gather how important every "clock cycle" of your brain is valuable when you're operating at a high level of functionality. People close their eyes to concentrate further, or turn down the radio during difficult driving conditions -- these are all efforts to reduce sensory input. Meanwhile, advertising is a persistent sensory load.
Along these lines, in the study "The Economic and Cognitive Costs of Annoying Display Advertisements"[0], which was focused around website advertising, one conclusion was: "in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate on questions pertaining to what they had read". This was just something I quickly found and I imagine there are many other studies which have similar conclusions.
[0] http://dangoldstein.com/papers/goldstein_suri_mcafee_ekstran...
I get so, so angry when I think about this for very long. It's frustrating to even have to explain it - it's just so _obvious_ that it's a bad thing.
No-one would find it acceptable if they were arbitrarily kicked lightly in the shins, constantly, as they walked down the street. Even if it were monetized. Even if there were no scars, no obvious "permanent damage".
Somehow, the mental assault of advertising is seen differently.
Not only are "we" OK with advertising stealing your mental bandwidth, we're also OK with you endangering the lives of everyone around you while it gets stolen!
To be more precise - "we" consists of 2 groups: ones who control (smaller) and second who is being controlled.
For the first group - ads are source of revenue and wealth. They call the shots. For the second group - majority ... they mostly hate it - but it doesn't matter, no one ask them. They have no say over this. They are being used and sold to and profited from.
Advertising is a lose-lose situation for everyone, just that some lose more than others.
First off, ad-block your browser as much as you can; if you want to really nuke things, go with something like a https://pi-hole.net/
Secondly - get rid of cable television, and stop listening to Clear Channel radio (or any radio for that matter). Avoid ad-driven streaming services (video or audio). In fact, you might cut them out entirely.
Instead, read and/or create stuff to fill your free time. Or write, or learn, or whatever. Anything except being a complete consumer.
Stop going to brick-and-mortar chain stores or restaurants; instead, seek out independent places for similar offerings. Note that these places will not be "ad free" - they are businesses, and as such they must do some amount of marketing. But it will be a local thing only, and much more low-key at that.
For the remainder of stuff, use online shopping. Of course, if you use Amazon, Ebay, Ali Express, etc - there is going to be a level of advertising there. You might be able to block some of it, but not all - do what you can to lighten the load.
Doing all of that leaves only billboards and signage, and of course incidental advertising (overhearing a radio, seeing a TV or something at a friend's house, etc). But if you do everything else, and maybe a few other minor things, you can eliminate almost all of it.
I can think of a potential way you could also eliminate the signage and other forms of passive and incidental advertising, but you'd be a pariah if you tried it. But potentially it could work (and quite possibly be done extremely well, almost to the point where such advertising would "disappear" from your otherwise normal daily life).
Well said, you articulated my thoughts exactly. I wish we could vote on banning public advertising eyesores. With TV or radio I simply choose not to view or listen, but being bombarded with unwanted ads on my walk or commute is insidiously brainwashing the public without recourse.
[1] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertis...
Would be kind of fun to carry a stack around.
In digital form ads get even more malicious - trying to reverse-engineer people's thoughts in order to place the most "actionable" ad in front of right person at the right time.
I don't really expect any government to begin to take action against ads at large - but I wish more people would take a good look at all the bad things advertising does to us all.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
Like, make impose a $1/impression fee on every ad that uses:
- Claims the product will cause an emotion in the user
- Use of superlatives or exaggeration
- Sex to sell
- ...
If we extrapolate this, there will be a point where humans have designed such an effective persuasion engine that certain concepts of society simply don't work the same anymore, such as democracy or the free market. It will be a permanent change. We won't be able to close pandora's box, and we will simply have to adapt as a society without these features. There will be parts of us that we aren't prepared to lose, losses that we never even considered the possibility of.
It will be a loss of innocence that I don't think a lot of people are expecting at all. Most people don't think that something like advertising can significantly change what it is to be human, but technology has fundamentally changed us before. We should be more mindful of it before we allow it to happen.
Bear in mind that it doesn't require perfect persuasion of 100% of people in order to break a system such as democracy. All we would have to do is some slight statistical hacking or nudging, and we could make it so that certain outcomes are functionally impossible. It is probably already happening to some degree.
Some of them are advertising for prostituting job seeking site. Here is the link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YNuJxB2NDhs
It is just disturbing, and I just cannot stop imagining what children would think by seeing these kind of ads. Japan is really sloppy country in terms of ads. There must be powerful regulations on this matter.
After all, a very big and important part of our lives is influencing other people (potential and actual boyfriends/girlfriends, kids, friends, investors, students, patients, juries, professional peers, hiring managers, subordinates, voters, etc). I'm sure you don't want to criminalize all of that.
So how do you distinguish advertising as the type of influence that is especially bad?
One is like sending an email, the other like sending bulk email spam. No-one wants the latter in their world, and the world would be a better place without it.
I got an ad on Facebook from an online recruiter because Facebook saw from my activity that I'm in the job market. It resulted in half a dozen onsite interviews, and made my job search so much better.
I got many useful ads from Google, for example about apps and games that come out, related to my interests.
I hope you don't mean to ban those?
Then how do you distinguish good ads from bad? And you can't just say it's obvious: the government regulator would need a clear rule to decide what's legal and what's not.
No, I've never seen a Google or FB ad I wish hadn't been there. Sure, how aren't all ads like spam? It sounds to me like you're in advertising. At least, I've never heard someone who wasn't in advertising defend it, promote it, as you do - comparing it to trying to influence friends or loved ones (!), suggesting it's hard to differentiate from that...
Ok well, I'm happy for you that ads aren't a totally malignant presence in your life as they are for so many people, that you fear the absence of helpful ads etc. I eliminated TV, newspaper ads from my life a while ago, have never listened to radio with ads, so most of my days are ad-free. Although I don't get out much. Am no expert, I guess it's up to you to distinguish good from bad, but sure, defining lines between good and bad X isn't easy - and is continually changing, not to mention gamed - that's why we have judges, juries etc, and not computers deciding these things - because the spirit of the law is the important thing, not the letter of the law. Sorry I didn't put enough time into writing this.
I know other people who prefer no personalization because they feel it invades privacy. And I know yet other people who just don't want any ads.
I'm comparing ads to influencing friends and family and others around us not because I think ads are good, but because I'm curious about how people develop dislike for ads.
When you said "No, I've never seen a Google or FB ad I wish hadn't been there", did you make a typo? I think you meant the opposite? Or did I misunderstand you?
If you really think Google or Facebook or Twitter et al's missions are to connect people or organize information you are deluded. Their missions are to be the most effective marketers ever.
Edit: in fairness, that would exclude Twitter. What I'm really getting at is that, for all the companies that get a _ton_ of chatter on here, tech is a lot larger than just BigCo's, and I'd expect the overall population here to reflect that.
Persuasive ad campaigns are an attack on individual choice. The goal is to convince someone to do something: to buy, to vote, to labor, to behave, etc.
If the attack results in an individual choosing something that benefits them, it may not seem evil. However, the difficulty arises in how one gauges benefit. Can advertising bodies be trusted to or even capable of measuring the outcomes individuals' of choices? Can governments?
I will assert that only individuals can be trusted or even capable of measuring choice outcomes. (Democracy is based on this assertion, otherwise voter's choice wouldn't matter). If this assertions holds, any attack on the individual's capability of gauging choice is an attack on democracy and their liberty.
Democracy is designed to be resilient. Essentially the democratic process is a boosting method for classifying the best choices for a population. [1] (Our forefathers weren't dumb). The citizen's choices just have to be slightly better than random to collectively form a single more reliable choice. If citizens' collective choice accuracy falls below 50% the process begins to fail.
Therefore any advertisement that subverts individual, rational choice is evil.
How would one determine if an advert is subverting rational choice? I don't know, but I wouldn't mind them being purged with impunity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosting_(machine_learning)
> take aggressive action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force, typically in a battle or war.
>(of a person or animal) act against (someone or something) aggressively in an attempt to injure or kill.
>(of a disease, chemical substance, or insect) act harmfully on.
>criticize or oppose fiercely and publicly.
>begin to deal with (a problem or task) in a determined and vigorous way.
>make an aggressive or forceful attempt to score a goal or point, or gain or exploit an advantage in a game against an opposing team or player.
>an aggressive and violent action against a person or place.
>to set upon or work against forcefully
>to assail with unfriendly or bitter words
>a belligerent or antagonistic action
I'm unable to find a definition of "attack" that fits your use.
> (of a disease, chemical substance, or insect) act harmfully on.
> to set upon or work against forcefully
> a belligerent or antagonistic action
---
The above fit relatively well.
* Ads are everywhere, not just online; physical ads are harder to filter off.
* Ads work (mostly) on unconscious level.
* Conscious resistance takes effort, and has a limited effect.
> advertising should be considered a public issue as it constrains our ability to solve social and environmental problems.
BTW I can't help but compare this to the recent outrage about social networks and games engineered to produce unconscious impulses to want more, and suggestions to regulate them, the way gambling and liquor are regulated.
I wonder how much of the unconscious-affecting stuff may get regulated. Perfumes affect the sense of scent which is ancient and bypasses consciousness well. Spices, salt, sugar — they all affect the unconscious sense of taste. Certain kinds of attire produce unconsciously recognized images of strength, authority, sexuality, etc. To say nothing of facial expressions. If followed down properly, this rabbit hole of a logic leads pretty deep.
I'm not sure why you're having such a difficult time drawing the line between billboards and facial expressions.
How about this: "People should be able to express opinions and propaganda however they'd like. Inanimate objects in public spaces should be constrained by something similar to the Fairness Doctrine[0], where factual information is allowed but blatant propaganda is not".
I'm not only talking about e.g. Muslim cultures; veils were pretty normal in 19th century's Europe (though not as thick as in 16th-century Europe).
So my question is where the line will be drawn, because removing the unconscious form humans seems infeasible, no matter how cultures try.
It seems a bit strange to say they all fit comfortably in the same bucket and thus we can't handle them differently.
However, I think it is important to note that we have been using spices and perfumes for thousands of years. Direct, omnipresent commercial advertising, as seen in modern cities, is an entirely new thing. I'm guessing there was much advertising prior to the 1800s (curious to research this more though).
Likewise with social media and good old fashioned social interaction.
I think there are many distinctions that are quite important to make when looking at subconscious influences.
For every successful Nike, Coke or Samsung campaign you see there are hundreds of other campaigns that didn't work.
The correct title is: "it is very, very hard to make ads work, but it can be done".
Think about how this sort of thing works without ads. Everyone has things like comfort foods, favorite shirts or socks or what-have-you, maybe a favorite comfy chair, favorite music, etc. Stuff that has become associated with certain ways of feeling through experiences. Foods that remind you of the comfort of home, for example, that sort of thing. Ads can tap into the same associative system and boost their perceived value in a similar way. And just as with all of the "organic" associations they become deeper over time. When you become primed to, say, enjoy coke just a little bit more than some discount supermarket cola then you build up the anticipation of drinking coke, and when you drink it you deepen the association of drinking coke with all of the positive experiences you've imbued into that moment (feelings of refreshment, maybe family amity, maybe it's associated with the holidays, maybe it feels like you're giving yourself a treat, etc, etc.)
People don't like to talk about this stuff because it's somewhat disturbing and a bit manipulative on the part of brands but it's absolutely real. Think of all of the history of ceremony, ritual, and artifacts that has developed around religions over the centuries, a lot of that stuff is based on precisely the same associative pathways that brands make use of. This is why so many branded products don't just have simple, no nonsense, nondescript packaging and instead have very distinctive or even iconic forms and distinctive labels. It's powerful stuff.
Another example is that Amazon is incapable of recognizing the difference between something bought as a gift versus something for yourself. Thanks to one Christmas present 10 years ago I still get recommended Playstation games.
Look at all the top advertisers on the internet, in almost every case it's all big brand advertisers that can't prove results, like Nike for instance. I know someone at Nike who held a marketing position there: she said, basically they just throw the money out there and hope that it works. There's very little validation that any of it works. And, I've heard on an NPR show how a lot of big brand advertisers are just continuing to do what they've always done because they've been doing it so long.
Now, the economist of course would say that companies who squander money on advertisements would loose market share. That's the way it should work. But our capitalist markets aren't nearly as efficient as people commonly believe.
On a personal note: I can tell you 99.99% or more of the advertisements don't work on me at all. How do i know this? I keep close account of everything I spend money on. I once did an audit on everything I've spend money on in the last 3 years and found that almost everything I spent money on is not due to ads (with the exception of SEO ~ I do occasionally find products through search engines but this usually isn't considered a direct advertisement expense). It's not that I'm against ads. If an Ad promised a product I actually wanted (say a home at an affordable price, or a faster way to get to work), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem is, everything that's being advertised is more stuff I don't want.
I work on advertising at Read the Docs and when we were first added to the main ad blocker lists our revenue went down. We were 100% pay per click at that time and our revenue went down by the same percentage as the number of ad impressions went down. Looking at it statistically, developers who run ad blockers still click on ads at the same rate as those that don't as long as they actually see the ad.
I deploy ad spend every day, and can see when it works - do I think spending a £1 on the online ads we use is the best use of that £1? In a lot of cases, nope (though in some, yes).
But £1 on outbound marketing when your agency is spinning you a line about it generating £5 is too much for the top brass to resist. I think the entire market would be much better for ads if there weren't so many fingers in the pie - too many people are making money, and too many reputations internally are at stake for the fundamentals to be questioned.
I'd like to say "fk programmatic" - we need to pull the market back into intent based advertising.
I was kind of thinking this as well: I hardly buy anything but unprocessed groceries. But then I thought of the kind of ads that don't seek a purchase, the ones that set the background or expectation of the culture. It's harder to document those working.
"Big government wastes our taxes and taxes are too high"
"Our country is the only developed nation without socialized healthcare."
"It's normal in America to have two cars in a family or to take an annual vacation by airplane."
"Guns don't kill people, etc."
>> "Big government wastes our taxes and taxes are too high"
but I know that reducing taxes will probably not fix the local bridge over there.
>> "Our country is the only developed nation without socialized healthcare."
but this is also one of the only countries in the world with a working legal system
>> It's normal in America to have two cars in a family or to take an annual vacation by airplane.
but I have two kids, a loving wife and a set of friends who live locally and provide me better than that vacation to Mallorca
>> Guns don't kill people, etc."
but people are vastly more efficient at killing with guns.
More importantly, by openning any of those headlines I pretty much know what's going to be written there anyway. So there's no value in that - the value is in education.
It's why I think targeted advertising is a bit of a scam. Yes, it's neat that we can do that now and the conversion is outstanding. But what's the real value in advertising for Widgets to people already actively shopping for Widgets? I show 50k ads and get sales off 40% of them, that's good compared to another strategy that only works 10% of the time that I'd have to buy 200k for the same result. Except, how many of that 50k were going to buy my Widget anyway had I not advertised? Whereas 150k of the second set had no idea I sold Widgets or even what a Widget was until I told them. Looks like there's more value in increasing my customer base by spreading a wider net with a lower conversion.
How does that work?
Yep, it's clear the actual effectiveness of an item or market doesn't have much to do with how much money is spent on it (or how much it makes back).
Physical advertising has to obey sign ordinances and in some places laws regulating the content of advertising. (In the US this is loosely enforced and mostly just for food and drugs.) You wouldn't be able to get away with constructing a billboard directly in the right-of-way of a road in an octagonal shape colored red with the word "STOP" on it. But that's the equivalent of what internet advertisers do with their fake virus warnings and the big green "Download" button.
How many 'normal' impressions of McDonalds ads would be negated from a single viewing of an image of a person projectile vomiting with McDonalds branding next to it?
Could buying 1% marketshare counteract the effects of the other 99% of the market?
I actually thought of a baseball game....
But then I have ADHD and not american..
Now, if "working" means you actually buy something, then yes I have to agree, most ads are not very effective.
Ads in the form of news, New Promotion, New Product Launch, New Drama Series etc. New Recipe from McDonald/ KFC / Foods you like ( Which fall under Product launch ), Airline Discount, New Restaurant opening in my area, Promotion from local supermarket. New Game coming out, New Concert, New Cars. A Services Company launching a new form insurance... etc etc
I don't even mind having online Ads, most of the problem is somehow these Ads, A/B Scripts decides to make my laptop fans spinning, which I hate. And when they are way over the top, Like having 5 ads just on the front page. It is not ads that I have problem with, it is the implementation and UX problem they cause.
Now whether Ads generate enough revenue or its effectiveness is an entirely different question.
Of course, if you do not keep up... you loose market.
The sad thing is just how much waste this creates. Waste of manpower and waste of energy, including fuels used to make and transport physical ads.
Ads pay for theses services and not only does it pay for it, it allow people that literally can't pay for it (either by being minor (no access to credit cards) or simply not having the means). That meant that service that depends on a big market to survive can survive.
I don't remember who said it. I wish I did, and then I'd give credit where due...
> Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
> In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
-- Alan Moore
I have seen this occasionally from stand up comedians. It can be pretty effective to mingle entertainment with piercing satire.
> "He was taking fully the role of the witch-doctor in front of the audience... like a big, giant exorcism of all the evil shit that's inside of us, that poisons us day to day. Talk shows aren't gonna help it, the news isn't.. You just need a guy to get up there, take you by the lapels and shake the shit out of you."
-- Eric Bogosian about Bill Hicks
And as we get used to avoiding them, they become less efficient, meaning they need to jam more of them in our face.
If we could somehow make it so that every ad was A) very relevant and B) we actually paid attention to it ...
The entire digital ad economy could subsist on you and I seeing maybe 1 or 2 ads a day.
That's it: imagine a world where you only had to see 1 or 2 ads a day!
It's economically possible.
But the worst and most cynical part of it all ... if ads were this efficient, short-sighted advertisers wouldn't stop at 1 or 2 - they would still jam more ads in our faces, thereby ratcheting up short term profit, wondering why his 'per view' metrics continues to all, as we pay less attention!
It's a very pernicious race to the bottom and the only way it would work well is of a benevolent entity with long term foresight and proper incentives basically dictated the terms.