Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...

View on HN

> Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

Here's the thing...

I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:

Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

I would never say 'advertising doesn't work on me' but it definitely doesn't seem to have the intended effect (persisting the brand in my memory for future sales) in a lot of cases.

Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.

Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.

> I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me.

No amount of advertising will be able to convince you to like something that you dislike. Advertising is manipulative, but it's not mind control.

But advertising is not trying to (for example) make you like cola if you don't like cola. What it's trying to do is make you choose one brand of cola over another.

For certain types of advertising, such as soft drinks, they're aiming to influence a particular moment. As a Pepsi executive once explained, they're aiming for that half-second when you're reaching for a soft drink and are making a spur-of-the-moment decision about which one. That sort of advertising is about influencing that spur-of-the-moment decision so you're more likely to choose theirs. It's effective because, in the absence of thought, you're overwhelmingly likely to choose a brand that you recognize the most or have the most positive associations with.

Ads are not designed to get you to buy stuff. Ads are designed to familiarize you with a product. So when you plan a party and have to think what drinks to buy, you already know Coca Cola is a drink that exists. Maybe you buy it, maybe you don't. It doesn't matter. And if you go to a party, you also know that Coca Cola is a drink you can expect to get.

That's what ads are for. To get everyone to know that they live in a reality where your product exists.

Advertising does NOT affect me 99.99% of the time. How do i know this? Almost all the groceries I buy has no advertisement or even branding. The vast majority of my spending goes to housing, Taxes, grocery bill, gas, maintenance and insurance. Almost none of the groceries I buy have any kind of logo, marketing or advertisement: cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes. Even when I buy soymilk, once I get through filtering all my conditions (organic, no added sugar, no added calcium/sodium, etc) I'm lucky if I even have 1 choice left. Beans come from nameless bulk, etc. Gas is based on location and price (not brand). Maintenance is always done at the cheapest place of the 3 closest repair shops. All my utilities offer me no choice at all. I have no idea what brand the clothing I'm wearing. etc.

I find this quite easy and intuitive. I'm not against advertisement at all. I've seen and remembered several advertisements but they almost never offer a product compelling enough to buy. When an ad does offer me something I actually want, I'll buy it (this happens for far less than 1% of my spending).

and yes, i'm well aware of how advertisements influence our perception of brands. but how is it effective if I never buy anything that has a brand? and when I do buy, I usually never have a choice: Utilities, etc

I have a 15" macbook pro that may have been aggressively marketed by Apple. But once again, I had no choice. the reason I bought it is because I'm a developer who used to create IOS apps and I needed the development environment to build apps (no choice but to use apple machines for that).

>Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.

>Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.

There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0] (although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).

[0] https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-effect

I don't doubt the effects I'd advertising. What I wonder is whether advertising affects everyone. Studies can show that it affects people on average, but it doesn't mean it affects everyone.

Advertising does affect everyone in the broad picture. Specific advertising campaigns don't affect everyone, though. Also, different people are affected by different approaches. What works for one set of people doesn't for another.

This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" -- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.

By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.

You misunderstand advertisement. It is not designed to get you to buy stuff. It is designed to get you familiarized with the product and to shape your view of reality. Did you think people thought smoking was cool back in the days just because? Do you think wedding rings are supposed to be expensive?

I don't know about smoking being cool (I'm very biased against smoking, because my entire family smoked and I have asthma), but I do know that people smoked hundreds of years before advertisements were a thing. I've also always thought that jewelry was silly and pointlessly expensive, but I do know that people were affected by advertisement.

You should read up on the relationship between smoking and advertising. It's actually really interesting, and there's no question that advertising alone is the reason that smoking became so prevalent in society.

A similar story applies to other things that we consider so normal today that we don't even think about them, like deodorants, women shaving their legs and armpits, etc.

All of these things only became common because of advertising.

I go out of my way to avoid products whose corporations spend money on advertisements

Perhaps you cannot resist the advertisements you see, but you can take steps to limit how much advertising you are exposed to. Get Netflix, get an ad blocker.

Indeed, and this is what I do! I don't bother with Netflix or similar (there's no point -- I'm not watching commercial TV anyway), but I do avoid advertising as much as I reasonably can.

This is good advice for an individual and relatively useless advice when given to society as a whole. Yes, people should think for themselves. If you have kids you might even be able to teach them how to think for themselves.

But at scale, at the level of a population, an expectation of individual rationality loses out to the realities of these manipulative techniques. On an individual level they might not work, but on a population level they tend to work.

If a population is being manipulated by political propaganda, then yes it's good advice to an individual to think critically / rationally. But that only affects change on the tiniest margin. The propagandists will still win overall.

I think on top of your points, the effect of decades of underfunding education - and on focusing on "marketable" skills over "soft" skills such as critical analysis - must be taken into account.

Why would education matter here at all? People are much more highly educated nowadays than they used to be. They even score much higher on IQ tests compared to people in the past. People understand the world better today than before.

You realise the reason why it's so effective is that it's psychological manipulation right? Telling people to just "stop rewarding" it is almost the same as telling abused partners to "just leave the relationship"; it's not that simple, and trying to reduce it as such is at best unhelpful, and at worst actively harmful.

But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works.

You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.

> Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

That's like saying stopping rape is easy, just don't reward it. It completely ignores the non-consensual nature of the interaction. Except advertising is even worse, because at least rape victims are aware they have been victimized, people that are manipulated by advertising don't even know it. In fact, if you ask, almost everyone will say "advertising doesn't work on me." If that were true, then why do companies spend billions on it?

I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves.

Is this any different from the free market arguments about how regulation is bad, and the customer must inform themselves about literally everything and every consequence, with convenient disregard for the fact that it's impossible for a person to learn everything, and that it turns into a way to assign blame rather than to make the world a better place to live?

Why should "you must think for yourself" become a justification for you to be allowed to show advertising to me continually?

taking bad deals like minimum wage etc.

The only reason there are minimum wages, is because people fought for them, and refused to take even worse deals.

> Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

Stop categorizing it as a tax-deductible business "expense".

It's not a requirement for doing business, and it should not be treated as such.

I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with being bombarded with advertising from cradle to grave.

> If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...

Literally no one can do that for everything. The world is too complicated and, depending on the area, there are either too many or too few choices available.

Preying on the weak is dishonorable.

This is the "capitalism doesn't work because of human nature" argument (which I agree with). It is impossible to train people to pursue profit and to value consumption without these horrendous side effects. Meanwhile, it is quite clearly possible to train people to do worthwhile things with their lives without requiring them to chase a profit motive. (Examples include the free software movement, academic research, etc.)

I've never clicked a Google link and bought something. I've never watched a Youtube ad and bought something.

I don't think they're making much money off me. They still keep advertising at me.

You don't know that a purchase decision wasn't subtly influenced by seeing a Youtube ad though. Many ads aren't designed to get you to buy a product right now, they are designed to make you feel a certain way about the product or even just make you aware, so that when you are in the market, you are directed toward that product.

Have you ever bought a soft drink or purchased food from a fast food restaurant? Why did you choose it?

I always order Tango at places like that because I like the taste. I can't remember the last time I saw a Tango advert, but Coke which I avoid like the plague because it tastes like ass, has ads absolutely everywhere.

Because I like the taste of that drink or wanted to try something new.

Given the vaugeness involved with advertising and attribuitation being something humans aren't too good at I wonder hypothetically how long it would take companies to realize that consumer advertisement effectiveness dropped to zero vs other economic causes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com