Advertising may make people miserable, but it still has its uses
economist.com
economist.com
1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's better, or how it's suited to a particular niche.
2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.
3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever.
Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is kind of harmless but much overdone.
Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.
Advertisers are almost never incentivized to be honest with that information. This seems to be intrinsic.
Third-party sources either seem to rapidly grow dishonest (e.g. Amazon reviews) or to be very limited (e.g. Consumer Reports). This doesn't seem to be intrinsic (e.g. Amazon could crack down on fake reviews).
As a result consumers are assaulted with ads and marketing and there is no indication it helps consumers make better choices.
Advetising essentially just draws consumer attention to the products that shout the loudest, not to the best products.
Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see:
* 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store
* a window cleaning product
* KFC ad
* "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store
* an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains
* "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store
* Powerade ad
I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?
I wouldn't be complaining if we were instead allocating that surplus working potential to solving real issues like climate change, or improving our understanding of the world, or making good software for the sake of having good software.
If the value added is negligible people won't pay for it. The beauty of the market is that you have the freedom to reward your value producers.
Sure, you could do that, or you could go the easier route and just spam people with advertisements that trick them into buying your non-valuable product.
Still, you make a good point: it all comes down to what we value individually. ... At least until that whole collective consciousness thing takes over.
I may be in the minority here, but I am extremely skeptical of suggestions regarding the ability of ads to truly compel one to desire something they really don't want.
Anecdotally speaking, I've seen hundreds or thousands of commercials for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and the like. And I watch a lot of football at sports bars, where I have plenty of opportunities to drink that stuff. Heck, they even have hot girls in skimpy outfits come in to the bar and give away random freebies, run silly contests, blah, blah, etc., to advertise those brands. And yet, while I am a (light) drinker, I have never felt any desire whatsoever to drink Coors, Budweiser, Miller, etc. When I do drink, it's almost always either a Sam Adams product, or a microbrew / craft beer.
Yeah, n=1 and all that, but if advertising were as powerful as some people make it out to be, surely I'd be drinking at least a little Coors or Miller by now.
It may be that all the ads are doing is reinforcing preexisting biases, and not inducing any new demand.
I'm not saying ads are totally wholesome and good, and made of puppies and sunshine and rainbows or anything, mind you. I'm just skeptical of the degree of power that some people seem to attribute to advertising. To hear some people talk ads are just short of "Manchurian Candidate" level brain-washing.
It's not like the vast majority of ads encourage some rational thinking about a product. It's just some content that someone is paying you to watch.
The birth rate in the US is something like 8 persons/minute of which presumably at least one 1 would be very happy to eat KFC and drink powerade. They are a good target for advertising, as well as people who are borderline about where they eat today.
There was an xkcd comic that really summed this idea up well. There is population turnover. Just because you know what everyone knows doesn't mean the new entrants to the world do - they have to learn from somewhere. Advertising makes sure it happens. I can vouch that it is working well for me even though I don't eat fried chicken.
Can't we ban the use of people in ads? That could be a first step in putting a stop to the mind-hacking, while still allowing informative ads.
Even if you didn't buy, the advertising worked. You may have built your self-image around beer with the twigs and beaks left in, but others will have a self-image that fits the story and will be vulnerable to being persuaded to buy beer-oid swill.
You’re not creating wealth, but you can manipulate people into believing you are by making them want what you make.
That is far from the only way advertising is used, but it is a rather important role.
I don't believe I'm "emotionally hacking people" by paying Google to put our phone number and a few snippets of text in front of potential customers.
Has a perfect valid use, hence we can't "close the bug" by removing marketing completely.
edit: I should say, is advertising closer to perfect information than word of mouth? I guess that's subjective.
Classified-like ads may be better than nothing. But the average ad is worse than useless. What information do we gain from, say, an ad for Coca-Cola? None at best since we already know it exists. More likely, we learn to associate it with happy, healthy, fit young people. Our rational mind may know this association is bullshit. But there are some very stupid people in the world and our emotional minds don't really take orders from our intellect anyway. Never hearing about a product frequently is better than advertising.
Sony could exclusively buy targeted ads on social media and the metrics would probably say it's a good idea, but their brand would be fundamentally less trustworthy if they stopped sponsoring soccer teams and buying prime-time commercials. That's why you intuitively trust their TVs more than a random brand you've never heard of, even if you don't consciously realise it; Sony have invested a lot more in establishing their brand, so they have a lot more to lose by tarnishing it. It's no guarantee that their TVs are the best, but it's a fairly strong indication that they won't be absolute crap and that the warranty might actually mean something.
Prior to the media age, bank branches were invariably grand and expensive buildings. On one level, that's just a waste of money; on a more important level, it's a costly signal of permanence. Would you deposit your life savings with a bank that operated out of a trailer?
What saves the day is size, not branding: if the political cost of failure is too high, they get bailed out. Not just banks, but car manufacturers, factories, etc.
- identification - identifying you. tracking your movements, learning your habits, your demographics, age sex race religion income address, etc
- discrimination - opting you out of advertisements that are unprofitable.
If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education>, you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit and then make the minimum payment for the rest of your life. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit, make a few payments, then default. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, pay it off in full every month and not be very profitable to the cc company.
Unless you're the first type, you may rarely see a credit card offer.
Now think about this in other ways keeping in mind that the people who buy some expensive items are sometimes the least able to afford them.
This basically subjugates a lot of people.
To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only care about cost cutting.
Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind, or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?
3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever.
Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so.
But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.
[1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.
For example, to allow for creative expression, concepts such as puffery (unfounded claims) are explicitly allowed in adverts, and while it is true that they facilitate this kind of art, they are also prone to abuse when a profit motive is involved.
Maybe a better approach would be to rate ads as good or bad on a scale like yours and then people could chose to use selective ad blockers?
Simple: ban the appearance of people in ads.
It is less drastic than you might think. In many countries, naked people are not allowed in public ads. So it is only a small step to ban people altogether.
Say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.
There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.
How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?
1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.
2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.
3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.
4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.
See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.
This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
Here's a real life example:
I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.
Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.
Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.
This is especially interesting in the world of tech.
Because sites like digitalocean post a massive amount of really in depth tutorials. Much more than any single person can churn out. So as a tech person interested in even giving away free tech info, it's a really uphill SEO battle. You can't compete with 65,000+ articles (based on Googling for this: site:digitalocean.com/community).
I'm not saying sites like digitalocean or stackoverflow are bad, but from an SEO perspective it's not going to be easy to out rank them in most topics where you're writing about the same or similar things -- especially not in the case of digitalocean because they are selling something, and they have a ton of $ to promote their site everywhere.
The poster above explained that the new product might, say, increase the productivity of plumbers by 50%, and all other apps on the market are far worse.
Yeah, I'm not sure. Very little new stuff is actually better, and the constant churn has problems of its own. I'd need some evidence to show this would actually be a problem.
I mean,
That doesn't mean that most inventions are beneficial. It's very much possible that only 5% are beneficial but their benefits outweigh the harm done by the other 95%.
Useful inventions don't need advertising to spread. They even did so during the middle ages. No one ran adverts to sell crop rotation. It spread because it's a good idea. It took a while but that's because compared to today, information and transportation networks basically didn't exist.
Advertising as we know it today isn't even helpful for spreading useful inventions. Yes, there are ads for them, but they are crowded out by useless ones. If the message we get from advertising is
> DRINK SUGARY WATER. KYS WITH CIGARETTES. YOU'RE WORTHLESS WITHOUT CARBON CRYSTALS. DRINK SUGARY WATER. KYS WITH CIGARETTES. YOU'RE WORTHLESS WITHOUT CARBON CRYSTALS. ELECTRIC LIGHT IS GREAT. DRINK SUGARY WATER. KYS WITH CIGARETTES. YOU'RE WORTHLESS WITHOUT CARBON CRYSTALS. DRINK SUGARY WATER. KYS WITH CIGARETTES. YOU'RE WORTHLESS WITHOUT CARBON CRYSTALS.
you could argue that speeding up the spread of electric light is worth the damage done by advertising. But what happens here is that garbage ads crowd out the actual useful information. It's hidden like a needle is haystack. Information overload and the associated stress reduces people's ability to find the useful information and to actually think about what they need and want.
The alternative is not to abolish communication. You don't need ads for people to learn about products that are useful to them. That's in their interests so they will seek out newspapers, magazines etc. that report about new products — aiming to serve and inform the customers that buy them rather than the producers that want to sell their products whether they someone needs them or not. The above wall of text would not be replaced by nothing but by "FYI: electric light exists. Its advantages are.... but keep in mind that...." — information rather than spam.
[1] Are we really happier than hunters and gatherers?
Would you be happier having to risk your life daily to get food and constantly facing hunger?
This is just romanticizing primitivism.
This is a common superstition, like faeries or psychic powers.
>Are we really happier than hunters and gatherers
Are you talking about the people who had like a 40% murder rate? The people with piles of dead babies buried out back.
The modern world is depressing and frought with new problems, but most of them are the inevitable product of high population density. Many of our inventions are built to deal with higher population density. The choices are A) create technology with some downsides, or B) genocide
I really don't think I can convince someone that advertising is sometimes necessary when they'd rather smear blood on their forehead and beat a deer to death with a rock.
That would be hyperbole even if I had just asserted that advertising had no effect at all without any arguments.
> I really don't think I can convince someone that advertising is sometimes necessary when they'd rather smear blood on their forehead and beat a deer to death with a rock.
I really don't think I can convince someone of anything who doesn't even read the very first sentence of my post and invents a strawman instead.
A lot of people don't want this to be done to them, even if it works for you.
We outlawed slavery, human trafficking, rape, fraud, theft etc even if it worked for some, because working was not the point.
Most(90%+) of businesses sell commodities, or near-commodities, or products that could be compared by a spec.
Marketplaces and parametric search seem like a fair way for them to get customers.
Do you have a source for this number you can link to?
Advertisements don't fill the niche any more of informing people in factual manner about products. The modern advertisement is the 'axe effect' or instagram influencing, which is purely emotional, tying personal success or celebrity culture to products in an attempt to manipulate audiences. Creating 'stories' about products that personalise them or as the article points out, signal social status and class segregation.
You are not entitled to customers. The only valid reason for a business to exist, including yours, is to produce things people want. If no one wants your product, your business should not grow. Useless businesses not growing is a good thing.
> Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.
I know that advertising is useful to companies that do it. But I don't care. What matters are not the individual interests of your company but the collective interests of society as a whole.
In fact, for a given country, looking at the growth in ad spending in one year, is apparently a good way to predict if people will be more or less happy a few years from now.
It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds up over time.
Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.
Brand recognition has impact.
You might still go read reviews of the product first, but they still need you to seek it out to do that. That's where advertising comes in.
So the ads are intended to help you avoid post-purchase guilt. Hence their emotional appeal: you're a certain kind of person etc. That keeps you buying MBs on a scale of decades, rather than jump ship to a lower prestige, lower cost brand.
The larger point is there are many reasons to run ads, not just to attract leads.
Reviews aren't enough for discover-ability, but they are awesome once you know the product exists.
I'm not convinced paid ads are the right move for me, but I do think general advertising (having someone talk about a product or service on a site that isn't yours) is absolutely essential.
I wonder if people working in marketing, advertising and journalism should have to swear an oath in which they promise not to manipulate or deceive people.
Lying or deliberately misleading is obviously not criminal in general, but perhaps it should be punishable in certain professional settings?
I appreciate that this is very delicate, and needs a bit more thought on how to avoid it becoming a potential tool of government or corporate oppression.
Of course, this is pie in the sky. Most people in advertising and marketing seem to believe that what they are doing is fine.
But like every pleasure in life, it needs to be consensual.
Citation needed.
For my money, if I could just get rid of any in-browser ad that starts playing audio without prompting, I'd be mostly OK with the state of ads. Note that, in this context, I'm not including any concerns about ad tracking networks, etc. I'm just talking about the actual ads themselves.
- attention-stealing (not just sound, but animation, flashing, etc)
- heavy (many of us can only afford mobile plans with small caps)
- misleading (e.g. fake download buttons near the real one)
- manipulative (using clickbait and divisive politics to get you to click)
- encourage censorship (since there's always the fear that advertisers will pull out if you show controversial stuff)
But personally, I could live with non-tracking web ads. Street ads are worse, in my opinion.
Maybe. I'm probably not the target market for most of that stuff, but that statement doesn't exactly jibe with my subjective experience. It seems to me that an ad can suggest that you could be (better looking | more fashionable | more luxurious | richer | getting laid more | whatever) without necessarily needing to make one miserable as a condition. All of those things are relative, and pretty much anybody can see an ad and think "wearing that suit would make me more appealing to women" or "wearing that lipstick would make me more appealing to guys" or whatever, without first having to believe "OMG, I am the worst of the worst, I look deplorable, blah, blah".
That said, I don’t know if such a system, if it was possible to be 100% accurate, would also have unintended consequences of denying people that are not as well off some important deals, such as a lower APR, because they are less profitable overall.
Still, this is an interesting concept to ponder - if advertising was as relevant as possible and goods attainable without undue stress, people would likely feel better about themselves.
The premise of the article:
> Ads and other forms of marketing ostensibly serve a straightforward economic role. Firms selling goods and services need to tell consumers about the availability and desirability of their wares, and spend on advertising to do so. By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.
(Had to laugh hard at the last sentence.)
Good products don't have to use advertising. Their existence alone, plus worth of mouth (e.g. reviews) assures customers become aware of good deals. Take good Black Friday deals, for example. There's a lot of BS and fake deals around, but if you search well enough there are some true gems hidden within.
Also, to me, advertising always meant some kind of deal. Merely mentioning the existence of a product doesn't cut it. It has to be a real deal where I'm saving money on the conventional price. Of course, marketeers hacked their way around that by making the discount price higher and the normal/non-discount price higher (above the actual real normal price). Old trick which is also heavily in use during Black Friday.
The conundrum is the more these tricks are used on consumers they will figure them out (eventually) and quit falling for them. So false advertising kills off the advertising market. My argument is that exposure to [such] false advertising killed the advertising market for me, and being the reason why I use adblockers 24/7.
> Some firms target impressionable children
Which is AFAIK illegal in NL, as it should be. However targeting the parents of children is legal, and... annoying.
>By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.
Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or anything of the like, and do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in media.
But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting, shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core. I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like I'd be directly harming society in building such technology.
In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on TV got one for Christmas.
The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year.
Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?
Overall, I do think that computers are useful, but if people are having to create an artificial demand for them, perhaps we're putting excessive amounts of labour into creating more computers instead of, for example, making them better. The vast majority of consumers aren't going to have a very good idea of what makes a computer better, so that's not usually the focus of computer advertisements.
Who decides whats useful for not? Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them. They would need some way to tell that at scale, and ads are a way to do it.
I find that hard to believe. Companies do what is likely to make them profit, which sometimes involves doing things they surely know is bad for people. Cigarettes are still advertised in many countries; do you really think that the cigarette advertisers seriously think their product is useful?
If anything, I think you're more likely to get advertisements for the products that are relatively bad for people, since when your motive is to do good for people, you're less likely to oversell your product. It might be fine and well for this dynamic to resolve itself in a critical forum like HN, but when ads for random products are just thrown out to regular consumers, the rational thinking about how useful a product actually is will be minor.
So if computers are useful, shouldn't it be allowed to advertise them?
Go to the FB ads library and look up ads from some random brands and start-ups you've heard of. They're all here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
Count what % are basically honest, neutral, or just dishonest. The ratio may surprise you.
You don't say!
> absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions.
They do communicate the existence of competing products, and are basically the only way to compete with an entrenched market leader. In this sense, advertising is rather important to keep markets fluid and allow better products to flourish.
> rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey
For someone considering themselves hyper-rational, you comment shows a surprising amount of negative emotions.
It's also rather irrationally to believe one of the largest industries is consistently wrong by not following your preferred format of notarised feature comparison spreadsheets.
Because marketing is really full of spreadsheets: those showing that people do sometimes have emotions, and that appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.
This isn't about my preferences. This is about the format of the average modern commercial, which is tantamount to clickbait.
>appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.
The industry is a fundamental conflict of interest, designed to convince people in most cases to buy things that they may not need, with the deceptive insinuation that the ad is operating in the interest of the customer, while frequently relying on totally unrelated emotional cues to influence decisions.
>For someone considering themselves hyper-rational
I'm not trying to make this about myself. However, a person who makes rational decisions can still experience and express emotions. The underhandedness of the advertisement business relies on the fact that the goal of many ads is to influence seemingly rational decisions by indirectly influencing emotions. It is an exercise in deceptiveness and manipulation, to bias people without their awareness.
Does this apply to all ads? Certainly not. But enough of the bunch is spoiled such that the whole game puts a bad taste in my mouth. And on top of all this, they're EVERYWHERE. Even if I don't consume media, simply by existing in society I'm bombarded by billboards, window TVs, and cable that I'm already paying for comes loaded with almost as much ad time as the programs themselves!
It's a race to the bottom through and through.
Thats a bold assumption. If I have a business then I will advertise my product in the hope that people will see it and make a decision by themselves on if they need or want it, and make an informed choice to buy it.
Besides, its not about needs, but also about wants. Humans are driven by not just strict needs, but also aspirational desires, ambitions and tastes. For e.g, nowdays you don't really need a wrist watch anymore since you can tell the time from your mobile phone which most people already have, still the demand for such watches is there because it seems to fulfill some other desire that there is no longer any strict 'need' for. There are various ways you can make such watches (different price points, aesthetics, quality of materials, after sales service etc) which also appeals to different sets of humans. Ads help in getting the word out on your brand of your wrist watch in the hopes that some people out there will find it appealing enough to buy it.