Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
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For example, everybody on the planet is now familiar with soft drinks. If anybody has never tasted Coke, it's not by accident. But Coke's ad budget is enormous. If all soft drink companies stopped advertising tomorrow, society would not be worse off. And we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful.
Like the author, I won't work on ad tech. I don't like manipulation and I don't like waste, and most advertising is both.
[1] e.g., https://notesmatic.com/pepsico-advertising-and-marketing-bud... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/081315/look-co...
Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.
Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results).
EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some.
She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others.
Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.
1. Education (let people know a company/product exists)
2. Manipulation (by various means)
From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services.
However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement.
Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it.
And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.
[citation needed]
You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven.
> Most ads isn't about manipulation
For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.
Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either.
And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis)
Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.
That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.
I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are?
Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness.
But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.
In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.
Not that I disagree, but where do you draw the line? Sure, if Coke stopped advertising we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful". On the other hand, if Coke stopped making soft drinks, we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful" AND significantly decreased obesity.
If you are going to make the argument that having soft drinks improves life somehow, then that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.
But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.
> that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.
Are you really saying the only way you have ever known about a product is advertising? I honestly have trouble believing that, but if that's the case please consider that you're an outlier.
Me, I avoid ads vigorously and have for decades. I have no trouble learning about new products.
Economy is basically production vs consumption, money is just the grease to keep the cycle flowing, to follow the money isn't getting to the base cause of our problems.
No, it remains in corporate budgets, which, without all the marketing spend, can be shifted to better wages, charity work, capital investments, better wages, safety and health initiatives, better wages...
Bill Gates could pay 10000 people $10/hour to dig a hole and 10000 people $10/hour to fill the hole back with dirt. Obviously this money doesn't "vanish", but millions of hours are wasted (and the food and resources needed to power this work).
If I go around smashing windows, I will make money move faster. The people who install replacement windows will have more money to spend. It's not like the money magically vanishes! But it's still a terrible idea, because all this economic activity is based on systemic waste. It's the same for most advertising.
Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
How many cities have the will to even attempt something like this? Maybe a handful.
I understand the irony of that page having multiple ads :P
People don't have time to research every single choice in their lives. At some point you just go with brand trust. When I see Uncle Floyd's Cola and CocaCola, I just go with what I know. Advertising establishes brand trust.
Advertisement is a zero sum game.
This is a non-sequitur. Brands existed long before advertising, and regardless they aren't the only way to solve the problem of choosing what to buy.
If you really care about making things easier for purchasers, you'd be eager to eliminate advertising, which a) adds a great deal of confusion and distraction, and b) reduces the value of earned brands in favor of whomever can spend the most money.
Each individual actor is working in their best interest, but as a society it creates unimaginable amounts of waste.
>The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors.
Small brained primate thought du jour; advertising shouldn't be an allowed business expense.
[1]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/tax-rate-paid/
In other words, most users could easily afford it.
And yes, here is the current problem, the mindset of the people. Not willing to pay for services and rather get it for "free" and accept manipulation and time waste. On the other hand, where services are adfree avaiable, like netflix, users indeed do pay. So I am positive that it is about to change.
I don't see the downside.
And no, we wouldn't have billions of dollars to spend on other things. The soft drink companies would have billions of dollars more profit. And fewer people would have jobs
The cost of drinks wouldn't go down. Basically the only thing that would change is we would lose a lot of free things, and fewer people would have money.
"From 2006 until 2018, Oettinger was the official sponsor of Rockets, a professional basketball club based in Gotha. The Rockets played as "Oettinger Rockets" in Germany's first distribution, the Basketball Bundesliga.[5]"
And yet capitalism is still lauded as the most efficient economic system...
In theory this works, in practice it doesn't. Nobody is quite sure about what the dichotomy is between the theory and actual results. Basically by allowing commercial interests to control the direction of capital you get useless areas of inn-efficiency like advertising. The weird thing is, these types of economies still thrive. However, when you restrict and redirect resources in a centrally controlled manner, the economies tend not to thrive.
Nobody really knows why. However there are hints as to why it works. Google, gmail, search, google docs, hangouts and google maps would not exist if it wasn't for advertising. Google and the services and technologies they provide to the world would not exist if they did not receive revenue from ads.
So lots of uneven distributions (anybody growing up in USSR will know what I mean), and lots of overhead.
A modern networked infrastructure could mitigate that. A general AI could solve it (but that has its own drawbacks, great if you like your paper clips though).
Markets in a sense create that distribution system organically, but they pay efficiency costs (comparing to a strictly optimal solution). One of those operational costs is advertising.
Market has its own deficiency/glut profile too -- instead of whole city lacking butter and drowning in socks, we have individual people lacking everything evenly and others having abundance.
I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
It's a childish and immature opinion really.
Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.
I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.
* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.
I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."
No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.
Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise.
That's a rather childish and immature rejoinder. The world of employment simply doesn't work that way, and people's job mobility is not infinite and frictionless.
Advertising offendees will always be offended no matter where advertising sophistication is at.
That isn't relevant regarding the truthfulness of the author's claim.
Whether or not ads are vital for any industry, product or technology (an extremely complex question by the way, not to be easily dismissed with a dogmatic "X would not exist without advertising") has no logical relation whatsoever to any opinion one might have about ads.
Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.
Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."
Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.
Don't underestimate the economic loss caused by people just not knowing there's a better way.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
There's a huge difference between informational advertising, which I support, and manipulative advertising, which is reprehensible. Telling people that their custom CRUD app could be ready quicker, cheaper to support, and contain fewer bugs if they used your product is great. Bombarding people who already know about your product and its half dozen competitors with subconscious messages that your competitors are evil and that if they use your product their sex appeal will increase is dishonest and stupid.
I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
The waste you speak of sounds the result of misjudging demand rather than spamming too little. Or maybe people were informed about the merits of your better mousetrap, but just didn't care. Startups often guzzle that kool-aid.
Advertising is the last place I'd go to learn if someone's novelty is better. Who trusts ads?
There's also a time and place for ads, and the article's examples (like actual medical documents) are neither.
We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervasive as to be unavoidable; they can also still have a net harm even if you think that orgs "depend" on them for income, which is dubious.
And just for the record, I work for a nonprofit who advertises minimally, and definitely not to the public.
Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.
It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.
There aren't many things that can only exist because of advertising. Most of the things people things think depend on advertising already existed in some form before advertising took over and would continue to exist in some form if ads went away.
Imagine how much better our world would look without advertising. Will some adtech devs lose their job? Yes, but honestly it would probably be worth it. They'll find work in a non-scummy industry and can be a net positive for humanity.
Those are outweighed by the things that don't exist because due to advertising, resources are allocated to less valuable things instead.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
The classic non-argument of conservatives defending the status quo. People who don't depend on advertising for their income just get criticized for selfishly demanding the stop of a practice that doesn't benefit them instead.
But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.
Not just computers but everything related to them too.
My SO escape room wouldn't exist without advertising either... I'm pretty sure that's true for PLENTY of business.
examples where better regulation is needed: robocalling, pervasive tracking and data sharing, dark advertising patterns, drug marketing, etc.
You're asking him to argue against himself rather than put a strong case forward for a position. And you're framing the fact he doesn't as a mental limitation. You're denying the authors agency by asserting it wasn't even a stylistic choice about presentation; he didn't present what you would have so therefore his brain must be broken.
It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.
I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
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I'd respect his position more if he was not on LinkedIn or Facebook and did not work on commercial projects.
I think LinkedIn is despicable but I have a LinkedIn account because it’s basically expected that you have one for recruiting purposes by many employers.
I fortunately avoided being ever involved in anything directly related to adtech, and I plan on staying that way.
Advertising isn't free, its costs are just hidden. They wouldn't spend money if it didn't relieve you of yours. People who watch TV do pay for it, it's just that the mechanism by which it happens is a magic trick of persuasion. The only question is do advertisers provide a legitimate service to society that is worth paying for and enough to support what we pay to adertisers. That's the only way advertising can be "free" - if it is self-funded service worth value in and of itself.
IMHO, marketing is a good thing, and advertising can be when it's sufficiently targetted. Getting the word out about a new product is fine. But most traditional advertising that tries to sell an image or feeling is a blight.
You sound like you think this is some sort of impossibility, but that's exactly how cable provided multiple packages back in the analog days....
The reason OTA networks aren't allowed to do that is that the spectrum is considered a public resource and the government made that a term of their lease. There's nothing impossible about that idea.
I'm pretty sure its net effect is positive in the economy. The alternative - banning advertising would slow down the economy and make everyone poorer.
I aggressively block ads - no exceptions.
To be fair to the in-laws, my parents do the same as well. It's mind numbing.
I can't tell you the shock when I started watching American TV. I couldn't believe people were putting up with this.
A lot of us aren't. I suspect that causes the TV companies to try to squeeze more out of who is left, which is a slow-motion death spiral.
Even if you were raised with it, as I basically was, it's gotten a lot worse. I sometimes buy shows that air on prime time on the legacy networks (ABC, CBS, etc.), and over the last few years I've been watching their run times creep steadily downwards. My current record so far is 19min of runtime for a 30min show with a popular 2019 release that I don't want to name to derail the conversation, plus of course the networks tend to shave off the front & back 30 seconds nowadays. If somebody told me they found a 16 I wouldn't be that shocked. By contrast, looking at MASH season 1 (1972) on Amazon, the runtimes are all 26 minutes. Syndication usually ran some cut versions for a bit more time, but, still. That's over 25% less time for a "half hour" timeslot.
Of course with streaming services this phenomenon is mostly gone.
See also: https://xkcd.com/810/.
Then of course less than 10 minutes later (or 4 when I'm in America and that's just horrendous) the same ad gets shown again. That's the bit that is truly mind numbing and turns me off ads, the share the copious repetition of low information drivel.
The Law of Unintended Consequences always gets you in weird ways, and I'm not a lobbyist or a public policy person, nor do I know anyone highly placed in those fields.
But one of the ways companies slowly fail is by choosing to sell harder instead of making their product better. If we lower the rate of return on advertising dollars by 15%, won't that shift some more money into R&D, logistics and other divisions that provide something approximating value (although one unintended consequence I can see is an increased focus on strip-mining the Third World, literally and figuratively).
i can only imagine that consumers love the advertisements, otehrwise, why would they buy the product?
I had a coworker who insisted you could just chose not to participate. My argument to him was the same I’ll make to you: the other side is using psychological warfare. It’s privatization of propaganda tactics. That requires something a bit more vigorous in response than taking your ball and going home.
Fortunately, there isn't a law of the universe that says we can't get better at implementing effective and fair regulations where appropriate.
The essence of propaganda is to weave a story and engage the target population in an action that creates commitment to the story and creates secondary effect due to social proof as people see other people committing.
This is the essence of modern marketing as well.
Cancer is not really a well thought out way to describe it, it sounds a bit fanatical.
There is nothing conspiracy like about this. This is all well known and researched.
General public is just kept ignorant of it. I don't know why. Maybe it's because the more you know about how propaganda works the less effective it is? Thus teaching people en mass how propaganda works would make even benevolent attempts at mass mind control less effective.
[0] Branding is nothing new. In the viking age particular german swords were very well thought off - and they had particular inscription on the blade. The brand was so strong that blacksmiths around baltic created "pirate" copies of the blades by writing the same inscription - or, as some were illeterate, attempted to copy the markings resulting in almost-but-not quite correct spellings. As their clients were likely illiterate as well I don't think it mattered for business.
Actually propaganda is so effective exactly because it works even when you know that it's propaganda. People remember the message but not the source of the message.
And static websites with mostly text are very cheap to host now, and there are lots of people willing to share their knowledge without adverts. That was how it was usually done before the rise of web advertising, and old-fashioned websites still exist. You don't even need search engines to find them; there are volunteer-run directory projects like Curlie (successor to Open Directory Project and DMOZ).
Bloated websites full of video and megabytes of Javascript are probably too expensive to host without adverts, but I think the web would probably be better without them. I'd miss Youtube, but how many Youtube videos are really the best way to present the content and a good use of your time? A non-commercial web is possible.
The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes have existed in specialized domains (academia, law, news) for decades.
Wikipedia is a vast, self-indexed resource supported by donations. It's also indexed by Google, and it's availability over the public internet makes them (Google) an enormous amount of money. The labor of creating Wikipedia (the actual labor of organizing human knowledge) was done for free, and the maintenance of Wikipedia is funded by donation.
Every paid ISP prior to Google maintained its own index, which was paid for by user fees.
Expert communities (which often can't depend on commercial indexes) maintain encyclopedic curated sets of links.
The internet - a vast decentralized web of self-published information - is what people want. It drives people to the internet in droves. One strategy for capitalizing on that hunger is to index everything, offer a pretty good index for "free," then sell access to those eyeballs. It is far from the only way to make the internet more accessible.
The only thing I use google for right now is a glorified phone book, because I'm too stupid to remember urls and too lazy/forgetful to bookmark them. So sometimes (sadly), I'll google the twoplustwo forums for poker, or "hacker news" because I forgot news.ycombinator.com. But it's the expert communities that I want, not Google's inscrutible index.
No one has really succeeded in substituting attentional transactions with actual micro-payments, but it's certainly not impossible. There's obviously a demand.
Things like search engines will be able to survive because they’re necessary. They may look different (e.g. wrapped up in a subscription package with gmail and gdocs). We are used to paying $X per month for an internet connection, it’s absurd to believe people won’t add on $Y per month for the over the top services that make that internet connection useful.
Google/Facebook are big and motivated enough that they could probably figure out how to make money.
I know why (privacy and ethics), but most people won't and don't care.
I'm not convinced by this statement, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning behind it. Is it specific products? Specific technologies? Although Google has built some interesting stuff, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that they've done that was either a) something that couldn't have been invented without them, or b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation.
And regarding your second point, what would the practical difference be to the consumer if the innovation happened because of their ability to scale out, or "true innovation"?
You don't need to like Google to admit they have added value to the world.
Are you suggesting that order of magnitude improvements on information accessibility in a planetary scale is nothing?
b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation
Scaling out search engine to the entire globe is THE innovation. You need to realize that any kind of innovation doesn't freely come from a bunch of idea guys, but from execution.
Google search now has a revenue driven development target, not a feature driven one, purely because of its advertising lifeblood. It's a shame.
Google will be fine.
Nowadays neither the ads nor the results have any relation to what you search.
And I'll note that Google, etc, only take a fraction of the money flowing through the ad system. So if we got rid of ads, we could not only afford Google, but a number of other valuable things of Google's size.
Good riddance; it's been most of a decade since Google provided anything of value to the world. They're ruining HTML with AMP, their sponsorship of YouTube has crippled torrent-based video distribution, their search engine is a sick joke, and ReCaptcha puts large chunks of the web behind a Kafka-shrouded spyware-wall.
2nd option... add a useful/not useful flag to every search result, so users can flag blogspam, content farms, etc and help keep the results useful.
They're not too great at the "all" part. Or the "organize" part, anymore.
To those who say there is no other model, you are not correct.
It made me think of a future where AR is highly prevalent. What will your life be like? Will you have to pay to not have adverts stuck in your face all the time? To me human attention is valuable and it should be protected. I'm concerned for future generations as technology is going to progress further.
I don't have a full argument formed, but in my opinion we should rethink what should be allowed in regards to advertising in the internet age. Why is advertising required at this point with services like google? Could you just have a regulated service directory that operates similarly to google instead?
To those of you that are reading, I get it, yeah we wouldn't have services today without advertising, but now that we have technology, isn't most advertising antiquated? If I really do need something, I'll look for it and let technology bring the service or product to me.
The OC is a good rant, list of grievances.
Missing from his cancer analogy is the feedback loop.
The cancer is monetization and preferential attachment (recommendation engines) leading to outrage culture.
Any remedy, mitigation would interrupt or add friction to that feedback loop. No more retweets. Require all statements to be sourced. Hinkley's notion (elsewhere) of not allowing ads to be treated as biz expense. And so forth.
None of those things will happen. Until...
Advertising today is like petroleum wildcatting in the early days. The bottom will fall out when everyone wises up to the con. Then investors will demand US Govt intervene with regulation, to save the market.
(I know I'm trivializing the question; I'm not in your situation and I don't know the perfect model for your product. But I disagree with just lumping together "paywalls" and "advertising" in the same category of "non-desirable things".)
We could try micropayments, probably in the form of crypropayments, probably unaccounted for tax purposes (which is the main obstacle to their acceptance. They can be accounted for via alternative means, eg. by correlating traffic statistics). Until then ads are the most democratic to monetize small websites in the absence of VC money. Unless you can suggest better ways - i d love to try them.
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– BanksyIt's a multi-layered story that resists simplistic interpretations, which is why it is so beloved by so many.
There's a huge difference between reviews, directories, and advertising. You can seek out information without being pushed advertisements. Another facet: whether payment from the entity being promoted is involved and affects placement.
I generally mute/fast-forward commercials. Those are the best kinds of ads we can hope for because they're easy to skip and they're completely distinct from content. I'd rather fast-forward through an anonymous, non-targeted commercial for diapers than have Netflix manipulate me into watching what's profitable for them with their browse interface, based on my viewing and internet history, and then there's Coca-Cola all over the show itself.
The reality though is that even without ads I'm never lacking for things to spend my money/time on. In fact, without ads my main problem is still more often the finite nature of my time/money than a lack of options.
For restaurants, I usually search for them in a directory and not in ads...
1% of products have natural virality and will be found on their own. The other 99% of products and services in existence, no matter the quality, needs to be promoted so people can find them and use them.
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.
Did know that 97% of statistics are made up on the spot?
The problem with your fictions here is that they're based in a world with a lot of advertising. In your fantasy, people just sit around dying of thirst because there's nobody to advertise water at them. But in reality, people would still find ways to get what they need.
I find great new products all the time despite living an ad-free life. I find them through friends. Through internet discussion like Hacker News. And through sites like Wirecutter and Consumer Reports. I don't find my life particularly lacking.
Would ending ads mean it would be harder for businesses to manipulate their growth numbers? Sure. So I can get why you feel panicked at the thought. But you're used to a world where everybody's burning investor money to get attention, so it's required to do the same. Maybe think about the world where nobody can do that. I promise you, it'll keep on turning.
Some who works in adverting values advertising? Yes, you’re well placed to judge, but I’ve little time for adverts and actually dedicate time to avoiding Facebook (blockers, Pihole etc).
If I miss the odd product or service, so be it. The current situation is toxic.
Something that could possibly replace the function of advertising would be an independent organization that would provide tools for picking the best product given your situation. And information channels for new high-quality products (i.e. there's a new restaurant in your neighbourhood).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhrnMbhMgmw
It makes a really important point, though: where do you draw the line at what is considered "advertising"? It's a pervasive part of humanity.
> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing.
That's life, though, isn't it? Me convincing my employer I'm the best person for the job. Convincing my wife I'm the best choice for a husband. Ultimately, everything becomes a sort of "advertisement". It's a very slippery slope.
It's even more interesting that this article even says:
> When I say "advertising", I use this term somewhat loosely...
Which is a problem when you want to make bold claims like "Advertising as cancer".
To do that I presume you would actually have to believe that you are the best person for the job. Otherwise you would fill emotional distress, as normal people do when they lie. Professional marketers on the other hand don't have to believe in what they sell.
I don't think it's really as black-and-white as your suggesting, though. In the "employee/employer" context: there are plenty of employees who do think they are the best person for a job. In most cases that's probably just not true, given the size of a candidate pool. Are they lying to themselves?
> Edward Louis Bernays ... was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".
> Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.
So here's a radical suggestion. Legislation that says: any web site or app that shows ads should offer an option to view the site without ads, by paying for access, and that is priced reasonably (approximately equal revenue as ads) and with options for "a la carte" vs. bundling. Any provider of ads (adSense, etc) has to provide this service as well.
It's complex legislation, I'm sure, and tricky to get right. But it's better than tilting at windmills, as this article leaves me feeling it is doing.
My YouTube subscription feed is full of stuff that is some form of advertising - music instrument retailers demonstrating new products, advertorial content from tool manufacturers, tutorials from software companies and so on. It's all paid for out of the marketing budget, it's all intended to sell more product, but it's also a useful service to me as a consumer.
Back in the day, I bought computer and music magazines in large part because of the advertising. It's how I kept up to date with the industry, it's how I learned about new products that weren't necessarily available in my town and it's how I found out the market price for products.
How do consumers find out about new products without some form of advertising? How do manufacturers find a market without some form of advertising?
But, then again, somethings really are as virulent and aggressive as cancer, and I'm ok with them being compared to it. I'm fine with the (needed, imo) reaction.
In other words, it's obviously figurative, but not necessarily (meant as) hyperbole.
$5/mo probably isn't enough for Google.
But, he is already deeply frustrated by the intrusiveness of online ads. He is old enough and informed enough to be aware that he's being manipulated, but not old enough yet to consistently spot the manipulation that online advertisers use on his own.
A little advertising is a good thing. Inundation is not a good thing, and we are far past the inundation stage.
* I don't like something. * Why do people do it? It is not even effective. * It should be outlawed.
If you and a bunch of other people like you think advertising is a waste of money, what is preventing you from starting your own company that does not use advertising? I promise you the government will not come and force you to buy commercial time or Facebook ads.
The argument can be made that maybe I didn’t need these things in the first place. But I want them, it makes me happy, and these ads have saved me time.
The fact that people attempt to ignore most ads, with varying degrees of success, tells you that they're net-harmful.
But advertising in general is how people find out about things they might need or want. There might be a bakery 2 miles away you'll really enjoy. How will you find out about it if they don't advertise? Being strictly reliant on word-of-mouth is woefully naive (IMHO).
Take Google search, the user is literally looking for something. Why isn't an ad an appropriate response to someone searching for a search for "ozark jetski for hire"? As long as ads and organic search results are clearly differentiated, IMHO this is totally fine.
Certain behaviours obviously need to be restricted, like I'm a big fan of outright outlawing advertising to children. But advertising in general? In what world is that reasonable?
That's in the article. He's arguing the exact point that advertising has a legitimate function in a market to inform about products. They've outgrown that, he continues, and now they do not inform, they convince (and often lie to do so).
I don't do much advertising at all for Tomotcha as our churn is low and I am quite content with the number of subscribers right now. But from time to time we send a tea to an "influencer" or run an adword campaign. It helps.
[1] When I mention my tea subscription service (https://tomotcha.com) right here on HN, does it count as advertisement? It should, because it is, thankfully HN as a community of entrepreneurs is rather forgiving about self-promotion. Other communities (some subreddits) can be very hostile towards it...
I just skimmed your site. It looks like it’s all greens. Is that correct?
But taking just non-roasted green teas, there is a lot of variations. Depending on the way green tea is prepared, it will taste very different. Difference can come from the steaming (asamushi -> futsumushi -> fukamushi, from light and quick to deep and long), from the shading, or lack of shading (sencha -> kabusecha -> gyokuro from no shading to a lot of shading). Then there are teas prepared with different part of the tea plant: my favorite tea is actually called karigane, and is made of twigs instead of tea-leaves.
The teas are definitely all quite different, there are many to try.
I don't mind informative advertising: "hey, we are making this thing which can help with this" is ok. But that's a rare breed of ads nowadays. One of the eye-openers for me was when I noticed in my early student (and shaving :)) days how all Nivea shaving products were branded as being for sensitive skin (does your skin turn red if you pull razor over it?): I've simply stopped buying their products. They've scaled back on that, but I didn't "forgive" them their attempt to manipulate me.
As a cancer survivor myself, I don't mind the analogy and term, it just seems to not be explicit enough about what the trouble is with ads today: you have to work backwards to establish parallels from "cancer" to "advertising".
I utterly fail to see how it could be the case that website scraping arguably violates the CFAA (though I have my doubts there), but this kind of malware deliberately designed to violate the expressed intent of people to remove data from their own machines, for the purpose of accessing identity information, doesn't.
Interestingly, if you try to download the zip file of the evercookie repo from github, Chrome detects it as malware and blocks it. That makes me rather more confident in the security model of Chrome.
Why assume a lack of will at this point? We know they routinely approach companies about collecting the data the company collects. They've clearly demonstrated the will to collect our data regardless of legality. (Does/did this site have a warrant canary?)
At this point I treat all ads as hostile. As much as websites try to make you feel guilty for blocking their ads I feel zero obligation to allow or support their efforts to manipulate me or compromise my privacy and security.
What's happening is that the barrier of entry - better yet let's use the industry terms: the cost reach of advertising campaigns is low thanks to the internet that drove the cost of distribution of information close to 0.
So you're just seeing what was once a privileged tool open to the masses - and it's bad. Anyone can have access to it with a credit card.
Now just because there's a lot of bad advertising, probably the great majority of it, doesn't mean it's a cancer. Else everything that's abused in a bad way is a cancer.
Is all that money paid for airtime an indirect subsidy or transfer of wealth to those who own media companies?
If the quantity of advertisement can be curbed in such a way that corporates are more conscious of how much space they have on television with advertisements (time limiting law), as well as what message they can convey, this starts discouraging and treating in-your-face advertisement less of a prioritiezed form of pitching a product.
The noise to signal ratio of the modern Internet is such that I, as a technical person, someone that finds it preferable to read instead of listen or watch; I still find myself on Youtube 99% of the time. Almost all of my web browsing is now Youtube. AND I HATE IT.
"Please support our project by enabling advertising on this domain [OK] [Later] [Never]" "For Youtube Movies please install DRM/x264 package from the market [OK] [Later] [Never]" "You will need to enable storage, code, and gaming modules to use Itch [OK] [Later] [Never]"
Because browser extensions suck. Browsers suck. Mobile browsers suck. The experience of the Web sucks, for anyone that knows better. Shopping, gaming, streaming, syndication and publishing all suck big time.
Basically, I imagined a website where you pick the type of service or good that you're interested in, fill out some sort of questionnaire and then get a list of recommendations which are optimal for your situation.
You are not forced to read pamphlets nor do they insert the content of the pamphlets into your newspapers and letters. Typically the only thing you are forced to do by someone distributing pamphlets is to tell them whether you'd like to take one. If advertisements had to ask whether you wanted to see them, the entire industry would collapse.
Pamphlets are also not magically distributed to everyone. People have to decide to help distribute them, which means other people have to cooperate with you to help you spread your message. It is also easier for others to interfere in your efforts, as, unlike online, people can see who and where the information is coming from, and they can also more easily and directly inhibit distribution. On the other hand, any individual can buy a Facebook ad and, with enough money, shove it in millions of people's faces with little to no oversight. Hence, it is easier to spread misinformation (like anti-vaccine propaganda) through Facebook than in real life.
Online ads - and most ads tbh - don't force you to do that either. They want to attract your attention but you re free to ignore them. I used pamphlets as the equivalent of advertising in older times, i m sure people would consider them just as pushy/spammy back then as we consider online ads now. They are not peer-to-peer by definition - there is no point preaching to the choir.
As an example, google "cbd oil vs cbd isolate" or "why is cbd isolate in powder form...", in order to understand the difference and the relation betweens the 2 components (knowing Canabidiol should already be an oil, as its name suggest) and why cbd isolate is under the form of powder and not liquid as CBD oil.
Everything that come in the first results pages are fake blog posts from commercial sites or commercial offers. We quickly understand one contains the other after reading the first 3 pages from the result. But we never find an article explaining the actual chimical nature of cbd isolate (or pure form of cbd) or even an actual scientific study about cbd.
It's only the same and repeated argument, "article" after "article" about one pure form contained in another... and that for the first several result pages from a meta-search engine like searx (searx.be in this example with setting settle to include in general results Bing, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and StartPage).
The good information has been covered under a thick layer of low density infomertial bullshit.
It's like trying to watch a movie in the middle of car traffic : You can't hear anything from the movie original soundtrack.
It take to further research, like "why is cannabidiol a powder", to have access in the first result page to actual independant articles for cbd, but under the form of its less "commercial" name, "cannabidiol"... to learn that lot of claims about cbd are not founded on actual scientific researches.
In short, the word CBD have been hijacked by commercial entities for profit and lost the biggest chunk of its actual meaning.
Information is lost in the process.
And I still don't know why cbd isolate is in powder form.
> This is why my kid isn't going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children's show, it'll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS.
Until what age? I doubt this resolve will last until 18, particularly when they become old enough to know what their friends are watching. The vast majority of video content isn't legally downloadable, and even illegal downloading is a bit difficult because children's shows aren't as widely shared as content aimed at adults. (Even really popular shows like Paw Patrol have surprisingly limited availability.)
If you want to limit ad exposure, using subscription services like Netflix is more practical, as does purchasing shows on a per show basis on YouTube (which granted gets very expensive). Public broadcasting is also typically ad free; in the UK we have iplayer which has ad-free children's programming available for streaming.
I have no idea what brand my clothes/shoes are, if any. None of the food I buy has any branding whatsoever. ever seen a branded cucumber? nope, neither have I. I only buy new eletronics when the old one breaks, and I almost always get the cheapest one. Other than that, almost all of the rest of my spending goes to housing and savings/assets.
If everyone was like me, the advertising industry might not exist, or at least be much smaller.
Around 2009 I saw it as "unprofitable venture backed companies advertising on unprofitable venture backed platforms" as if it's some kind of matryoshka doll system that works as a baton passing from one generation of bad investments to the next - no revenue is trading hands, just poorly placed investor money:
A kafkaesque anarchy of people siloed at companies named after adjectives spelled without vowels passing pixels for sale among each other hoping that some unicorn will fall out of their back pocket.
A few reasons that we don’t see this:
1. It seems a slightly weird thing to tax. On the other hand, sugar taxes are becoming a thing in some places.
2. Elected governments may not want to piss off the media companies who they feel elected them.
3. Maybe people don’t care about advertising and so would feel like such a tax was for some hidden purpose. São Paulo (iirc) banned almost all public advertising. I wonder how the people there feel about it.
My behance feed is full of artists doing amazing things, being supporded by ad company budgets. GMUNK actually has a great talk on this, I think it's 'pearl 5' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F93CP8UjRxk
There would have to be a fundamental shift in our economic system, not just 'advertising', for artists to be able to have a support system outside of corporate sponsorship and gigs.
We all need advertising in order to enjoy the free services we all use. Cancer is something that nobody should have to live with. Advertising is something we can all live with if done ethically and responsibly.
So, some kinds of cancers are OK. It's hard to take this sort of article too seriously when it undermines it's own point so effectively.
The fact that advertising doesn't have to be a cancer is compatible with the claim that it is one at this point in history.
Some kinds of mold aren't harmful. That doesn't mean mold isn't a bad thing.
One possibility would be setting up some sort of cloud/container solution that isn't really trying to TOR is up, but does manage to obscure and filter traffic enough to harden us mortal targets.
Up from there, perhaps there is some tarted up proxy as a business model that supports doing social media and searching in a low-fingerprint way.
These ideas must have been explored already, so tell me who has some good products, HN.
Obviously, it wouldn't be perfect. But we don't need perfection here.
It also seems fairly obvious that there are plenty of alternative ways -- both existing currently and those that could be developed -- for informing people about various products or solutions to problems.
However some advertising is very good. I go to work to make money and I want to spend it ... how do I know what to buy? I like video games, an ad that tells me there's a new game coming out for a console I own is really useful to me! I'm not embarrassed to be a consumer and to be open to influence.
Which isn't to say that a better balance couldn't be struck (in the West and elsewhere) now, but 'cancer' is the sort of thing you want to eradicate rather than moderate.
https://www.christchurchnz.com/christchurch/arts-and-culture...
You realize that advertising isn't what created coloured paints or what allows us to plant flowers right?
I think it can have been a contributory but not a determinative factor. Mainly, I was just relaying an interesting observation, about the impact of advertising on public spaces, that I hadn't heard elsewhere, or previously, which prompted me to think that eradicating advertising probably isn't an optimum solution.
Only thing stopping me is a lot of companies have moved to 2FA via my call phone number as opposed to an authenticator app.
Would this reduce the overall amount of advertising and cause the remaining advertising to be smarter and more effective? Could this even be implemented? Could it be subverted?
Our ads are self-hosted, static images that basically just show pictures of office design products. We also have an area that is literally just a listing of office design products which works kind of like a catalog.
We also sell the ads ourselves and do not participate in ad networks. The only 3rd party scripts we use are a google font and google analytics and the site still works if you block them.
While we are an exception, I'd like to see more people take the approach we do.
I do think the space should be reserved and used for advertising city services such as 311 information, elderly housing services, housing rights etc. It's a great way of educating the city residents about benefits and rights they might not otherwise be aware of.
Jokes aside, advertisement itself maybe not a "cancer on society", but click-based advertisement is definitely ruining the internet and damaging the society. Can't wait until its era is over.
Why should someone with more money get to show off more?
More money doesn't mean a better product.
But what is the alternative?
A nationalized ad network? Like public healthcare, you pay X% of ... IDK ... your sales or something... but the amount of money doesn't determine what you get.
In public healthcare, your medical needs determine what you get, what would be an equivalent in business?
"Content" to me is like corporations calling people "human resources". It's a grouping word which removes all that makes elements of the group valuable in the first place.
Occasionally I make an exception and signup for premium services (e.g. Netflix and YouTube Premium).