Hacker News Reader

> images convey a lot of information very quickly, and can be visually "skipped" in a way text cannot.

Some images can be skipped. I installed an adblocker on this browser today because of an advertisement that could not. An obnoxious facial expression on both sides of the article can't be ignored; the subroutines running in a brain to detect faces and eye contact seem to be pretty highly prioritized. That's why those stupid youtube thumbnails are so effective.

>This is more complex than financials - displaying an advert leads to a bi-directional association in the consumers mind between the entity being advertised and the entity advertising it. It is beneficial to advertise products that have Brand values similar to yours (or ones you want to appropriate).

I agree, and I think that's part of why I disagree so hard with you on the primacy of images.

I mean, i'm not saying that a preference for text vs. a preference for pictures is objectively right or wrong, it's just a really good example of your aforementioned alignment of brand values between the content provider, the brand doing the selling, and the consumer. pictures are a way of associating your brand with values, but eschewing the (possibly extraneous) extra data in that picture, you are also associating your brand with a set of values.

I am also a consumer of protein powder... but you are way better off appealing to me with text. Ingredients, (tell me what the stuff is made of, and don't add any sweeteners) purity (Test for heavy metals or the like!) and then price are probably the attributes you want to bring forward, if you are trying to sell me a protein powder, approximately in that order. If you instead show a nice picture of the can or have a model preparing some in your ad, I'm going to see that, at best, as an irrelevant distraction. (again, I'm not saying those are the objectively most important attributes of a protein powder, but if you want my protein powder budget, that's how you get it; At a cultural level, the more I feel you focus on the things I care about and the less you focus on things I see as irrelevancies, the more I feel you align with my values.)

I mean, I'm not saying that pictures are good or bad in general, just that advertising with pictures and advertising with text have very different cultural connotations, and that advertising with text only can be a striking alignment with a consumer's values.

i.e. you want to see the facets you'd be looking for when choosing a product to purchase.

For many products and people that will just be the visual appeal, and advertisers target their widest audience.

This is a case where tracking can actually be seen in a positive light - I too think I would be more likely to convert if I saw a datasheet as an ad, but that's definitely not majority. At the same time, obviously fashion ads will convert better as images, in almost everyone.

>For many products and people that will just be the visual appeal, and advertisers target their widest audience.

I... think this is usually unwise. If you attempt to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. I personally think one of my advantages when I ran prgmr.com was a consistent brand? At the very least, it was very recognizable. (I don't run it anymore, and I'm not claiming to have done a great job when I did. But I can point out several mistakes I made where I would have gotten... big at least by my standards if I had zigged rather than zagged. I think I did a memorable, if not a good job at branding, and "just get my name right" is... well, it's halfway there.)

Personally, I think that if you want to appeal to different markets, you should use a different brand with a different customer-facing layer, even if in the bowels, the product is produced on the same equipment.

>This is a case where tracking can actually be seen in a positive light

I'm not sure? I mean, I think that the connection between the advertiser/brand values is important, and you destroy some of that if you tailor your advertising to the consumer... if different people get different views of the same brand, well, it's really different brands.

(Also, the decision to track/not track is a brand value decision in and of itself- a rather big one, if you can credibly communicate that to your customers.)

Attempting to appeal to everyone by serving a different ad based on tracking is precisely what I meant, but I'm thinking more from a platform standpoint than as a brand. An ideal marketplace would prefer to sell a spot to brands who advertise in a way that appeals to the buyer.

And since we re considering new advertising ideas, how the ads are presented matters. We could perhaps be thoughtful about when and how to present ads instead of plastering our sites with more banners than content because that's what adsense says that works. E.g. why are there not ads at the end of the video? Why are there 5 minute ads (seriously?)? Just saying "this worked" is not enough - this might have worked for an ad but destroyed the field for all other ads.

> Keep the image, it's worth 1000 words.

Rephrase that one, please. An image lies more than a 1000 words.