The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age (2018) [pdf]
digitalcommons.law.yale.edu
digitalcommons.law.yale.edu
Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something that's not crap. Be it a question about daily life, or a product review, or a tech related thing.
Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.
But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?
The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price, which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are added to websites just to break even.
I really, really despise advertising. It can't disappear soon enough.
To make this comment a bit less ranty, I'd like to add something: some people believe that ads don't work on them. I very much disagree. Ads DO work. That's exactly why I don't want anywhere near me.
Optionally, adjust the price according to rating. The higher the rating the lower the payment for interaction with the ad. Let unpopular/unsuccessful ads/advertisers pay more for the same customer.
Let me adjust the price and rating thresholds to exluce low priced / low quality ads.
Keep track of my purchases to build my reputation among advertisers.
That's where we started. It's a solution, but only for one side of the market. It leaves a lot of potential inventory and revenue on the table.
Presumably your ad blocker doesn’t prevent sites that display ads from loading at all. How then do you make the calculation about doing without?
Otherwise, if you use websites that are solely ad-supported, then you are neither paying for the service nor doing without.
Web sites that require payment are more than welcome to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of sending a copy of the requested data for free.
We can play semantic games - “looking at” ads - or we can acknowledge that people pay for websites by allowing their browser to load ads, which is both true and the uncontroversial truth my comment was assuming.
Websites are obviously capable of returning that response or a 200 with text that states that the site declines to show the page...
I’m still curious how OP decides that OP is doing without.
This expectation that "you pay for content by looking at ads included" is a unilateral decision made by publishers who embed ads, and pushed by the advertising industry. We have every moral right to refuse looking at ads. And if you demand payment for the value you provide, do it the honest way: demand up-front. HTTP protocol has provisions for that too.
Not even close. There is only one truth here: nobody's charging users for anything. There are no payments.
Webmasters run servers that send pages to any client that asks, 100% free of charge. Advertisers pay webmasters to load these pages full of ads. What clients do with these ads is not under anybody's control. They might look at it. They might delete it. Who knows?
So any problems that arise here are between webmaster and advertiser. The ads aren't being displayed? People aren't clicking on the ads? Not making enough money? None of that is the user's problem. Nobody is obligated to solve these problems for them or even to help out by looking at or clicking on ads.
Poor phrasing on my part. I meant: Presumably if your ad blocker detects ads, it doesn’t prevent the site itself from loading.
Once they got a click, they know that this user does not have an ad blocker so is less tech savvy, and more susceptible to be influenced by marketing.
Click through rates and conversion rates have increased on desktop traffic in the past few fears.
This alone makes ad blocking a moral imperative. They don't really care about the internet, it's just some money making scheme to them.
> But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?
Aren't capitalists all about adapting to adversity? If capitalism can't survive without ads, then let it die a well-deserved death. Nobody should be putting up with advertising for the sake of it.
A) What you wrote: Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.
But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?
B) What people say about 'the brightest wasting their time on Wall Street instead of creating things'
*
Why are we assuming these people would do something meaningful with their lives if they were not working on 'better advertising and better conversion'
??
Perhaps they would just be doing something else that pays well but has little long term contribution to humanity
This creates its own set of problems. Companies looking to sell directly to consumers through their own website lose a powerful way of promoting their product to consumers giving entrenched retailers more power and more control over what is sold to consumers.
Does Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. not promote certain types of products over other, either subtly or overtly? What constitutes advertising?
I don't think anyone likes misleading or intrusive advertising, but to say that advertising is obsolete is either incredibly naive or put forth in intellectual bad faith.
To everyone around me, I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation.
Reviews are thoroughly gamed, and have been for many years now. That applies both to vendor-owned stores, where you can assume they're all heavily moderated or fake by default, as well as marketplaces like E-bay, where bribing customers to remove negative reviews or give better ratings is a standard business practice for sellers.
Product descriptions - those are always purposefully misleading. Hyping up the positives, hiding negatives, avoiding to provide useful metrics, and doing everything possible to prevent you from comparing between alternatives.
The best way I've found so far is to look for communities of people using a given product category, and read up opinions. Not review sites - these are, with few exceptions, just ads in sheep's clothing. But smaller, purpose-oriented communities are much harder to game thoroughly. So personally, unless the product category I'm exploring has a recent review on WireCutter (in which case I just buy one of their top picks; never been burned this way), the first thing I do is googling "<product category> site:reddit.com" and do my research there.
That strategy works better for some products. E.g. especially high-value products such as digital cameras where one can go to photography discussion communities to learn of real-world opinions on Canon vs Nikon vs Sony, etc before visiting amazon.com
However, for many other products, that doesn't work. E.g. I was searching for a small square pictures frames and large photo albums for some family pictures. None of the online communities[1] talking about picture frames are useful for this because they focus on custom frames instead of commodity items. In this case, just browsing amazon.com's "virtual shelves" or driving to a brick&morter store to see what they actually stock is the easiest way.
Another example of using amazon.com's reviews (even if they're gamed) was buying a temporary guest bed. (My previous comment.[2]) As far as I can tell, there really isn't focal point of online discussion for folding beds because no strong recognizable brand names emerge to converge lots of opinions on. Because folding beds don't attract discussions like Canon/Nikon cameras, it turns out most of the opinions are at Amazon.
[1] one example search of discussion forums: https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+frames+discussion+fo...
What I do for the product categories you mention - cheap commodity items - is I first decide how important are they for me. If I don't really care about quality (or it's a product that's almost impossible to make in bad quality), I'll order from the cheapest seller that doesn't seem fly-by-night (which I determine by metrics like "how old is the account/offer", "how many positive reviews the offer page has" and "what special site-specific markings the seller has". It's not bullet-proof, but the goal here is just to avoid dealing with fraudsters.
If I do care about quality, it depends on whether or not I can afford losing money and time on a bad item. If yes, GOTO previous paragraph. If not, I'll find a brand - any brand - that sells the item and order from them.
Also not mentioned: for a good chunk of such purchases I rely on word-of-mouth. If someone I know has a product in the category I'm interested in and they're happy with their purchase, I'll just buy the same thing they did, preferably from the same place they did.
The main heuristic I use: sellers are incentivized to lie, cheat and steal from you. Degree to which it happens depends, in general, on how much they can get away with. So I expect the official Nikon store to lie to me (deceptive marketing, bullshit specs, purposefully making it hard to compare across product category). I expect an e-commerce platform seller to lie and possibly cheat (that's entirely based on personal experience). Reviews are too easy to fake and bribe (I've personally know people who did it and I've been asked to participate many times, so I know how this works and how widespread it is).
Wait, one can get money for negative reviews? Let's automate that..
As for "what people say about" a particular product on Amazon, I don't even bother reading it.
They argue the FTC needs to put the hammer down in different ways now that advertising has changed so much.
"Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."
With respect, it is completely the opposite. Advertising IS storytelling and adtech has created the opportunity to tell, retell and invent new stories at a rate and with an impact that has no precedent.
Any set of facts (or non-facts), and any storyline- especially false ones which "spread" much more quickly- are promulgated by digital ad campaigns of infinite variety and infinite precision, and create the social disintegration the US especially is experiencing.
Advertising is asymmetric, and all it takes is one quip, one framing, and the mind of one person is changed. The cost of finding that one effective personalized message has never been so low. Products- physical, digital, and "people"- have their stories- in the minds of specific target individuals- changed (nudged) in a moment. One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted.
The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level.
Similarly, Bloomberg's spend should not be evaluated on what it failed to do, but on what it succeeded at.
And I agree (implied) that banning advertising is implausible.
Best wishes.
>> One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted.
I am skeptical. The only cases I can think of where it has worked (religions and cults) are ones where resonant storytelling is all there is. The power of collective belief and shared meaning outweighs any contradictory facts. In extreme cases, the facts themselves are denied (the fossil evidence is a lie). In most cases, memorable storytelling nudges you to pick one of out essentially similar choices (from coffees to smartphones).
>>The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level.
This is an interesting point. I'd love to see some objective study looking at who actually changed their beliefs after coming across these hyper-personalized political ads. Getting the already disaffected to reinforce their beliefs is one thing, and getting people to actually shift their beliefs to the other camp is another.
1. Decision making is much more of a "Thinking Fast And Slow" behavioral model than a monolithic intellectual logical process (the Slow part of Thinking Fast and Slow).
2. The small messaging nudges have a huge and impossible-to-prevent impact on the Fast part, which drives the majority of micro decision making.
3. Rationalization (how the Slow part retroactively justifies Fast micro decision making) plus authority dynamics (Trump enshrining bullying behavior at the leadership level) mean:
Beliefs may not have changed but behavior contradicts beliefs.
This is especially critical- and tragic- when that behavior is self-destructive, and beliefs/denial are an obstacle to using communication for harm reduction.
Hope that makes sense.
Best wishes.
> It is hard to believe that as late as the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) viewed non-false, non-misleading advertising as anticompetitive conduct capable of violating the antitrust laws.
> Advertising has the power, through repetition and brand image creation, to induce consumers to buy things that they do not really want, to the disadvantage of competitors selling the things that consumers would otherwise buy.
Capitalism has been invigorated by people buying things they don't need.
Capitalism has a very different premise than this. When it ran into problems capitalists (particularly in the US and their boosters) opted to double down on just about all of its negatives, rather than consider real alternatives.
Advertisement, per definition, is self evident. You have way more "less obvious" marketing tools, like product placement, but even those that are subtle, are in set in a context - like a movie or a tv show.
I think it's way more troublesome the obscure parts of what the paper claims to be "product information" - that is where true deception and manipulation occurs. This is where your defenses and your guard are down. You don't know you're being manipulated, even if it's a simple paid 5 star review with no review text, it's a deceptive bias. Another example, is undisclosed paid promotions/reviews from influencers.
People would be better off acknowledging that advertising works, and that it is present in media, and we should be critical of it, which I believe in 2020, we're aware of it. Else if you're going that path, then you can start make monopolies on media and information distribution that arguably serve any agenda - even if that agenda is to gather more share/views/audiences, and you end up banning media.
Because that's the truth - the majority of endeavors that are distributed in media have an agenda, and try to manipulated the audiences in some way.
With this said, I'm not saying that all advertising is fine, in fact, this is probably the hardest times for authorities and regulators to control, and fine, abuses. You just need to log on Facebook and see illegal claims being made in advertising, things that would never be allowed on TV/Radio/Outdoors. Yet they generate massive amounts of reach.
The paper is so out of touch with the reality of marketing to even suppose that.
Very little marketing is done on the basis of information, it's emotional, life style aspiration.
Does Nike put ads showing the technical aspects of their shoes in Times Square?
Or does the 'Big Spend' go on Kapaernick's lofty quasi-political statements?
Literally turn on your TV and watch 10 commercials and listen carefully and look at the imagery: "This truck is rugged, tough, reliable, I can haul a bigger load than anyone else on the road, look how impressive I am to the other guys on the site" - this is an example 'utilitarian aspiration' i.e. when they sell utility as an aspiration because said utility is not very necessary.
Arguably, these days, I think it is.
>Very little marketing is done on the basis of information, it's emotional, life style aspiration. >Does Nike put ads showing the technical aspects of their shoes in Times Square?
You're missing the point - I said that Nike stance, claims, ads, brand, is self evident.
Manipulated reviews, high ranking on Google, and influencers promoting products, it's dissimulated. People are not aware those variables are being manipulated.
Even if some people buy Nike for the sake of Nike, if they are presented with a 150$ pair of shoes that has 3,5 reviews on Amazon, or has Kanye West saying "this shoes are shit", makes a huge difference these days.
I confess I didn't check the references, in part because of laziness, other part because I gave them the benefit of the doubt with regards to the references they used.
>or just assume that they wouldn't cover the subtleties and nuances you describe above?
You tell me.
I said that advertising is self evident, it's not dissimulated. Ads must be signaled as being ads. On TV, comercial breaks must be voiced out - "we're going into comercial break" - you signal people that they are leaving a news format into advertising. At least in the countries I know, namely my country, where advertising is quite regulated for it's nature.
And let's not think we're Pavlov Dogs, exceptionally good advertising needs a lot of money behind it's distribution to generate enough reach and frequency to be effective - that has a tremendous cost. That's why the lion share of marketing budgets is for media buying.
Then I said that their proposal is not practical in reality - SEO, market places, reviews, product descriptions, everything is pretty much dissimulated these days, or has a high potential to be dissimulated.
Hell, the market reference, a tech firm with access to literally unlimited money, can't handle this problem, I'm talking about Amazon.
What's just as shocking is how naive most of the tech world is in terms of their understanding of what marketing even is, let alone advertising. Similarity for finance and financial concepts.
Advertising and Marketing is a complicated thing, but it's part of the structure of business and it's far from irrelevant.
This is absurdly false.
Prevails in which part of society? The vast majority of the few ads that I see at least attempt to be at least mildly misleading by at giving the impression that the product is somehow quite different from competing products but without actually spelling out what the difference really is or whether there really is a difference.
I feel as if we are right on the cusp of alternatives to ad-sponsered free internet. Web Crypto Mining being one of the more obvious methods to harvest spare compute cycles of peer meshes.
That narrows down what you can do with it quite a bit.
[EDIT] oh AND it has to prove you were performing the operation with the current block in hand. No running ahead with the calculations then hashing it with the block when you get it, or anything like that. You mustn't be able to even start until you have the block.
I can also imagine that anything non-random is vulnerable to a discovery of a more efficient method of computing the same thing, and the first person to exploit such a method could take over the chain.