Imo all ads are ethically questionable. Their main objective is to make us want things we didn't want before. Unfulfilled desires make people unhappy; unnecessary consumerism uses up limited resources on a finite planet.
1. Inform the consumer that certain offering exists. If someone invents a new superior type of coffee maker, they should let people know that there's now an option to make their coffee in a better way. There's nothing unethical in that. Of course, you can invent something like cigarettes, which people would be better without, but most inventions aren't like that.
2. Inform consumer that certain provider exists. I.e. if you have 20 coffee maker vendors, all alike, then when a customer goes to buy a coffee maker, they would tend to choose one they heard something good about, thus brand promotion and celebrity endorsements. This _might_ be somewhat unethical if inferior product is promoted with superior ones available, but usually there is enough offerings of similar quality that this is pretty neutral. Sometimes also something good comes out of it when companies sponsor worthy causes to get attention.
3. Associate the offering in consumer's mind with something positive and desirable. This one may be the ethically questionable one, as usually the association is completely bogus and is not based on any actual qualities of the offering but only on unsubstantiated claims of the advertiser that consuming the offering makes the customer "a kind of person" they want themselves to be. This is the kind that gives advertising the bad rep. But most online ads are actually not of this kind - it's just much harder to make such kinds of ads as a small banner.
If you don’t rely on advertising (speaking directly to possible customers) then you have to work with journalists other middle-men, whose tastes might not reflect those of your customers, or you have for a network to build, which might be too slow. Possible grateful future customers loose out here too.
If I see a place that has 100+ 5 stars on tripadvisor/yelp I'm much more likely to go than if I see an advertisement, because at that point I know a reasonable number of actual people have gone and liked the experience.
I typically dismiss any claims an advert makes as total bullshit because adverts are lying to you the majority of the time. In the case of a restaurant it might work if you're advertising that you're newly opened, but otherwise I'm wondering why people aren't being pulled in when they look on sites like tripadvisor/yelp.
All social media enables/encourages this to a certain degree and I think the personal touch and reach that individuals give to the products they promote is potentially far more subtle and harmful than the banner ads we typically think of as problematic.
You might not be able to change an individual's choices by very much, but all these tiny nudges in aggregate push society more and more towards unsustainable levels of consumption, without improving happiness.
Most cars I see around on the roads are family sedans and not trucks. Some are SUVs but those are not for hauling trailers - those are for hauling groceries and kids to the soccer games. So I don't think the trailer one works very well :)
And actually if you take about prestigious, two-person convertible looks much cooler than your standard family-size SUV/minivan. But people that buy the latter usually buy it not because they want to be cool, see above.
I think the problem here is not the ads but that people are gullible. If those people can afford to buy a car which can pull a trailer when they don't need to its not because of advertising, it's because consumption makes them happy.
That's irrelevant to the topic of ads.
Clothing is of cultural and societal importance for individuals in a group and we've become rich enough to afford to essentially buy items of clothing as we please.
This runs quite deep in human society. Look at every human groups on the planet even the most isolated and 'primitive'. People wear symbols and try to make themselves more attractive.
Clothing ads are just a 'symptom'. Our behaviour runs much deeper than that.
The whole point of advertising is getting conversions: convincing people who previously weren't going to buy your product that they should buy your product.
Some of the people that are converted just didn't know about your product, some had forgotten about it, some thought a competitors product was better, etc. So there is a sense in which the vast majority of people you convert aren't people who specifically "don't want" your product. And you're definitely right that this isn't Inception-tier infiltration of the mind. But at the same time, the conversions you are trying to get are the people who don't want your product yet, but just need a tiny push to want it.
Yes and no.
The problem with digital advertising is that the only part that's easy to measure is what's happening at the bottom of the funnel. Which means that a disproportionate amount of effort and attention gets spent on those campaigns.
There's a whole layer of awareness advertising which, while it's not about influencing behaviour, is certainly about building consumer awareness of a brand or product to later build purchase intent.
But it's quite likely that the majority, or at least plurality, of ad spending goes to the changing minds kind of campaign. This is especially visible in the massive popularity of lifestyle marketing campaigns, that seek to create a particular image making a product (or even type of product) more desirable. Think of the Coca Cola Christmas, "green" cars, hyper-technologized "smart" fridges/washing machines, fashion brands, Apple's success a few years ago in convincing people to change their phone each year etc.
You also shouldn't forget the disgusting world of children's advertising, where often the goal is to convince children to nag their parents or friends about an item - often by explicitly showing this type of behavior, which works wonders with small children especially.
My problem is not that I want to see ads that are more "relevant", it's that I don't want to see ads. I don't care what you're selling. If my problem that you're trying to solve is really that important, I'd be actively searching for a solution, not waiting to be enlightened by a targeted advert.
Adtech evangelists seem to think that my biggest problem is a burning surplus of cash that I'm just desperate to get rid of. If only I could find more products to buy so I could be liberated from the pain of having money in the bank! Er, no thanks. I'll put my spare cash towards saving for a house and retirement and the occasional luxury; save your bullshit for the people who don't know how to install Adblock.
(The other way I use my spare cash on is to pay directly for content, because almost everything that's wrong with the Internet and modern media is the fault of the current ad-driven paradigm, and only future I want to live in is one where ads are dead.)
Is it the main objective, though?
IMHO the main objective is to make potential customers aware that you exist. It's very basic behaviour for someone who tries to sell something, like setting up your fruits cart on a busy road, in full view, and not in a deserted backstreet.
There is nothing intrinsically unethical about ads or targeted ads.
Targeted ads are not that different from telling a friend about something you saw or heard of because you know that they might be interested.
"Unethical" is one of those terms that is being exponentially thrown at anything some people don't like, which only hollows out its meaning.
Oh please.
Targeted ads are like following people around, tracking everything they do, then interrupting them as they go about their business to interject your commercial "message" about something you think you can sell them for a profit, regardless of genuine need.
They are absolutely nothing like interaction between friends.
Advertising is all, pretty much by definition, entirely unlike a friendly recommendation. It has a profit motive.
If I own an ecommerce marketplace I can look at a customer's previous purchases in order to gain some insights on what might interest them. There is absolutely nothing sinister, unethical, or just wrong about this. This is simply using knowledge about someone gained in a relationship in order to improve your service, again not too different from the knowledge you gain about your friends (or anyone you get to know since my use of the term 'friends' seems to bother you. This is not important to the point), which you use to improve, so to speak, your relationship with them.
Of course there is a profit motive, but this is a red herring. A good business profits by actually helping their customers, ie. by providing them with something of value to them.
Here are reasons friends recommend things in my experience:
* They think I’ll like it (A++).
* They like it (When their default way of expressing enthusiasm for something is recommending it, one has to learn to not take it so literally. Also, I’m not discounting the opportunity for shared bonding over something that at least one of us enjoys though. Is this category of recommendation a symptom of having a weak theory of mind? I don’t know).
* Loyalty (they’ll recommend products by friends/associates/compatriots, irrespective of quality).
* Financial kickbacks/business connections. (Still can be useful).
* Pyramid schemes (almost no experience with this, thankfully. I guess the same as #4 but also creepier).I wouldn't really consider someone doing your last two things there to be doing something friendly, those are self-interested actions and I would treat them with suspicion.
The first three though, sure, those are friendly actions. Their utility is variable, but they aren't motivated by personal profit.
I have vouched but I doubt it will have any effect, which I think is a shame because it think that, other than that single sentence, your conversation was constructive.
The Mad Man series are about an advertisement company in the fifties.
The main objective of ads is to connect buyers and sellers via brand recognition. That's why companies spend so much money on advertising.
The problems with digital ads is that they are deceptive, clickbait, annoying, resource hogs, ugly and a source of malware.
For some reason my preferred news site has these shitty low quality clickbait ads that make you lose a lot of brain cells each time you see them.
That's a "motte and bailey" defense of advertising, though. If the stated main objective of connecting (existing) buyers and sellers were true, almost all ads would be restricted to opt-in forms like trade shows and catalogs (be it paper or digital). After all, it makes sense to let a buyer self-identify before spending money and effort on informing them about your wares.
The actual primary objective of most advertising, as demonstrated in the real world[0], is to create new buyers, and recapture those you buy from your competition.
> The problems with digital ads is that they are deceptive, clickbait, annoying, (...) ugly (...).
That's started way before digital. Check out pictures of some old newspapers or billboards from a century ago - that was "clickbait" 100 years ago too. It does read strange (all that presumptuous and grandiose language), but it's only because we've became culturally immune to that kind of wording. More recently, I'd argue TV ads were and are the worst - the current form was refined into pure and unadulterated brainwashing. On-line at least mostly spares us that.
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[0] - "The purpose of a system is what it does". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
"All ..." frequently leads to obvious counter-examples and exceptions.
When you invent the new thing that completely solves the problem, how will you let people know that your thing is available and works just great?
Well the answer to that for designer labels is to hire film stars to appear in expensive tv ads so you can buy stink that costs cents to make for hundreds of dollars which obviously makes the world a better, kinder more equitable place for Chanel. /s
In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
This is one of the prime examples of problems that are explicitly created by advertising itself. What these example people perceive as a problem and the way they see it are product of generations of advertising.
> you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
There is nothing to address here. The market is an optimization system. As long as there exist a single exploitable loophole in the human psyche - and there always will be something[0] - advertising industry will evolve to find and exploit it. Lying to people, or making them feel bad and offering a product to relieve the emotional pain? All par for the course, tried and true methods.
Advertising - and marketing in general - needs to be reined in, because it's a cancer on modern society.
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[0] - Even if we were emotion-free robots with perfect reasoning capabilities, there's only so much time an individual has to acquire and process information about any given thing. This limit, and prioritization in general, is exploitable too.
I'm not advocating for anything positive about ads, but when I say we need to address underlying causes, it's that thousands of years old behavioral pattern I mean. Destroy all ads, it will still be here.
So we cannot remove or drastically reduce advertising without it causing far-reaching second-order consequences that in turn have their own consequences. Less ads, people buy less stuff. Places that make stuff make less of it, or go out of business, and not as many people are needed to make that stuff. Businesses that supported those businesses suffer the same problem. Countries whose economies rely on us buying their stuff or having our stuff made in those countries suffer major economic losses.
Lets take the consumer electronics industry. Lets say we just got rid of advertising for things to the point where everyone was willing to keep their stuff twice as long and buy less stuff they don't really need. That industry is about $1 Trillion/year. Let's say the second-order economic effects from support industries that depend on that are another $500 Billion. Still doesn't seem like a lot in the scheme of things, a little under 1% of the world GDP. But it's also not evenly distributed. Some countries are hit much harder. The economies of South Korea & China are hit particularly hard. And a part of China's stability is driven economic growth that supports propaganda promising increased quality of life. War may not break out, but small cracks start to appear. Do that same for the automobile industry, and that's about another $2.5 trillion out of the economy.
So we cannot remove from this system a part we don't like and still have that system function the same way. I guess we can go into it eyes-open and say "it's worth the consequences" and go ahead with it. Or, and this is my preference, we can try to understand the system well enough to figure out how we can change the parts we don't like smoothly enough to avoid the worse of those consequences.
None of this means we shouldn't complain about ads, and want them to go away. But if we're being practical about it, we don't just need a way to get rid of ads, we also need a way to patch that hole in the system.
Yeah, but not just capitalism. Anywhere you don't have unelected legislators imposing censorship on what they feel is good and wholesome and what isn't. Competing candidate's platform advertisements in the run-up to a union election in that union's newsletter isn't displaying a lot of capitalism and it's as true there as mop advertisements between talk-show segments on late night tv. (One or more of the candidates might be, gasp, wilfully and knowingly telling, omg, lies!)
When the ads are creating a problem that is actually difficult to solve they're revealing a problem that is not the ads themselves. It's a crisis in education and the general public's ability (or the pereception of it) to do a decent job critical thinking and bs detecting.
Making cruel fun of ridiculous fear-mongering accross society ought to be the answer to organised lying. When it isn't, getting Zuck & Jack to censor it is kind of a worrying development. Tough to get that back in the bottle even if it's initially done in support of causes you kinda like, coz you know that condition of it only being "for good", (where /you/ define good) will not last. Guaranteed. Never does.
"The government is about to pass a bill to lock up your reproductive organs. Join the campaing to free the genetalia!" Public information or ad? Context depedent, sure, and also dependent on your views on whether the bill is actually teriffic, terrible or anywhere between the extremes.
Still an ad to make the public aware of the information.
For covid info, advertising slots are still bought. They are filled with content tha has been paid to be created to fit the format and effectively convey the message, including on an emotional level. The covid information ads still decorate media being consumed for reasons other than seeing the associated ads.
"All $whatever..." rarely works out.
The grey areas here overlap so badly and based on opinion alone that it really is a distinction without a difference. Any rule you set up I'll show you as many exceptions that show it's futile until boredom takes over.
You slice it any way you like. Do they take money for services? Ok so UNICEF information is ads but political advertisements are not. The Coca-Cola company endorses being nice to puppies and supporting your local shelter.
There can't be a clear distinction. There can't be sensible policy that fairly discriminates between good and bad paid 30 second television slots or between good and bad magazine spreads, between good and bad PR influenced news articles or anything of that nature.
The Covid information adverts that probably saved lives. They could easily have had the opposite information content and cost lives. Without verifying it, i'd be sure that somewhere in the world they were and activists were advocating a better response with paid ads which were funded by industry groups.