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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

We definitely know that it works. We generate petabytes everyday proving it does.

That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.

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As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing?

Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifestations of the unfathomably-cringeworthy-to-utter "sheeple" / "NPC" trope or something?

One area I can see is more subtle word-of-mouth kinds of influence (organic or astroturfed), where someone may see a lot of their friends or people they admire using and recommending something. I can definitely be influenced in that way in some cases - that's kind of how interest in almost anything works, isn't it? (For a non-profit example, would I have become interested in Rust if I didn't see it positively mentioned thousands of times on websites I use for the past decade? Probably not.) But for traditional ads like banners and commercials and billboards, I perceive zero efficacy in my own case.

I used to think like you, but now I think it's 5D chess. Marketing is like air, so ever present you can't even see it. If you don't buy anything and live off your homesteading, then marketing probably doesn't have any effect on you. If you live a life anything like the average westerner, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on things you had to be taught to desire. It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest (but not looking at anyone else's hiking gear brands). Our economy is based on you consuming many many times more goods and services than your great grandparents, and it wasn't cheap to train you to do that.

It's certainly quite possible. However

>It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest

I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like HN and reddit), I have comprehensive ad blockers, etc.

I also don't really buy products. I buy food, maybe I'll upgrade to a new laptop or phone every 4 - 5 years, but otherwise I don't think I really "consume" new things.

The only thing I can think of that ads have consciously made me do is pay to get rid of them. For example, I pay for YouTube Premium so I can never see ads. (Ad blocking gets tough for mobile devices and casting to other screens.) They got me there, because I watch a lot of YouTube (which I acknowledge is kind of "the new TV") and in some ways it's the best $12/month I've ever spent. It doesn't cover video makers including sponsored content, but I use crowdsourced browser extensions to identify and skip those.

Do you buy your clothes at the thrift store or at the mall? If you buy them at the mall, how did you choose those stores? Did you buy those clothes to make sure you were meeting other people's expectations? Were those people's expectations shaped by advertising, marketing and branding? If you wear flour sacks, then my humble apologies and sincere congratulations.

It's kind of close to the equivalent of flour sacks for me; I don't shop in either thrift stores or malls or think about expectations, and I buy new clothes very rarely. When I do, I order the same cheap generic solid-color clothes off of Amazon, and sometimes one or two other low-cost generic brands (based simply on what's cheapest when I sort by price, as long as the ratings aren't way below the rest). I admit I'm probably being influenced by Amazon's brand and the prioritizing of their "Amazon Basics" items in search results, though.

You would admit, then, that you're not the norm, and that your experience - while interesting, certainly - does not appear to extrapolate very well to others?

For sure.

It is difficult to reflect on how we’re influenced, but yes, you are almost certainly being impacted to nudge you to purchase one thing or another. Unless you’re using solely cash payments and also do not own a cell phone, then you’re in the data ecosystem. In your case, it is probably likely that you don’t get advertisements or emails for luxury items, even if your income would allow such a purchase.

The great misunderstanding of this industry is that what ads you see are just as important as the ads you don’t see, which allows for profit maximization.

In your circumstance, it may be true that bank transactions are farmed and analyzed to be additive to data gathering on the web, which in turn is additive to the offline data gathering offered by various companies. Every transaction made is analyzed for location, merchant, purchase category, amount, date & time, and more.

Most of the other commenters who are claiming and linking to articles that ads don’t work aren’t in the industry. This is an important distinction because what we’re talking about here are the machines that crunch all this data are considered trade secrets and/or intellectual property. Also, slightly off topic, but it’s important to understand that ads != marketing. Ads are a child component of marketing. When you look at the overall function of marketing (of which product management is a discipline, no matter how desperately some attempt to align it to technology), then consider how much of a factor data analysis and operationalization of data is a driver of success for Fortune 500 companies. Almost any company in consumer technology (e.g. FAANG), consumer healthcare (CVS), telecommunications (AT&T), FMCG or retail (Walmart, Costco), and retail banking (Chase, Wells Fargo) are using these techniques to build better products, sharpen communications, and win new customers.

Most advertising spend on Facebook or IG is actually tracked on click and conversion based performance, it's not subtle at all.

Because you only notice the bad ones.

It’s like CGI graphics in movies. If it looks good then it just looks good and you definitely notice when it looks bad. Your average TV show probably has half the stuff on the screen being CG in some way but millions of watchers never know.

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