Is there anyone else out there who refuses to buy something if they first learned about it from an ad?
I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.
The claim you're responding to is not that they won't allow it to influence their decisions, but that they will actively refuse to even consider a product if they learned about it through an ad.
Most of the ads I encounter are through podcasts because I don't watch TV and ad blockers of various kinds apply everywhere else. I will never use or recommend Squarespace for any purpose, simply on principle.
The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.
That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!
Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.
Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.
As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.
https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.
If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.
Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.
I even freak out if I accidentally click on an ad on mobile because I feel as if I have downloaded a piece of malware.
I don't know where this comes from...possibly due to having been there back when many ads really were malware? I am not sure.
Sure, I remember the brand names. And I'm going to be sure to remember that those brands spent a lot of money wasting my time.
I now understand that ads are purposefully nonsensical and annoying because they’re stickier that way. The ostrich in the insurance ads doesn’t have any damn thing to do with their product, but because it’s out of the ordinary my mind is left to absorb it, wondering, what was that ostrich doing there. It’s just straight mind manipulation and I resent it.
And 2, it hardly makes sense to advertise insurance (I’m never in the mood to cancel my current plan) but they have a gargantuan adspend because their profits are capped by a percentage (search 80/20 rule)- This is basically the same reason Coca Cola is famously ad-spendy - since they are locked into a low percentage of revenue, the only way to grow is “make it up on volume”
To the point where I'll boycott entire stores if an ad pisses me off too much.
Tangentially, youtube's ads are getting worse by the day and Hero Wars' efforts are now so damned desperate that they've gone beyond deliberately misleading to damned near pornographic.
It's bad enough that I'm considering completely dropping Google despite the inadequacy of DuckDuckGo and the fact I've had the same Gmail address since university.
These things are difficult to separate these days. I don’t blame the people who want to sell their goods though. It’s scary to try competing without using online ads in many industries.
However, I recently bought some Dr. Squatch soap, so ads can work.
If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.
Or they just want to make even more money than they could make organically, which they can then put into R&D or into cutting pricces (through economies of scale).
E.g., Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit? Surely the ends justify the means?
Corporations trend toward consumer exploitation and as they get bigger, there is less chance for any human concerns like ethics or morals to correct negative behavior.
Head into your nearest pharmacy and check out what they sell. Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.
It's got aisles for fungii, ears and eyes, cuts and bruises, stomach stuff, cold/flu/allergies, prophylactics, etc etc. But the closest thing to unapproved cure-alls are the stronger sort of cough drops.
There are plenty of stores that sell sketchy supplements, but they usually don't have prescription pickup counters with pharmacists.
Homeopathics only reliably do nothing (different from whatever inert carrier is provided) if they are real homeopathic dilutions, which thanks to the absence of regulation and testing in the homeopathic market, they often are not, which has led to homeopathics with dangerous levels of ingredients that would be < 1 molecule per package if the stated dilutions were accurate.
Which, I guess, doesn't contradict your point.