Marketing sneakily affects our decision-making | Hacker News Reader

Marketing sneakily affects our decision-making

memod.com

25 pointsspendthrift11 comments

This is the biggest reason I use ad-block. I read a book Pre-suasion by Robert Calidini and he talks about how online ads often don't registry consciously but will subconsciously effect decision making.

He ended the book by flipping people's voting preferences with a 64% effectiveness rate using only some subtle online ads. My brain is my own.

Same. Similarly, being subjected to inaccurate information repeatedly without disproving it, you're significantly more likely to believe in it simply due to the exposure.

"Appealing to children is an incredibly effective marketing strategy. It’s believed that 75% of all food purchases can be attributed to a nagging kid. To instil desire in a child is to cultivate it within the whole family."

Is that why all the TV Ads for cell phones seem to be aimed at people in their mid 20s? I assume those ads appeal to people much younger as well?

Do people in the mid 20s even watch TV?

Good-sized friend group spanning late 20s to late 30s. Flyover country city, and very few of them are in tech.

No-one watches TV (broadcast, cable, any of those virtual-cable steaming options) unless they're sports fans, and that use case is dropping off fast. For even younger people, I doubt they're shifting back to it. Why would they? Various free-with-ads streaming options have better content, and there are tons of free or cheap ad-free streaming services (Kanopy and free-tier PBS stuff, plus most paid ad-free streaming services that aren't Netflix or Hulu are still really cheap). And piracy still exists.

I only see "regular" TV when I visit older (boomer) relatives, who still subscribe to cable and always either have a shitty news channel or something they DVR'd playing in the background 100% of the time (god, that's weird, and these are people who were all "TV will rot your brain, go outside" when they were middle-aged, but often leave a TV on literally 24/7, falling asleep in front of it, now) or am stuck in a waiting room with a TV. Even my gen-x relatives are way more into streaming and video games than they are broadcast or cable TV.

I consider YouTube and Hulu basically synonyms for TV. While this generation isn’t watching “TV” they’re still streaming and there are ads everywhere.

I’ve also noticed most people with kids on the age bracket have TV because it’s just easier.

From what I can tell, sports. Live sports is basically the use case for TV.

In Denmark a weekly print magazine called “Donald Duck & Co” was (is?) really, really big. Like, everybody grew up reading it. For many people the stories in that magazine was the first stories they read by them selves by their own volition.

I remember watching a news segment about why the magazine contained car advertisements and the reason was basically the same as from your quote.

However, I’ve always felt that maybe the ads were aimed at parents reading the stories out loud to their children.

We have Donald Duck magazine here in the Netherlands as well and I can tell you everyone was reading it when I was young. Me, my siblings, but also my parents. There often was a literal fight when the mail came in who got to read it first.

I carried the subscription along when I moved out as an adult but cancelled it years ago as the newer stories became less interesting. I still love to read the older ones so I don't think it's an age thing. The old ones often have great storytelling. You can really tell if it is an original (American) Disney story or one by the Dutch/European studio, or if the intern was tasked with coming up with this week's idea.

It’s only sneaky if either you aren’t paying attention or are more readily convinced by various appeals towards a perceived social center.

As an example the most important consideration, often the only one, in the choice of purchase of liquor is packaging.

"Brands take advantage of that protective impulse by marketing car seats, strollers, and baby monitors as the safest option."

...or "brands" emphasize the aspects of their product that people care about / make decisions on?

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