I changed my mind about advertising

Paying for an ad on a result in a google search for legos is manufacturing demand for a product?

I think any serious discussion has to be about the ad medium.

I had email thanks to netzero way back in the day because it was ad driven, I think it's perfectly fine for an adult to consent to ads in exchange for services. I couldn't afford AOL, so without that service I have no idea how I would have gotten into email. I couldn't afford 10 cents a minute long distance calls and my physycial mail never got to my grandparents overseas.

Billboards on the other hand... those are intrusive... buildings with their company logos by the highway, maybe those are too.

What you mean is, they want it after being told how this and that it is, how utterly special, how pathetic they are for not having it, how bad they look without it, and a spell of desire and want are cast over them, to covet thing $x.

So many things, are only a thing because someone else has it.

Like it or not, advertising is an important way of spreading new memes in a liberal society based on voluntary exchange. Banning advertising is a recipe for stagnation.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but that's *the proof that adv is manufactured demand*!

People interested in having something will find a way to know about them.

I think people are confusing the idea of advertising (AKA publicizing) their products or skills, with the advertising market we have today.

They are not the same thing, they only share the same name, for historical reasons.

It's like comparing Risk with WW2.

21st century advertising is nothing but bad news.

If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that sells them.

If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is wearing them)

If you banned all advertising, you'd be doing a huge favor to the largest, most established companies--the ones that already have high brand awareness.

As much as ads suck, they also provide a relatively democratic form of access to markets for new entrants. Without them, the only hope is going viral organically, which is more or less equivalent to winning the lottery.

Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I have simultaneously ’manufactured’ a ‘need’ where there was/is none.

It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think people only pay for stuff that they want.

consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool people drinking the product and having a great time. this does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too could be cool if you drink bud light.

on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison of features and prices between their product and that of a much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.

Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying.

But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways. If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha.

My main objection is advertising steals my attention without my consent and actively works against me in order to try and get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy, but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about ads which resonates with me:

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious actors to take, etc. are all wrong.

Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it is probably the most prevalent.

This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want?

There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons.

Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population?

In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them.

Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.

Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.

Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own.

I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you don't agree with this argument so much as you think it demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with none being really any more better than any other. I do agree that you would have to believe something like that to defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen to think that's absurd.

Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we really do need certain things: safety, security, to be understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a highway do more to reflect human nature than something like Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough argument to make.

I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!) captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality itself.

I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is true.

All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net negative for society.

Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to get new things and I enjoy what I have more.

It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items too.

In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want stuff way less, and use what I have more.

At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.

If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.

For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup, the startup would ping him), but for most people, including me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the attention of employers.

Wants do not cause enjoyment. Desire is the root of all suffering.

I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want anything, and convert them to a state where they do want something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered their well-being.

I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away, because the slot didn't sell)

I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses, ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on.

Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends to distort the content on the website. When did you last read an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away from those sites.

Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid.

I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there. But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there; it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive brand advertising. That I can do without.

This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach millions of people means that capital can be used to manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital, the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can I prove that society would be better off without advertising entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society, and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.

How much time do you spend researching a product today before buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?

In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally, suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and cruel thing.

P.S. I guess I am a unique snowflake!

P.P.S. Maybe it's because I'm a tightwad. I do not enjoy spending money. So I have to really want something to part with cash for it.

but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable civilization).

There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply shape not just individual behavior but individual understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep.

A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves?

This converts readily in to the question facing societies since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in the related question, "what is 'the good'?"

This problem–the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-manufacturing, resource-consuming culture–has been explicitly analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist revolution.

Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand" for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot.

TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that addressing these requires systemic (legal, political, economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal responsibility" which however drives that change.

I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go.

Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals. Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't particularly care which provider I use

Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked. Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before. It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you ignored it.

Is that wrong? I would say no.

But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the person you are envy the person you could be with the product. In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and then offer to sell it back to you."[1]

Is that wrong? I would say yes.

How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who don't use it are.

Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How many are giving you information that something is out there? How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or sexier if you bought their thing?

[1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where due.

If I don't know I have a problem to solve I probably don't have a problem to solve, or at least not a problem big enough that it requires me to be forced to consume hours of advertisement per year

Google convinced manufacturers that they should also advertise but it was working just fine without the advertisements.

I don't think that's right. If I use a product, like it, and tell my friends about it, that isn't advertising because it isn't funded by anyone who gains from the purchase of the product. Similarly, Consumer Reports isn't advertising, because they are funded by their members. General review orgs like The Wirecutter may or may not be advertising, depending on how successful they are at preventing manufacturers from influencing their reviews.

From friends, online communities, search, ...

In some places it's illegal to publicly advertise alcohol or indicate where it's sold. People still manage to get drunk without a problem.

A long time ago I had a friend who did "contemporary marketing" for Budweiser. Half her hours were spent getting bar owners Bud Light neons. The other half were sitting in bars, drinking Bud with other beautiful people while wearing Budweiser clothing.

Who knows what horrors they've invented in the years since. But I will bet cash money that there are a lot of them.

The main difference between advertising and booze is that beer consumers wanted beer, but advertising consumers don't want ads. (In the rare case that they do, they can just go look at corporate YouTube channels.) So there's no particular reason to suspect society would be any worse off if we banned advertising.

If it were purely about informing that the product exists, ads could just be text instead of flashy animated popups. That's a form of advertising I could get behind. Would even be more accessible.

I hate the idea that we need to project jobs, even if those jobs are significant net harms for society.

Advertisers, private health insurance, political fundraising. I will have no sympathy for the unemployed, should they lose their unethical jobs.

Disclaimer: I work in adtech.

So you are suggesting that if my roof needs fixing, the only solution is that I first have to be interrupted and distracted numerous times during work, by various imagery and popups?

This is why I don't think the ethics are worth considering - this isn't a failing on individual users making personal choices. The ad industry has essentially made parts of the economy anticompetitive. Facebook and Google pick winners and losers via the ad market (whether intentionally or not), subsidized by private equity, which most of the actual producers of games do not want to participate in, but have no choice. Consumers may or may not be getting the best products, they are getting the products promoted by the ad industry.

I don't see how any reasonable legislator or regulator can look at that situation as healthy, competitive or sustainable.

But similar to D&D alignments, whether something is profitable is completely orthogonal to whether it is ethical. Human endeavors may be profitable but not ethical, ethical but not profitable, both profitable and ethical, or neither ethical nor profitable.

So I share the parent commenter's concern about people who seem to be claiming that a thing must be ethical because it is necessary to be profitable. It's perfectly possible for a profitable thing to be profitable-good, profitable-neutral, or profitable-evil.

* No personalisation * Full transparency (must be publicly available who is paying for this, ...) * No brainwashing, lies, propaganda, ... * No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)

Since we have basically no restrictions today on what is allowed, I'll still use ad blocker, advice everyone to do the same. And of course I'll rant how ads are bad on the internet.

Your post reminds me of a friend who was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries, until Bernie lost to Hillary, and this man became a huge Hillary champion overnight. It wasn't enough for him to vote for an odious candidate for practical reasons. Now, Hillary was always the best candidate because she's very "qualified" or "details oriented". Nothing about Hillary changed, nor did he learn any new information about her. But he changed his mental model of Hillary to support his "change of mind".

Agreed again, but IMHO even if you go with "traditional" advertising it definitely can be done too much, it's (in)famous now between us people who are overall against ads the pictures of cities that banned ads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

https://dontdrinkthetapwatercom.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/291...

I am from an old European city and I love looking at the buildings and public spaces and not being bombarded by ads. In contrast, I think it's interesting now that I live in Tokyo and there's areas where ads creep up buildings, but because it's a somewhat very jarring visual experience in some places, in general it's one of the things that I really dislike here, beautiful buildings covered by giant ugly paper ads.

So rephrasing things, where do I think ads are okay? I haven't thought about it too much, but possibly:

- On a sidebar in a website, like Google did back on the day

- On a magazine, both full-page and in-page, as long as they are limited

- On TV as long as they are limited (they are by law in Spain)

- Newspaper ads section

- Specialized magazines, websites, directories, etc (white-pages-like), including Google Maps

- Recommendations within the page's theme (a section with new or highlighted restaurants in tripdavisor/yelp).

- Probably few more places like this.

For things that you _need_ to do to live your normal life I don't think we should be forced to stare at ads. I'm sure a lot more people would stop staring at their phones if the train/bus showed art, interesting videos, etc. in their tvs instead of ads (as they used to do in my hometown). Now wherever you look, it's all ads.

But no one likes web banner advertising. It's just a bad experience! At best people like it when you search and the thing they wanted is at the top of the list because of paid placement. They don't care if the placement was paid or not, but they like seeing the thing they wanted. Banner ads make the experience of using a web page worse, but unlike TV ads or magazine ads, they don't contribute anything good back. It's just "here is an ugly square that disrupts your browsing experience." Publishers should think about other ways of engaging reader attention.

Back in the day my wife was subscribed to Total Film (a UK film magazine), which had several full pages of ads related to sex phone numbers and other similar "services". These were pages at the end of the magazine that where full of ads. We really liked that format, because you could read the content without interruption and sure, if you wanted you could check the ads.

It's the same reason why I hate TV ads that happen at different times within a program, but I don't mind ads in the SuperBowl that happen during the half time. Also why I don't really care about Youtube Ads that happen before a video will start (but if it interrupts the video in the middle, it sucks).

I would be ok with pages that show you an ad when you load it, and then it completely goes away and leaves 100% functionality in the page to do whatever you are supposed to do there.

Sure, that could be influencing my reasoning, but it goes the other way too. It's easy to criticize ads as a business model when you don't have skin in the game (ducks). That's why I decided not to bring up either of those points: I'd rather write for people who are willing to focus on the argument instead of assuming bad faith.

> Because ads are clearly marked with a "sponsored" label.

You've already demonstrated that you're willing to go back on previously held principles and commitments for profit. Why stop with just putting in ads? Why not stop marking ads with a sponsored label? Why not include a cryptominer payload? And why should anyone believe you when you say you won't?

I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways. Would be really interesting to see what would happen after the prohibition was lifted.

There are technical challenges to doing this as it requires sufficiently frictionless micropayments, but the biggest challenge is cultural. People are pretty addicted to "free" crap, so it's far from a given that most people will ever be willing to pay whatever arguments there are in favour of it. I think there's something of a pushback brewing though.

The saddest part of this for me is that there are some incredibly talented people wasting all their energy making ads for oil companies and health insurers. Though, I suppose that happens everywhere... everyone needs to make a buck.

Thats because the company who produces the product you are most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads. Products you aren't very interested in, either because they cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be able to afford to get to the top ad spot.

In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product to spend on advertising widely varies.

A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such guardrails. It recommends things that reflect someone else's economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.

Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that recommendation list because a large portion of them know that the recommendation list is adversarial.

So, modern advertisers are left with two options:

1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside other content).

2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to influence results).

Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it somewhat adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to buy things against your own best interest. But it's not so adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you to stop eating it.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."