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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Some of the best products don't need advertising at all. Raspberry Pis for example, I actually cannot recall ever seeing an ad for a Raspberry Pi. Word of mouth, seeing examples of it in use - now you might call a Youtube video on how to set up a Pi as a headless server on your local network 'guerrilla marketing' or something, but I rather doubt that was paid for, people just like showing off their little Pi projects.

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Devil's Advocate; Raspberry Pis don't use traditional advertising, but they advertise a whole lot. Your example of the YouTube video -- while yes the channel may have gone out and purchased the device based on word of mouth because it was cool, there's an equally likely chance that the Ras Pi foundation sent out devices to traditionally "smaller" channels since they want to create that word-of-mouth advertising feeling, despite spending a whole lot of money on advertising.

This could be because they know that their demographic is precisely the type to avoid traditional advertising, be it because they run ad-blockers, or don't consume media with built in advertising like television, etc. Or maybe it's because they know that those smaller channels have significant viewer overlap with their target demographic, so why bother with trying to find these customers yourself when someone else already has them (for lack of a better term) captive?

I've personally seen Ras Pi's mentioned in "niche" magazines a few times, usually when a new generation of the device comes out. That's 100% advertising, although I prefer it to a generic "buy our thing" ad, because at least they go into detail showing me what exactly it can do for me.

There's the idea in the business world that you can just throw money at programmatic advertising and trust the ad tech to put your message in front of the right audience at the right time. Your example shows that there's a lot of value in carefully crafting your message and putting thought into where to find your audience. Programmatic has its place, but its capabilities are massively overstated.

rasppi is a niche product. There will never be mass consumer appeal. Just like how you don't see advertisement for Ergodox keyboards. Even if they spent money on ad campaign, it will likely not move the revenue needle

Maybe we need more products that don't target mass consumer appeal.

Why? Can you explain that thought process? i.e. everything should be niche? Like toothpaste for devops engineers who want their teeth to grow in the dark when they are around 2 or more wifi networks?

I mean, I would buy that.

ah crap, i just raised a 4 million angel round due to your response :)

> i.e. everything should be niche?

This is not what I said.

My thought process is that I personally would like to see more products with a higher focus on being good for a smaller group of people, rather than cheaper and /or worse but aimed at a huge audience. [0]

Focusing on delivering a good product to a smaller audience allows you to have tighter feedback loops and create more useful iterations because of that. You can also usually charge more. Personally, there are a lot of product spaces that I currently prefer or would prefer spending more for higher quality. But I don't always get that option due to the obsession with casting a wide net, as it were.

Do I expect this to happen organically? No, market forces seem to heavily incentivize races to the bottom.

[0]: NB my use of relative statements and not absolutes. Going from one extreme to the other likely won't produce a net positive.

I think it's relatively uncontroversial that advertising is a "strategy" for either low quality, not needed, or undifferentiated offerings, and that when looking at how a company goes to market, there is a choice of putting $ into advertising or into a better product.

I generally use advertising as a proxy for inverse utility. It would definitely be better to have more products that targeted being good, as opposed to ones that target influencing people to buy them.

>I think it's relatively uncontroversial that advertising is a "strategy" for either low quality, not needed, or undifferentiated offerings, and that when looking at how a company goes to market, there is a choice of putting $ into advertising or into a better product.

You mean like iPhones? Because Apple certainly advertises.

I'm not sure your statement applies broadly to automobile advertising either.

what does your point got to do with my argument - How the cited example of rasp-pi is not a strong argument for usefulness of ads

I think you and I are in agreement. By not focusing on mass market appeal, raspi isn't reliant on massive (traditional) ad campaigns.

I see this as a feature, not a bug.

No one advertises on the modern web, to "mass appeal".

If they are, they're doing it wrong. Ads are far more targeted than that.

The Pi is a hobbyist device, so yeah. But something like the Ergodox could definitely become popular if video game streamers used it, if there were displays in computer stores, etc. It's an interesting product but many people (like me) simply haven't heard of it.

Funnily enough I purchased an Ergodox EZ after clicking through an ad for it. I actually see this a lot with "niche" products (audio equipment, home automation, keyboards, etc) where I will have never seen an ad for anything in that product category but once I start going to the hobbyist and store pages for such products I get inundated with ads for one specific offering in that category for a week or two before all of my ads go back to what the usually are.

I absolutely see ads for the ErgoDox EZ.

Granted, I bought one and have put another in the shopping cart multiple times, so they probably have good reason to advertise to me. They know I'm a paying customer who's flirting with paying more.

>I actually cannot recall ever seeing an ad for a Raspberry Pi

You hear about them in the media all the time, though. I'd be shocked if they didn't have a solid in-house PR team.

To be fair, they have had a whole slew of "submarine" news releases on them. That tends to be a form of "earned content" advertising.

Aren't pis in a constant state of shortage? I remember when I bought mine I could only get two at a time. I wonder if there's any value at all in advertising in that state.

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