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Comment by spunker540 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is denying advertising works. But most of the time ads are trying to win you over vs competitors in the market. Most of it is predicated on the fact that you are in the market for something, and they want you to choose them over someone else. I doubt coca-cola is targeting non-soda drinkers in their advertisements. But they want you to pick coke over Pepsi.

Even if you create an open source drug that cures cancer and give it away for free, you’re gonna need a marketing campaign so that doctors know about it, or that patients know to ask their doctor about it. Not because you’re malicious and trying to manipulate people but because otherwise people who would benefit from your product won’t know it exists.

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I think the mechanism of advertising is more fundamental than that, I think it's intimately hooked into the same path as spaced repetition.

I feel Marketing isn't so much crafted to compete with other signals on any merits but rather crafted to compete with recall.

Once a message hooks into an effective spaced repetition pattern it doesn't matter which is the 'better' product; because you'll search first for the one you recall the easiest. At which point it's an entirely different marketing team who tries to make the sale.

My opinion is that some companies craft messages to carry additional product metadata not because it's a necessary component of advertising but because they think it makes it simpler to recall.

I think this is evidenced by more than a handful of marketing campaigns that don't explain their product at all in any meaningful way and yet still enjoy immense popularity.

All that to say I think the worries alluded to by fragmede are justifiable, since the mechanism of impact could involve so little personal agency.

Coca-Cola competes not with Pepsi. If you chose Pepsi, you will not suddenly choose Coca-Cola if if shows a flashier ad.

Coca-Cola competes with: a glass of water, a cup of tea or coffee, an actual meal, a walk outside, a meditation, a nothing (just you chilling and keeping watching YT), your vision of yourself as someone who is not a Coke drinker (so e.g. Coke drinkers in adverts tend to be active, adventure-seeking, well-socialized and loved).

It advertises most certainly not to make the product known, that's done by putting it on shelves in stores. Invading your attention at home or while doing anything other than shopping is strictly banking on triggering an impulse and/or trying to adjust your self-image to allow the possibility of you seeing yourself as the type of a person who uses the product.

Similarly McD and SBX compete with local parks and benches, Netflix competes with woodwork (and indeed sex), YouTube competes with going out (and thus Uber, in locations with poor public transport), Uber competes with not going out (and thus YouTube), etc. to various degrees.

(Things are different with advertisements especially for lesser known products without IRL presence. An advert != an advert.)

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