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Comment by float_laugh | Hacker News Reader

I have a degree in marketing, took a vow never to work in it, and use these words to describe advertisements - Motivated deception, manipulation, mind control, inauthentic, inorganic, insincere, a betrayal by your peers.

They're using your own mind against you with psycological techniques you're blind to. Behind every advertisement is a group of real life people working hard to find new ways to control and manipulate YOUR mind and the people you love. They'll lie to your face as long as it "increases brand awareness in our target demographic". Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?

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Yes, this is how I feel about marketing in the 21st century as well. Most pointedly that lies and psychological manipulation have become the status quo. Unfortunately there are so many products and so much information available that it's difficult (impossible?) to actually discern the good products from the bad. As well as to discern the value of good products.

Lying and manipulation as marketing aren't exactly new, but it's more pervasive, to the point that it seems impossible to succeed without stretching the truth of your capabilities. Everybody else is doing it after all, and there is no penalty. By the time your customers find out you screwed them, they've already paid for your product twice and told their friends it was 5/5 would buy again.

The Century of the Self is a great introduction to this. Modern advertising literally uses techniques originally developed for wartime (WWII) propaganda. Commercial advertising is literally brainwashing applied for economic purposes rather than political (though often both, too).

p.s. if you like the Century of the Self, watch Hypernormalization as well. Amazing documentaries.

Actually WWI. The clue is in the name of the doc.

Thanks for the correction, it's been a while (too long) since I've seen it!

I also like to call ads "mind control" because they are that manipulative, but it's hard to say that without sounding like a nutjob.

I don't think ads are inherently evil, but most ads are designed to exploit human psychology instead of just making you aware that a product exists.

> I also like to call ads "mind control" because they are that manipulative, but it's hard to say that without sounding like a nutjob.

If they were that manipulative, they would always work. Every time you saw an ad you would immediately be compelled to buy whatever it was advertising like those mall zombies from Dawn of the Dead.

Ads are manipulative but definitely not "mind control" manipulative. You would probably be more effective convincing people of the dangers of advertising without resorting to hyperbole of that degree.

They don't have to fool all the people all the time, they just have to fool some of the people enough of the time to hit their sales quotas.

Ok, but that's still just influence, not mind control. By that rationale, literally every form of communication which has a chance of affecting someone's behavior is "mind control."

> Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?

I block ads myself, but if I didn't it'd be because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.

Taxes are another.

> it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.

To see the absurdity of this position just replace "view ads" with the following:

I would stop content creators from breaking into my home and taking money from my wallet in the middle of the night, but I don't because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.

It is not the responsibility of consumer to accept harmful practices because they're the only practices in broad use.

Yup. That's the reason I kept 2011-2021 without ad blockers. But yeah I could no longer live in that hell.

Fwiw ads have more properties than just being micro payments. Another property is that the price is a monotonic growing function of your revenues, so """every viewer contribute with how much they can"""

No. This is the marketers fever dream real life is way more dumb and ego driven. I am in advertising for over 20 years now doing international campaigns from Nike to Burger King from 100k to 80mil per pop. These things are way less elaborate, way less deceive and way less impacting as you make it out to be.

Ah yes the nerd reality distortion down votes. HN really is a shithole.

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