Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad.
Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad.
I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.
Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad.
I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.
Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
This is my point.
Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising.
The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the companies you love and buy from) is, in general, desirable.
What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts (three rights make a left and all that).
"shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to be good.
Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for is hot garbage 100% of the time.
I don't agree.
I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis:
> feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money
I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.
But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad.
> There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same.
That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all.
That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well.
Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
If you have a 10$ capital to start a company and you allocate 9$ for advertising (and marketing), you're left with 1$ to build a shitty product.
It's a simple mathematical formula : For a given selling price tag, the amount dedicated for advertising your product is inversely proportional to the amount dedicated to build your product.
Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists because "women be shopping"?
So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?
As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this.
The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature.
Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years?
I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).
Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can be.