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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Do good products fail to take off on their own because advertising is an absolute necessity, or is it because advertising allows bad products to saturate the market so thoroughly? In a hypothetical world without advertising, would it still be true that good products couldn't take off on their own merits? Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry?

I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.

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While it rings rather hollow at this point, I still find NPR's description of how they differentiate "advertising" from "sponsor messages":

- no qualitative adjectives

That is, you can say "Foo Corp. makes high speed Gizblams that can help you and your family deal with the challenges of flamming" without it being an ad.

BUt if you say "Foo Corp. makes the best anti-flam devices", it's an ad.

I mean sure, it's sort of bullshit, but there's some sort of idea buried in there somewhere.

I really like this. There is a huge difference between,

“We make Foo. Foo helps you Bar the Baz. Check us out at foobarbaz.com”

Vs.

“Look at this scary Baz. Feel emotions about it. We want you feeling anxious and ill-equipped. Okay now here’s Foo. We want you feeling better. Nicer music. Smiles. Good emotions from you. What a relief. If you’re tired of being a dumb idiot who suffers from Baz all the time, we can fix you with Foo.”

I'd rather take is a step further:

"Foo Corp. makes Gizblams." Whether or not they're high speed depends on the other Gizblam manufacturers, whether or not it can help me or my family depends on if I like it or not.

I'd take is even further:

"PEPSI - When they don't have Coke."

Hey I'd never heard that one before, I like that one a lot. I wouldn't mind ads if they were sponsor messages like that or remember PBS and stuff? Less noise and crap would be great and ads wouldn't be so crap to deal with. If ya want to let me know your product exists just say it does don't try to lie to me then yeah I'd be more okay with ads or "sponsor messages" as you say there.

Thanks for sharing that

To NPR's point, I do not find NPR's voices advertising objectionable when they come up once or twice an hour. They're non-offensive and in the same voice, tone, and level as all of the other commentary.

I've been thinking about this comment for a few minutes and do find it interesting. But the extremes of the comments and quotes above make it clear that even displaying your product is an ad; demonstrating how it works to a crowd would be an ad; telling someone that it exists would be an ad; there seems to be no way to tell the market that your product exists without that being defined as an ad.

So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product.

I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even?

You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.

So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.

>So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.

I spent a number of years doing market research for advertising, and I couldn't agree more. Data analysis is primarily focused on increasing "top of mind" and "unaided" awareness and linking positively-perceived properties and emotions to the product being flogged.

I got out before "social media" convinced everyone to share everything about their lives with advertisers and their enablers, but back in the day, ad agencies and the marketing departments of large consumer product companies each spend millions every year (cf. BSB Global Scan[0] as an example) collecting a tiny subset of that data.

Given the enormous amount of data available today, I imagine that the levels of manipulation have increased exponentially. And more's the pity.

[0] https://www.proquest.com/openview/46f87cae3614d373064294a43b...

So I suppose where you are coming from is that you're using dirty tricks to convince people who don't need a product to buy it. Which is not ideal. But I've seen a lot of software engineers write code that is unreliable and causes their users a lot of suffering. Most people do a bit of harm on the margins because their job is part of messy reality instead of some imaginary pure world.

On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal.

"I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.

> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.

To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.

> To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves...

Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.

People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.

People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.

Advertisers never push people to do the sensible thing though. There's a reason that "vice" advertising has so much money poured into it.

The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.

Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.

McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.

It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.

I agree that way more advertising is aimed at encouraging poor decisions for profit. There's just more money in it. But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves. Profit is still made, but the exchange is much more equitable (or there's no better option).

> But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves.

Name three.

iPhone advertising back in 2007-era revolutionised computing and managed to convince a lot of people to pa for quality phones instead of putting up with the usual cheap product that most companies produce. It was a two-for-one.

AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.

I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.

Local news stations are one of the last bastions of investigative journalism, (generally) reliable and actionable information, and platforms for local non-profits. They're a net benefit to a community, and they only maintain that capacity through promotion.

There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.

Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.

It's not so much about any particular ad or product, but the attention that ads steal. Most peoples' heads are FULL of ad jingles they never wanted there.

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.

Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.

As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

Sorry, what? This sounds like wishful thinking not grounded in reality or data…

> You gotta _tell_ people you made something.

I think that the rest of your discussion hinges on this assumption, and I completely disagree with it.

What you need actually is for people to know that your product exist.

People have needs & problem beyond the fake ones created by advertising.

People can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem. And that to me is fundamentally different.

Having a way for consumers to go out and pull information in about what options exist is fundamentally different from having advertising shoved down their throat.

> People need can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem.

Where do you propose people ask? Who would fulfill those queries? What formats would you allow the information to be expressed in? Would you filter out any non-objective characterization (“best car in the world”)? Would you constrain packaging (eg color, creativity, etc.) so that it isn’t attention-grabbing? Etc.

I’m not sure how it would all work out. But let’s start where we are now with search engines.

Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.

Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.

Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.

This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:

1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.

2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.

This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.

Google used to (like, fifteen years ago) go to enormous lengths to break or cripple any kind of SEO - unpredictably revising their algorithm, hand-reviewing sites, and other things that they wouldn't even admit to or hint about (for fear of giving the nascent SEO "industry" a moment of ascendency). There was a brief time in the early teens when the received wisdom was that "SEO doesn't work".

Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".

I recently switched to Kagi, and it does most of the things I talk about above. I don’t stumble into SEO crab very often anymore. And when I do, I instantly black hole it.

They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.

I really believe I have a good idea for this question[1]. There is no reason advertising couldn't be nagging me to do things I want to be nagged into doing anyway. But damn, the actual work to disrupt such an entrenched snakepit of self-justification is daunting. I don't think it's at all impossible to build something much better, just really hard to get the necessary mindshare from an industry built on taking mindshare.

[1] https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...

This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.

Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.

> This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.

The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.

I actually didn’t require it to stop looking like current advertising. I merely wish for a system in which you come to companies telling them what problem you want and listen to what they have to say.

This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.

It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.

I recently bought a ski touring pack. It's almost certainly the best pack money can buy. The guy who made it has a waiting list and seems to be happy with his life. He doesn't advertise at all. If you find him, you move in the circles that mean that you want a high quality ski touring pack, and word of mouth will eventually reach you. If you really care about this category of product you can find him. The pack is competitive in price with anything else on the market of similar features and quality. It's not really a "luxury" or "boutique" product.

This is an example of how businesses and customers can be perfectly happy without any advertising. It's not the only example, just the first that came to mind.

I know a Polish guy that makes sleeping bags along much the same model. Best sleeping bags that you can find. He's got a waiting list longer than a year now and people don't mind. Never a single ad, just word of mouth. And no, it doesn't scale but he couldn't care less.

Now you've got to tell me where to find him!

For a small fee...

One of my clients make really good products. I would say the best you can get (this is a mobility product) It has ergonomic properties that blows away any competition, and build quality is second to none.

However, it’s expensive. It has been a really tough uphill climb to connect to our audience and convince them the money is worth it here. In a market with marked up shitty quality products it has been a journey to position ourselves, especially since our budgets are maybe 1/10th of that of aforementioned shitty producers who outmarket us.

I honestly feel the work I am doing is near to a community service. Although still advertising our ads are honest of what the products can do.

Wanna know how to tell people you did something?

Put up a non-intrusive entry in a directory that people would use to reach out to you. Let them come to you.

Stop hounding people to be the repeatedly ground in impression by repetition. So much time is wasted today... When I think of all the broadcasting/transmission medium throughput that's eaten up by carrying unsolicited advertisements to people that could either A) be left unused, or used to provide better performance for everyone, or B) utilized for, heaven forbid, the public calling out for proposals from service providers!

> Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry?

It is even more complex than that. As it already happens, word of mouth can also be hijacked by advertising resulting MLM pyramid schemes.

To bring about such a world we need more than just banning advertising, we need to make it a socially repulsive behaviour.

You know, we could just bin the entire sector/activity under dishonesty like we did before puffery was enshrined as an acceptable behavior for a business.

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