The Sad Math of Ads | Hacker News Reader

The Sad Math of Ads

jamesdamore.com

42 pointsTaurenHunter34 comments

I think ads targeted at minors should be banned outright. I think of ads as business proposals and minors cannot engage in business without their parent's approval.

Of course, things might get murky with regards to teens, because they also use products that adults use, but there are still products made especially for them.

They're basically indefensible.

Could not agree more with the article.

Billboards are basically paid side-channel attacks on your mind.

Feel free to try and change my view on that, I'm very open for discussion!

I will concede that there can be "ad-adjacent" things that add value for society (newsletter-like information that creates awareness about a products existence), but that is IMO far from the main purpose of ads as they are now.

Interesting blog post from James Damore, author of the infamous Google "Ideological Diversity Echo Chamber" memo while at Google:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

I don't disagree with anything he says here. It must be liberating to not have to defend advertising now that you have no association with Google.

Also, that memo is fascinating because it references work by Simon Baron-Cohen. That last name seemed too close to Sasha Baron-Cohen, and indeed, they are cousins.

it'd make a great podcast to bring those two on and talk about society.

I’m still shocked that the US allows pharmaceutical advertising and people there just take it as something normal. It shouldn’t be normal to see pills you should totally ask your doctor about on billboards during your commute. It’s not good for consumers or for doctors (except the ones getting kick-backs?). If there’s no will to regulate terrible things like this in the US, there is no hope.

There's no will to regulate such because those who would be regulated pay the most in "donations" and "campaign contributions" to those who would be regulated.

My proposal: if you, a corporation, is a recipient of at least $1 million in lifetime benefits, grants, tax exemptions, government contracts, you and your executives are unable to make any political contributions whatsoever.

If you as a corporation are unable to stand on your own without the government propping you up, you shouldn't be spending money on lobbying the government- you shouldn't even be in business. If your company is vital to national security, the idea of lobbying or donations shouldn't even cross your mind. It's sickening, honestly.

Perhaps I am a pessimist but I think most advertising, 90+% of it, is absolutely wasted and pointless. Adults, IMO, ignore advertising and have trained their brands to block it out, and dismiss it immediately. Some of us are even petty enough to mute them, or look away; I may be guilty of this too.

What is very interesting to me, however, is how much online advertising works on kids. We know advertising works on kids, you can get them to become excited and demand to buy just about anything. But I am curious if the kids of today, technically sophisticated, are not also learning how to block out ads.

When I was a kid I got ads from the tv, and while I could walk away, I had to wait for my programing to resume. Today kids can swipe away, look away, dual screen, etc. so I am curious if advertising works on kids today and how well..

Let’s say you’re correct, that only 10% of ads are effective.

How many ads do you see a day?

If you use social media or read articles online (without an ad blocker) I’d bet it approaches triple digits.

For children it’s even worse as most children content are, themselves, ads for toys and games. Many mobile games aimed at children are commonly vehicles for micro transactions too and thus laden with ads

Hell, the only reason I know of raid shadow legends or nord vpn is the insane number of YouTube ads they buy.

Ads work… it’s why they keep getting purchased.

> Let’s say you’re correct, that only 10% of ads are effective.

You know, the biggest financial disasters in history have happened because of this reasoning. This is not how complex systems behave, and humans are very complex systems. Those turns out to be much closer to fixed points processes, which implies a very different:

Either ads are 0% effective, or they're 100% effective. Very little exists in between and events can cause even the very same ads to flip between 0% and 100%, and even the time when it flips will be very short (and won't be a simple linear 0% -> 100% move, but a fast, wild, oscillating process that at times looks small and controllable but is utterly unstoppable)

Which would imply the GP is right: for the vast majority of ads, it makes no sense to show them to anyone. It's just annoying and wastes everyone's time.

Oh and the reason it doesn't have effectiveness measures is that normal distribution requires independence. Whether I respond to or ignore an ad must be independent of whether you do, for all factors not taking into the calculation. Meaning even if I am your twin and we live together it must be independent. Otherwise, because things like average are really a way to refer to normally distributed events, it doesn't even make sense to say an ad is "10% effective". There is no mathematical meaning behind that, and it's no different from saying "Orange tomatoes shot Joe".

> Either ads are 0% effective, or they're 100% effective.

I think one of us are maybe confused. I don’t think this has anything to do with what I was saying.

I was saying that even if only 10% of all ads you see in a day stick with you, that’s still quite a few ads.

If you see 100 ads in a day, a certain amount of them will stick with you and a certain amount won’t.

That’s not to say anything about the percentage effectiveness of any given ad or whatever.

What I'm saying is that the idea that quantity will work where quality fails does not work on complex systems, like humans. If you present me 10, or 100, or 1000 wrong solutions to my problems I will ignore 100% of those ads.

Not 90%. Not 99%. Not 99.9%. Not 99.99%.

Every last one.

And this behavior is the same for complex systems in general. They "lock" to a particular solution, and you can perturb their behavior, but not for long. It will go back to whatever the individual thinks is the best solution. The only thing an ad can hope to accomplish is to present a new solution, nothing more. It cannot hope to change preferences.

> If you present me 10, or 100, or 1000 wrong solutions to my problems I will ignore 100% of those ads.

I don’t think this is true. If you’re watching something and the “HeadOn apply directly to the forehead” add plays 1000 times, even if you try to ignore it, it’ll stick.

That’s why so many people know “HeadOn apply directly to the forehead” even though it’s a product that did literally nothing.

What’s more, most ads don’t even seek to explain how a product solves a problem (like in the 50s) they just try getting you to notice the ad.

Regardless, I was talking about the percentages of all the ads you see in a day. Not the times you saw one kind of ad.

Speaking about the percentage of all ads you say throughout the day is not the same as the percentage of retention of a single ad.

You're sidestepping the argument. Complex systems have "fixed point" behavior. This is true for the climate, animal nesting and breeding habits, ... everything that isn't based on chance. I'm going out on a limb here and say that includes humans.

That means there are a number of fixed solutions, and that complex beings or systems keep going back to those solutions. You can give them a little push and their behavior will change for a very short while (by the way: chaotically, in other words, impossible to control. In other words, making an ad for pepsi makes people try cola alternatives, it doesn't even make them go for pepsi), returning to either the previous solutions (the fixed point) or, if the new product is actually better, to a new solution (which is also a fixed point in that case). If you want behavior to change for a reasonable period you need to either take away the previous product or you need to make an actual better product.

Plus you do read about that promoting an inferior product with ads just does not work. It has an effect for a while, and then stops. Agencies will of course happily try this, but it does not work. This is exactly how fixed points behave and not at all how a normal distribution behaves.

But you're assuming facts not in evidence, that people a) watch ads, b) that there is a quantiy of ads that can be quantified as being seen, and really c) that 10% of all ads are effective. You're making suppositions based on your own experience that have little to do with the central discussion.

Speaking for my own experiences... I have no idea how many ads I see in a day. I ignore them, with a vegence. I use ad blockers on everything, and I block ads on social media.

You don't know that ads work, you only think they do because you can't ignore them and are effected in some way; you remembered them. That wasn't the argument I was making. The argument is that 90%+ doesn't work because people ignore them.

either it works on customers, or it works on business people - by duping them into spending alot of money ever since Edward Bernays. projected to be a trillion a year 2025

Technically the whole concept of marketing is kinda insidious - the goal is to turn non-users into users. I still think a great use case for AR glasses is blotting out ads instead of adding them.

Flyers should be 100% banned - just so much waste.

I'd like to see some form of regulation around % of visible screens/information presented in a public space needing to be specifically useful to the population vs pure advertising.

It's frustrating to be at a train station where every wall is an ad for something, and the actual information concerning the trains themselves is either tucked away on a much smaller, much lower quality screen in the corner, or worse, not working at all.

Basically I'd like to see some solutions to the problem that I'm generally being shown ads at the expense of the public service I'm trying to use.

I can understand advertisements in unpaid products (e.g gmail), but when I'm paying for a service and it shows me ads I always think that the company views me as another product they can "sell"

Sad that this is getting flagged.

that old chestnut about the medium being the message applies. the message of every single advertisement is the same, it says you are inferior and redemption is possible through buying our thing.

most stuff is just symbols and artefacts. calibrate how you relate to them to live more intentionally.

Big fan of these anti-ad manifestos. Here's one from Banksy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9326372

Why was this flagged and removed?

Because the advertising industry is somehow even more gross and pervasive than advertising itself.

Those on the inside see it as a right to impinge psychological manipulation on the rest of the world and any alternate opinion is some kind of restriction of free speech.

Like thinking they have a right to blow cigarette smoke into society's face.

The thing is, society has let them get away with it for so long that it appears that they're right.

I really hate pervasive ads but I'm so sick of these sorts of these mind bogglingly naive "well obviously the solution is to tax X and ban Y" takes. Law is roughly speaking an expression of societies norms and morals and needs to be popular to stick around. If you don't want ads you need to get other people to not want ads, ironically I'm not sure how you do that without ads.

People will put up with quite a lot when the costs are unclear or diffuse; nevertheless, billboard bans seem popular in states that have them.

There are other cultural vectors, and while they might lack the virtual ubiquity of ads many of them are more effective for it (if perhaps slower).

are ads popular, or just the money from them? I feel like if given a choice most people prefer not to see advertisements, so long as there's no direct cost for it.

I think that's the whole point of the post, no? to encourage people to oppose ads

This is the James Damore who questions Google’s commitment to hire female engineers. [0]

[0] https://www.jamesdamore.com/articles/googles-ideological-ech...

His opinions on advertising can still be worth hearing.

> His opinions on advertising can still be worth hearing.

If so, his opinions on advertising will spread despite his illiberal opinions on the value of women engineers.

For my purposes, ensuring people’s illiberal attacks in places of work attach to them wherever they may work is important until they disavow those actions.

Yours is a tremendously illiberal stance.

First off, he didn't "attack" anyone. The phrase "illiberal attacks" is vague. It's unclear what constitutes such an attack. This ambiguity could lead to the punishment of individuals for expressing unpopular or controversial opinions, even if those opinions don't incite violence or directly harm others.

A core tenet of liberalism is the protection of free speech, even for ideas some might find offensive. Your lack of clarity here threatens that principle.

Secondly, your emphasis is on punishment over rehabilitation. No path to reconciliation or understanding. No consideration for potential for growth or change. You seem bent on creating a system where past transgressions, however minor, can permanently impact someone's life.

You came across as the least liberal person I can think of. Hopefully I will never have to work or deal with someone with your mindset.

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