In Paris, an anti-ad insurgency grows
latimes.com
latimes.com
Advertising is not essential to capitalism. While economists built countless models that show the superiority of competition and free markets, advertising is something they have barely studied. One of the fundamental assumptions of most models is that consumer preferences are fixed. Advertising works by changing user preferences, so the typical economic model will not be able to say anything about its effect on the economy.
I studied economics in the early nineties, and I remember having a look at the literature about advertising. There was a study that showed cigarette companies competed only through advertising, leading only to higher prices, not to better products. Another study showed that the introduction of advertising for glasses led to lower prices, and concluded that in that case advertising had helped competition work better. I think there was one weird model that somehow argued advertising was good because it allowed people to enjoy life more.
I concluded that there is a good part and a bad part of advertising. The good part is conveying information that helps making better choices. The bad part is bringing products to your attention regardless if they are good or not. My personal impression is that the bad part drowns out the good one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
His thesis is that private production is increased by advertising generating artificial wants in consumers: wants that were neither there before, nor very fulfilling to them.
It's true that before seeing the ad for a MegaBananaChoco cereal bar, I didn't want to eat one. Yet I've always wanted to eat nice things. That's what's so great about ads: they provide information about good stuff.
You might as well say "raise a group of boys without clothes" and then tell them "there's this thing called clothes that will keep you warm". It doesn't matter if you don't tell them: they'll still be cold.
On the other hand, no one has a need for a MegaBananaChoco bar in particular. If you never tell anyone about the bar, they're not going to suffer from not having it.
You're cheating. While it's fair to say that no one has a "need" for a specific bit of sugary goodness, it's not fair to say that no one needs better food and won't suffer from not having it.
Yes, the "need" for better food may be expressed, but that's rather uninteresting without a mechanism for determining how to satisfy that need. The "eat Reese's pieces" ad is actionable. "Eat good food" is both useless and uneconomic in that there's no point in someone paying to say it.
That fails wrt "good food". There is no innate need for any specific food. Yet, there is a generic expressed need.
Heck - it even fails wrt clothing and warm. There are many ways to be warm. (When my cat gets cold, she doesn't put on pants.)
> You're still missing the point tome is trying to make.
I'm pointing out that the interesting version is wrong and the correct version is uninteresting.
Yes, one can't want a specific solution of which one is unaware, but that's not a very interesting result. One can easily want a solution to a generic problem ("cold", "food") and thus value information wrt specific solutions ("little black dress", "Reese's").
And sometimes it's really subtle. Check the Wikipedia article on Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud who used the Freud's theories for advertising.
A while back on HN I wrote about how I dropped cable and haven't looked back. What I didn't write about was one of the reasons: I have a six-month old son now, and I find that I do not want him within reach of modern advertisers.
Yeah, I grew up with child-focused ads, but now they have 30 years more refinement behind them, while my son is just as much a kid as any other kid in the history of man. It's not a fair fight.
So, I've dropped cable, and will be leaning towards techniques based on DVDs of TV shows and such where there is no advertising focused on him. ("But DVDs have unskippable ads too!".... yeah, well... not when I'm done with them.)
I find myself even staying away from Hulu now, because damn it, I want to pay for video and not get advertised at! I'm tired of it. I can deal with it better than most people, but I'm still tired of it.
It's only part of the reason, and I'm not "terrified" of advertising or anything (obviously he's going to see some no matter what I do, and obviously I survived, even if it wasn't as bad), but I want to give his brain time to develop in an environment not saturated with commercial noise before he has to learn how to resist that, too. There is so much good stuff in the world now, so many good (lightly used) toys, decades or centuries of music, video, board games, everything, that to get caught up on the treadmill and urgency of the products of the now is just... stupid.
I think that's a variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma ?
If no cigarette company advertises then there's no sunk money, if all of them advertises it's a waste, but if none of the advertise and then one of them starts advertising, then that one wins and the others lose.
In our every day markets on the other hands, companies often fight to conceal information because that allows them better pricing options, but that in fact does make the market less efficient.
Some countries, like Germany, have much stricter laws when in comes to product labeling, they require much more information.
And in some countries, like South Korea, there seems to be natural market demand for a lot more product information.
I think that makes those markets more efficient.