Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayg99 | Hacker News Reader

I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally.

One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of money."

He genuinely believes this. A lot of the other guys simply try not to see the "punters" (potential customers [1]) as real people, they are disconnected through the impersonal nature of the internet.

[1] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/punter_2

View on HN

I saw lots of cognitive dissonance when I worked for a company that was something of an advertising firm. Everyone hates pop-ups and spam... but it's probably OK if we do it.

We can turn off the user's pop-up blocker right? What do you mean we can't get around it? How are we supposed to get them to see our side offers if we can't do pop-ups?

And the constant discussions about how to keep our emails from landing in spam folders. Since we weren't running a scam, there had to be a way to get our emails in the inbox right? Even though we don't know the person... bought their address from someone (who bought it from someone)... sent them 3 emails this week already...

I'm glad to not be involved in some of that any more.

Just to show a little balance - there are those of us in advertising who try to do the best we can for our audience, and don't even need morals to make that decision, since doing the right thing gives us better results than trying to trick people.

That's one of the beautiful things about advertising that a lot of us (well, I assume a lot of us - I can't be the only one, right?) did not realize at first. Especially over the long term, being respectful toward the audience leaves you in a better position to market to that audience. The end result is you make more money.

Gathering data was always a huge problem. The highest traffic site didn't get enough viewes to make any A/B test worthless.

At least in other business likes we could easily track the direction the program was taking and which bits were causing the most problems.

All the end-line employees gated it to various degrees. We just had to hope we could convince the owners we were rigth.

We did our best to deliver what was requested and not blatantly illegal. When one of your top sales people gets a good deal, you'll find you're doing it to make money, not because anyone thinks it will make things better. Without anyone actually able to figure out what might makes a difference you end up with guesses and snake oil.

With no dada or time to expiremet, all they were left with are terrible ideas like pop-ups and spam. Combine that with the sales guys who talk to buddies elsewhere who report that spam "totally works"! and you end up resenting a large chunk of your job.

But there will still be people like me who consider any amount of advertising to be an offense, something that is more desirable if it doesn't exist. You can be as nice about it as you want or feel is appropriate, and I appreciate that, but at the end of the day, your interest is antagonistic to mine.

Doing right by the user doesn't mean "doing exactly what the user wants". I'm sure there are people who want iPhones and don't want to pay for them, yet I see no ethical lapse or legitimate conflict of interest with the user in Apple's charging > $0 for an iPhone.

If you find all advertising offensive then I think that's an issue with you, not with advertising. If you want to look at or use something that doesn't belong to you (whether that's getting on a bus, or visiting a website, or watching a TV channel) then the owners should be allowed to show you advertising if they wish. If you prefer not to see it, you can make that choice and avoid it.

Is it more desirable if it doesn't exist? Perhaps - if you really hate it all then fine, that's your opinion, but do you really hate it enough that you would prefer every website that is financed by advertising to either bill you for usage or shut down, every public transport subsidised by advertising gets more expensive, every TV channel price goes up, cinema tickets, everything...

And as to my interest being antagonistic to yours, I disagree. I (personally) want you to buy a laptop or a PC and I want you to, when you next need one of these items, consider my brand. I target audiences very tightly to try and ensure that people who see my adverts are likely to be interested, and do rather a good job of it if I say so myself. If you end up being interested in what I am advertising (as plenty of people who view them do) then great for me, great for you. If you don't, then you can ignore my adverts, I don't buy any that are overly annoying or evasive, so even without adblock installed they won't cause you any problems, you can just ignore them.

End of the day, my goal isn't to trick you into buying something you don't want, it's to make sure the people who do want to buy these things know about them, and to avoid other people as much as possible. Feel free to hate bad adverts - I do. Even feel free to hate all adverts, including mine, if you wish, though I disagree with you on this. But don't go so far as to call them offensive. They just aren't.

I like to imagine an IQ pyramid, with money generally flowing upwards. Although in reality it is probably a combination of IQ and bastard-ness.

Anyway, this is how I think of the poker economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com