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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

So how come this doesn't work for me? I am not influenced by advertising in the least. I find it all equally annoying.

I'm not being pretentious, but when I look at the stuff I buy (and I'm as materialistic as the next person, slightly obsessed with 'design', and attached to a brand like Apple), none of it I've seen in ads.

Advertising uniformly has the effect of pissing me off and can even turn me off brands. And I'm not a unique snowflake, my wife is exactly the same.

I honestly cannot fathom why any intelligent human being would be influenced by something as unsubtle and obvious as advertising.

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The irony of a person being "attached to a brand like Apple" and claiming he is not influenced by advertising is so rich it's hard to take it all in one setting. I may have to ask for a takeout box to take some home with me.

Not that I doubt the efficacy of Apple's marketing in any way, but it's perfectly possible to be attached to a brand for fairly rational reasons. If you have a good history with the company and have had consistently positive experiences/interactions, buying regularly from the same brand can make perfect sense.

Thinking advertising annoys you doesn't mean it doesn't influence you. In fact it probably influences you more then you think - you dwell on it. You think why it annoys you. But at the end of the day "buy Coca-Cola!" was still the last message in your head and you probably spent more time thinking about it.

There was a McDonalds ad on the radio a while back which had a combination of, not unpleasant but slightly annoyingly pronounced voices talking about their breakfast menu. I couldn't stand it. Tended to switch the radio off when it came on. And yet here I am, years later, telling you exactly which brand it was advertising and what it was advertising.

Precisely - advertising, especially for larger brands, is just as much about getting you to buy stuff as it is about awareness.

For example, next time you're on a road trip and you have a choice between mcdonalds and a lesser known chain and you are hungry, you'll be more likely to go to the familiar McDonald's.

Or you might even tell your friends about how much you don't like McDonald's ads, but in the process you just told your friends about McDonald's, thus perpuating the chain.

Isn't that exactly what the article said in its Drano example? If McD wanted to say "guys, we have new breakfast menu", they succeeded. Being remembered for years though is useless for that purpose. If they had to do it in annoying form that may have to do more with justifying ads budgets or seeking artistical fulfillment on the side of the ad makers than with its effectiveness.

Brand recognition is definitely important but I don't think there's anybody in US past the age of 6 that doesn't know what McDonalds is. Well, maybe excluding Amish, but even that not sure. So all that theory "you told you friends about McDonalds" sounds nonsensical - I doubt there is somebody on HN who didn't know what McDonalds is and if there is, this information is probably useless for him as he doesn't have any McDonalds around him anyway and he never traveled anywhere where McDonalds is (because otherwise he'd already know about it). Of course, there's a marginal case of a traveler from a remote rainforest village coming into US for the first time and immediately visiting McDonalds basing on his past HN experience, but come on - does it really happen often enough for McD marketing to spend any time thinking about it?

Knowing something and hearing about it many times a week are two very different things. Why do you think product placement exists in shows/movies/sports/etc? Everybody knows what Nike is.

And what exactly McD achieved by this except fame on HN as a maker of annoying ads? So you eat in McD more in general or breakfasts specifically? If not, that ad failed.

> So how come this doesn't work for me? I am not influenced by advertising in the least. I find it all equally annoying.

Like all knowledge, this is probabilistic. Variance exists and a mechanism that will reliably cause an effect will not cause that effect to the same degree to 100% of the human population. Individual differences do exist.

>I honestly cannot fathom why any intelligent human being would be influenced by something as unsubtle and obvious as advertising.

Then you are ignorant of the workings and mechanisms of a very massive industry and research area. That is not a thing to be proud of.

Thats what a lot of people think. "decoded" a great book about it. http://www.amazon.com/Decoded-The-Science-Behind-Why/dp/1118...

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