"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."
Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph his father)
>>> He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
I sometimes wonder if the people who are the true targets of advertising, made to want things they don't need, are the people who buy advertising.
Those people can also do A/B tests, and compare various methods of advertising. And they get their money's worth on customers (e.g. a promotional vlog by an a-lister can suddenly push millions worth of product). So probably not.
a/b tests only work for outcome based advertising. A lot (if not more) of the old world advertising isn't outcome based. It's more about make consumers hear your brand over and over and be associated with things that you think of them automatically.
The descriptions I've read about a/b testing make it sound a lot like null hypothesis significance testing, which has a well earned reputation in the social sciences. And you have to buy the things that you're testing, either from a vendor, or by employing people who assemble the stuff.
Advertising signals are normally too weak to be detected by standard A/B tests.
Additionally, most traditional advertisers do not run A/B tests. Their agencies especially do not run such tests.
Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=lewi...
"PR" was invented by the military. I learned this from someone in PR who was trained in the service during WWII and then went on to work in the "public relations profession" as a civilian. I suspect the military trained Bernays. He may have invented the "profession", but he did not invent PR.
Turow, Joseph (2008), Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication, Routledge (New York), at 627, 631
"If you are refuting the article..."
The article made no mention of public relations nor Bernays. I was responding to a comment that cited a YouTube description. I am familiar with Curtis' documentaries, including the one in the video. I enjoy them. However, I believe he makes them as art, for entertainment purposes, not as a teaching tool. His comments in interviews seem to support this view.
I haven't read Propaganda so can't answer your question, but I do think you should watch the first part and see if it adds anything new. The documentary is not much about his work as it is about him and the impact of his work - it's a level meta. So might be worth it.
Wow it's crazy to think the world wasn't always like this... and I guess it's even crazier that you can't really imagine a world without adverts using things like celebrity endorsements.
It's insane how much effect seemingly minor things can have on society.
Well, a constant barrage of promotional messages, playing with people's feelings, taking advantage of psychology, hurting their self-worth to hook them (buy these clothes to be like those beautiful people, fat? you need this product, buy this gadget and enter the lifestyle of the persons using it in the ad), embedded covertly in TV, movies, celebrities and openly in tv, billboards, print, webpages, video games, mobile apps, flyers, posters, and so on, is not exactly "minor".
We see hundreds of ads every day. Even if we miss each particular product placement, their aggregated core message "buy more stuff" and "your life is not perfect like the people in the ads" registers just fine.
They are using a core mechanism of humanity though. There where always risk-affine outliers, who developed new techniques, tasted forbidden berries, and thus we copy those who stumbled upon success.
It was a good strategy until it was hacked.
Reach, penetration and target audiences is like 95% of what modern advertising does.
Modern advertising works on simple statistics rules like "people who drink Pepsi might need heartburn medicine" or "people who recently bought home appliances might want to buy another one".
These things are simple applications of the CLT. No psychology or manipulation is needed or wanted.
To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit.
We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
It seems like a larger and larger percentage of our economy is being taken up by parasitic sectors that have a net negative value for society. Advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive.
There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.
You'd be smart to accuse me, here, of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the core parasite is Capital, which siphons value from the labor of mankind in a Byzantine labyrinth of social games meant to obscure this essential truth.
But capital through markets is how we get around the "labyrinth" that is the economic calculation problem. I think it's like complaining about how you lose power when you transfer electricity over wires. It's true, but there's always going to be a transmission cost.
>The Mises Institute has put it up for free, which is surely off-message but whatever.
Ah, a clearly well-rationed article is at foot. Here’s a hint, if someone isn’t able to model free things in their understanding of capitalist systems, they don’t understand them enough to critique them.
Anyway, the rest of that “critique” isn’t actually a critique. It’s just goal post shifting to the point where it assumes socialist systems by nature have perfect demand discovery mechanisms (none of which are alluded to) and can never produce a surplus. Conveniently, it follows that clearly socialist systems are perfectly efficient and do not allow surpluses because they have this neat built in mechanism of perfect demand discovery.
So it’s “not true socialism” if there are any inefficiencies in food production, energy production, etc because “true socialism” has a mechanism by which everyone gets exactly what they need.
Did someone inform the author of this that such a mechanism has never existed and the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
> the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
This thread originated in a discussion of the detriments of advertising, I would remind you. The "markets" we're currently employing to "discover demand" find greater profit in engendering it.
I know people love to parrot this libertarian talking without really thinking it through. Generally young, logic-minded people that end up following some kind of Randianism and cannot fathom the possibility that people are, by and large, basically bastards to each other.
The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them from mobsters and racketeers and is at least supposed to offer a chance to poor people. A libertarian paradise dooms the poor to never be able to afford education and basic necessities unless they sacrifice through slave wages. In a libertarian paradise, the rich run amok, and children of rich people start with an insane advantage that no amount of smartness or slaving away will ever erase. And no, by and large, people are not Howard Roarks in hiding. Most people are within 2 sigma of the mean--i.e. not geniuses. In a situation with no social contract, the 5 sigmas both in terms of intelligence and aggressiveness prey on and suppress the rest. Inequality skyrockets. It ultimate results in violent revolutions, like France. In short, libertarianism is madness.
In general it'd be great to have a discussion about these things, but since this comment is just some non-thinking spouting of absurdity, I'll just leave it here. I already said too much.
But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.
I do think the period directly following the revolution in which the rival factions fought over the country is a context of a libertarian dystopia, if only a glimpse of one.
Another way would be to say that effective government ensures that the rule of law is maintained, that contracts are enforced, that the environment is protected, that trade is conducted efficiently etc ..
Granted, none of the above are absolute, some governments will do better than others and some will abuse their power.
What is the alternative? Somalia in the late nineties? All government functions handled by corporations? something else?
In a system where we (richly) reward people who buy and sell securities back and forth, or who manipulate people into wanting to buy mountains of crap (with lovely side effects such as the above post mentions), or produce clothing and food, transport them half the world, then set it on fire, when the system rewards these behaviours then of course this is exactly what will happen.
It's not like there's some central planning committee that sits down and decides what to pay everyone.
Citizens decide where to spend their money -- at least the part that the government doesn't tax and spend for them -- and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them.
> and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them.
I think his point is, these industries are not valuable to people; they are just aggressive at extract wealth from other people. In net, they have a negative value (from his perspective) and thus society will be better without them.
No one's being forced to buy soda, eat highly processed food, have a credit card, or use a car dealership. Yet people voluntarily choose to spend their money on these things, so they obviously do find some value in them.
When you characterise them as 'not valuable to people', you're making a prescriptive moral judgement (and not one I necessarily disagree with), as opposed to a descriptive observation of where free agents choose to spend their money.
I don't drink soda or eat highly processed food, I don't have a credit card, and I didn't buy my car from a dealership. But the fact that many people choose to spend their money on all these things tells me that those people do see value in them, and I don't think my preferences are right and theirs are wrong.
If the advertising industry is such a powerful force of mind control that we literally have no free will anymore, then why did they let _you_ figure it out?
You're giving them way too much credit. Do you notice how the world is full of failed advertising campaigns? How the world is full of failed companies and failed products that the evil geniuses in advertising weren't able to make people buy?
There's a world of difference between 'we can use some principles from psychology to try to exploit people's fears and make them more interested in our product' and 'our unlimited powers of persuasion make free will an illusion'. And despite the hype, most big-data, machine learning, 'downloading your thoughts from Facebook before you've even had them'-style targeted advertising amounts to showing you ads for the thing that you just bought.
Almost correct. Governments have a strong say in what is incentivized and what is not through taxation and monetary policy.
The people running government are (in most places) elected by the people but that is affected by political manipulation, gerrymandering and politicians often represent the moneyed interests that got them into power.
Governments have a strong say in what is incentivized and what is not through taxation and monetary policy.
Governments have similar competition problems as individuals and companies. If taxes are raised too much, the people with money will take it to other countries with more lenient tax systems.
And unpopular policies will cause other political parties to seize the power from their promoters. Money and advertisement also plays a part in campaigns.
Finally, if you try to extract competition from politics, you get a tyranny.
People on HN likes very much to write comments with the "we as a society" or "we as a species" or "we should do that", but there is really no such we.
Okay, explain to me how the government is incentivising 'advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc.' through taxation and monetary policy.
How about the chicken tax [1]? Or how any truck is allowed to bypass CAFE standards for emissions [2]? Or the fact that if a truck or SUV is used for "business" it can be written off completely over time as opposed to a limited amount [3]?
That's off the top of my head. Taxation is control. And the wealthy & powerful have undue influence over who chooses what gets taxed - using the above methods I referenced.
Well, to start, corn is highly subsidized. This means corn syrup is cheaper than it should be, making soda and most processed foods cheaper than healthier options.
Low quality ingredients will always be cheaper than high quality ingredients, regardless of subsidies and taxes. That's an unfortunate fact of life, not a government decision.
And there's nothing to stop people buying diet soda.
Wrt soda, and highly processed food, I think that FDA and similar agencies could make an effort to evaluate the consequences of prolonged consumption of such food and figure out what quantities are safe. They could require proper labeling and not allow children to buy such foods (as with cigarettes and alcohol).
For credit cards, maybe he meant that in some countries, where individuals cannot default, banks are comfortable taking too much risk and advertise credits aggressively. I have personally witnessed several victims of this (yes, people can be dumb).
Wrt "car dealerships and (most) sales people", it is probably not affecting the individual so much, but if you look closer at "enterprise sales" and government spending, you will certainly notice some "interesting" practices. However, I think that this is a lot harder to solve than the other case above, because it is not so directly aimed at the masses.
But you're talking about guiding your children, not observing your neighbours. This is 'how do I make other people choose the same things I would choose', not 'people aren't free to make their own choices because [the government somehow]'; it's not 'people aren't free to choose', it's 'I don't like what they choose'.
I also don't like what they choose, and I don't disagree with any of your suggestions; I think these would all be good ideas. But you're asking for less freedom, not more.
That's the problem, to a large extent we don't because of the pervasive manipulation the advertising industry does to us, the industries reason for existence is literally undermine our free will.
What percentage of the products that you see advertised every day do you buy? 100%? 50%? I'm guessing it's probably less than 1%.
No one would argue that businesses spend a lot of money on targeted advertising, and targeting is something that marketers are constantly trying to refine.
What is targeting? Showing things to the people who are most likely to buy them.
In the world you're describing, targeting wouldn't exist, because the mind control techniques of advertising have made free will a thing of the past, and people will just buy whatever the all powerful advertising agencies tell them to buy.
The value of soda for example is that some people like the taste and sensation. It brings them a little bit of joy. Not everything has to be coldly utilitarian.
There was a scientist who's work was to find the optimum amount of sugar to put in soda - the "bliss point" that would get people to keep drinking it without getting fed up with the sweetness - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
You aren't making any decisions when you enjoy soda: a large corporation paid some people to conduct studies and ensure that you can't not enjoy it on a basal level.
Of course it's not bliss - it's not good for you in anyway. In fact we know - completely - that it has massive long term deleterious effects on your overall happiness - because it's not optimized to actually "make you happy" - it's optimized to keep you drinking it.
I disagree. You can make anything seem valuable by defining value in the most cynically narrow terms possible like that.
By that same logic, heroin has great value in society, and hitmen and we shouldn't be trying to stop these things. However we do, because the popularity of the product is no measure of its contribution to society.
Continue on with that logic and literally everything is valuable, making it a meaningless distinction.
> You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.
I can and did. It's an opinion not an assertion.
If you are creating a need that didn't already exist, like targeting people's predisposition to addictions to substances like sugar, or nicotine, or heroin, then I posit that you have created no real value whatsoever.
By your logic music and art have no value to society, because there was no need for those until they were invented, someone could assess their value as zero, they consume natural resources which harms all of us, and the people could be doing something more productive (by some unstated metric of yours) instead.
You just don't enjoy soda. There's nothing wrong with other people enjoying it. Either in moderation, or irresponsibly in our opinion, which is their own business. Other people don't enjoy music and art and should probably think they should be done away with you like you with soda.
Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?).
So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.
I don't accept that sodas are either. I think they're a honest product. They aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat. They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.
Kola nuts, which contain caffeine, were in the original formulation. It's a stimulant - that's partly what some people are drinking Coca Cola and similar drinks for in the first place. It wasn't added later to increase sales.
Right, but nowadays there's no reason for it to be in there. You said they're marketed as a treat, and optimized to be as delicious as possible. So what's the caffeine for then? They're not marketed as energy drinks or designed to be as stimulating as possible.
I say that the caffeine is in there solely to keep people addicted to it even more.
> hey aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat
Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you.
Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is harmful to their bottom line, because they are selling you what amounts to a mild poison.
People fought to get this labelling required by law. These companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
> They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.
The difference being my health isn't harmed by a pop singer trying to improve their voice. Nor are they creating a need or addiction to music that didn't already exist. There has always been a need for music among humans. Even tribal war drums count as music.
I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit, but really, pop music is such a small part of the entire musical landscape.
Even if it were, what damage to people is pop music causing? What addictions is it fostering?
You could debate about the dumbing down of music that manufactured pop music encourages, but we are talking about actual harm caused by fostering addictions here, which things like sodsa and cigarettes do, as a result of their being addictive as well as damaging to health.
The pop music analogy isn't a very good one, because music doesn't damage your health by encouraging your addiction to substances harmful to your health.
> I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit
Bah I think you're showing yourself to be a cynic and a snob with statements like this. You don't like that music so it's 'lowest-common denominator crap' and you can't see any purpose for it apart from profit, no matter if other people chose to enjoy it.
I'm not being a cynic and a snob. There are studies showing how much simpler, more generified and more homogenous and less dynamic pop music has become over the last few decades.
You didn't address the point of my post though, the pop music analogy was just an example you used that I felt didn't work very well because music, even pop music, doesn't harm your health or exploit addictions in the ways many advertised products do.
I can't second this strongly enough. Why are we utilizing such vast amounts of our limited resources to persuade people to make certain decisions? In my humble opinion it's usually because the decisions the people who employ advertising tactics want the people they are advertising to, to make, are suboptimal, if not downright bad, and people wouldn't make those decisions, but as a by-product of having been advertised to.
Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?
Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.
We all have to stop focusing on the short term quarterly profits and growth and zoom out and see the big picture. Not only is software eating the world, but it's appropriating it for a low kind of social programming--turning us all into zombies. Software wants to mediate all of our experiences as humans, and advertising is right there with it, trying to interpose to do, as you wrote, "psychic violence" in little drips throughout our daily lives.
It's amazing that we let our minds be run by the shit in computers. (including all of this! haha!)
I don't care how much education they have, the minds who are focused on developing ways to capture people's increasingly fractured attention are disqualified from being considered the top minds of our generation.
honestly, its just a thinly veiled repetition of the American/boomer dad stereotype that money flow is the key arbiter of intelligence (even though I think at the higher end of intelligence its actually the opposite/ non correlated)
I think that's a nearsighted appraisal of people in these industries. Advertising is effective and so is the myth that money gives you actualization, to me it makes perfect sense that smart kids are going into a high paying industry while missing it's harmful effect.
And then the math geniuses that could be the next Einstein are slaving away in cubicles writing algorithms for the stock market. So much potential lost in the pursuit of increasing someone else's wallet.
And their own. These people are writing algorithms for the stock market because it pays incredibly well. Same for the engineers at FAANG selling ads online. Our society values money/material above all else and it's making us miserable.
i think he was just giving a saying. that said it is a game when there are points and competitive at that. as far as life not a game indeed but it is still a game where the stakes are just higher.
Who funds that “potential?” Markets have a purpose. Increasing one’s wallet drives innovation. Patriotism and superpower competition led to the space race, however the same people that claim to hate profits also condemn patriotism/nationalism that has led to innovations like manned space flight. The Soviets didn’t care about space because they saw a benefit to humankind, it was to beat the US in propaganda. Tesla couldn’t build cars without investment. Bell Labs wasn’t a benevolent non-profit. Henry Ford didn’t make an assembly line ought of altruism. Capital and profits drives innovation, like it or not. Even universities reward innovation with the “profit” of tenure or increased project funding. So yes, we need smart people “slaving away writing algorithms.” Some of those algorithms help with the efficient allocation of capital — capital necessary to build stuff you care about.
Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works.
Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:
Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.
Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
I would never say 'advertising doesn't work on me' but it definitely doesn't seem to have the intended effect (persisting the brand in my memory for future sales) in a lot of cases.
Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.
Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.
No amount of advertising will be able to convince you to like something that you dislike. Advertising is manipulative, but it's not mind control.
But advertising is not trying to (for example) make you like cola if you don't like cola. What it's trying to do is make you choose one brand of cola over another.
For certain types of advertising, such as soft drinks, they're aiming to influence a particular moment. As a Pepsi executive once explained, they're aiming for that half-second when you're reaching for a soft drink and are making a spur-of-the-moment decision about which one. That sort of advertising is about influencing that spur-of-the-moment decision so you're more likely to choose theirs. It's effective because, in the absence of thought, you're overwhelmingly likely to choose a brand that you recognize the most or have the most positive associations with.
Ads are not designed to get you to buy stuff. Ads are designed to familiarize you with a product. So when you plan a party and have to think what drinks to buy, you already know Coca Cola is a drink that exists. Maybe you buy it, maybe you don't. It doesn't matter. And if you go to a party, you also know that Coca Cola is a drink you can expect to get.
That's what ads are for. To get everyone to know that they live in a reality where your product exists.
Advertising does NOT affect me 99.99% of the time. How do i know this? Almost all the groceries I buy has no advertisement or even branding. The vast majority of my spending goes to housing, Taxes, grocery bill, gas, maintenance and insurance. Almost none of the groceries I buy have any kind of logo, marketing or advertisement: cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes. Even when I buy soymilk, once I get through filtering all my conditions (organic, no added sugar, no added calcium/sodium, etc) I'm lucky if I even have 1 choice left. Beans come from nameless bulk, etc. Gas is based on location and price (not brand). Maintenance is always done at the cheapest place of the 3 closest repair shops. All my utilities offer me no choice at all. I have no idea what brand the clothing I'm wearing. etc.
I find this quite easy and intuitive. I'm not against advertisement at all. I've seen and remembered several advertisements but they almost never offer a product compelling enough to buy. When an ad does offer me something I actually want, I'll buy it (this happens for far less than 1% of my spending).
and yes, i'm well aware of how advertisements influence our perception of brands. but how is it effective if I never buy anything that has a brand? and when I do buy, I usually never have a choice: Utilities, etc
I have a 15" macbook pro that may have been aggressively marketed by Apple. But once again, I had no choice. the reason I bought it is because I'm a developer who used to create IOS apps and I needed the development environment to build apps (no choice but to use apple machines for that).
>Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.
Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.
>Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.
There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0] (although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).
I don't doubt the effects I'd advertising. What I wonder is whether advertising affects everyone. Studies can show that it affects people on average, but it doesn't mean it affects everyone.
Advertising does affect everyone in the broad picture. Specific advertising campaigns don't affect everyone, though. Also, different people are affected by different approaches. What works for one set of people doesn't for another.
This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" -- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.
By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.
You misunderstand advertisement. It is not designed to get you to buy stuff. It is designed to get you familiarized with the product and to shape your view of reality. Did you think people thought smoking was cool back in the days just because? Do you think wedding rings are supposed to be expensive?
I don't know about smoking being cool (I'm very biased against smoking, because my entire family smoked and I have asthma), but I do know that people smoked hundreds of years before advertisements were a thing. I've also always thought that jewelry was silly and pointlessly expensive, but I do know that people were affected by advertisement.
You should read up on the relationship between smoking and advertising. It's actually really interesting, and there's no question that advertising alone is the reason that smoking became so prevalent in society.
A similar story applies to other things that we consider so normal today that we don't even think about them, like deodorants, women shaving their legs and armpits, etc.
All of these things only became common because of advertising.
Perhaps you cannot resist the advertisements you see, but you can take steps to limit how much advertising you are exposed to. Get Netflix, get an ad blocker.
Indeed, and this is what I do! I don't bother with Netflix or similar (there's no point -- I'm not watching commercial TV anyway), but I do avoid advertising as much as I reasonably can.
This is good advice for an individual and relatively useless advice when given to society as a whole. Yes, people should think for themselves. If you have kids you might even be able to teach them how to think for themselves.
But at scale, at the level of a population, an expectation of individual rationality loses out to the realities of these manipulative techniques. On an individual level they might not work, but on a population level they tend to work.
If a population is being manipulated by political propaganda, then yes it's good advice to an individual to think critically / rationally. But that only affects change on the tiniest margin. The propagandists will still win overall.
I think on top of your points, the effect of decades of underfunding education - and on focusing on "marketable" skills over "soft" skills such as critical analysis - must be taken into account.
Why would education matter here at all? People are much more highly educated nowadays than they used to be. They even score much higher on IQ tests compared to people in the past. People understand the world better today than before.
You realise the reason why it's so effective is that it's psychological manipulation right? Telling people to just "stop rewarding" it is almost the same as telling abused partners to "just leave the relationship"; it's not that simple, and trying to reduce it as such is at best unhelpful, and at worst actively harmful.
But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works.
You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
> Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.
That's like saying stopping rape is easy, just don't reward it. It completely ignores the non-consensual nature of the interaction. Except advertising is even worse, because at least rape victims are aware they have been victimized, people that are manipulated by advertising don't even know it. In fact, if you ask, almost everyone will say "advertising doesn't work on me." If that were true, then why do companies spend billions on it?
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves.
Is this any different from the free market arguments about how regulation is bad, and the customer must inform themselves about literally everything and every consequence, with convenient disregard for the fact that it's impossible for a person to learn everything, and that it turns into a way to assign blame rather than to make the world a better place to live?
Why should "you must think for yourself" become a justification for you to be allowed to show advertising to me continually?
taking bad deals like minimum wage etc.
The only reason there are minimum wages, is because people fought for them, and refused to take even worse deals.
> If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
Literally no one can do that for everything. The world is too complicated and, depending on the area, there are either too many or too few choices available.
This is the "capitalism doesn't work because of human nature" argument (which I agree with). It is impossible to train people to pursue profit and to value consumption without these horrendous side effects. Meanwhile, it is quite clearly possible to train people to do worthwhile things with their lives without requiring them to chase a profit motive. (Examples include the free software movement, academic research, etc.)
You don't know that a purchase decision wasn't subtly influenced by seeing a Youtube ad though. Many ads aren't designed to get you to buy a product right now, they are designed to make you feel a certain way about the product or even just make you aware, so that when you are in the market, you are directed toward that product.
I always order Tango at places like that because I like the taste. I can't remember the last time I saw a Tango advert, but Coke which I avoid like the plague because it tastes like ass, has ads absolutely everywhere.
Given the vaugeness involved with advertising and attribuitation being something humans aren't too good at I wonder hypothetically how long it would take companies to realize that consumer advertisement effectiveness dropped to zero vs other economic causes.
A good way to immunize yourself against something is to have weaponized it yourself in the past. Then you can recognize it when it appears, and you know its strengths and weaknesses.
The human vulnerabilities that advertising leverages are coded deep in the genome; building antibodies instead of avoiding the virus entirely could be wise indeed.
Lol, we're already incredibly far down that path. Have you been using the same smartphone since 2008? I ask seriously: how many have you owned since then?
Well, if you want to use a smartphone, you pretty much have to buy a new one every few years. They don't exactly have great upgrade-ability, do they?
If course, it doesn't excuse all the Apple fanatics (among others) who go through one every single year.
I am still using a cheapo Asus from 2012. It was relatively powerful when it was released, but its performance drives me nuts nowadays. Thankfully, my smartphone needs are pretty modest, but I can see why a more "advanced" user wouldn't want to use such old hardware.
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.)
If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
What nobody is willing to admit or even consider is that it is a spiritual war. Progress on this front cannot be made without the collective consciousness of humanity moving toward higher/greater awareness.
It’s a good point. It all starts within. It’s a bit counterintuitive that to win the war we have to first fully accept things as they are, right now. It’s nice that on the external level there are people creating technology to protect us psychologically, ie: ad blockers.
So who's going to be the politician who can step forward and fight for those ideals without being bought out and thoroughly corrupted along the way? I hereby declare my endorsement for YOU, kaybe, to be that candidate! And with this push, I wish you the best of success between now and November of next year! https://i.imgur.com/7hvPycX.jpg
Too many people in the EU don't know that our many decades of peace (longer than ever before!) is due to how the EU effectively did some reverse securitization. Basically, after WWII, any discussion of foreign countries was heavily securitized. "Germany" wasn't considered a major indutrial competitor, but a threat. And who knows, maybe France would be the next aggressor? Better be prepared.
The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (the EU's predecessor) transformed the language in which politicians discussed neighbouring countries. Right now, it is unimaginable to have war within the EU.
When people (rightfully) complain about how, say, Germany abuses their position of power, or how the EU is un-democratic, or how too many MEPs are corrupt fucks, then it always strikes me how ridiculously successful the EU has been at preventing war among its member states. I mean, if there was any grounded reason to fear war, the last thing people would worry about is some MEP spending public funds in a strip club.
I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.
I take a little bit of issue with Truth is less important than shock value, which implies that news media is selling out their content for profit. The vast majority of news outlets don't make enough in ad revenue to stay afloat, and rely on outside funding. The news itself is the propaganda. Carlos Slim didn't put $250 million into the New York Times out of charity, he did it to buy influence.
The common conception is, like the person I responded to originally, that news outlets optimize for clicks and eyeballs in order to sell the most advertising. Many will cite "if it bleeds, it leads" as a mantra for news corporations that will do anything to get viewers.
That's just not how it works now, though. The narratives of the stories are what they're selling to you, and the advertising is secondary. It's something you can't unsee when you start noticing.
While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way.
We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.
I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything.
One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely.
Unfortunately, I think your solution would effectively destroy democracy at any level other than mayor and dog-catcher in tiny cities.
Televised presidential debates? Those are advertising for party-sponsored candidates to the disadvantage of write-in candidates. If all publicity is good publicity, then the same holds true for all news articles about candidates running for any office. How is a newspaper editorial proclaiming that "Elected official X is bad for Y!" any different than a campaign ad in the same newspaper that "Elected official X is great for Y!"?
In one case, the newspaper makes money to put the content to be there, in the other, the newspaper makes money because the content is there.
The same goes for books: how is publishing a biography of someone not a form of advertisement for or against that person?
If I'm not mistaken, that happens to also be the heart of (at least one of the justices' deliberations on) the Citizens United case that declared corporate spending on elections to be covered under free speech.
All democracy should be grassroots. I find the concept that you simply can't win an election or a candidacy without a large warchest to be abhorrent.
We live in an age where media dissemination costs essentially zero. All politicians should have volunteers and not be able to raise donations nor spend a cent on advertising. Easier said than done yes, but still a far better outcome for democracy.
I get the sentiment, but advertising is just a small part of how public perception is manipulated. Edward Bernays laid this out in his 1928 book, Propaganda, which is a how-to guide to indoctrination and manipulation of the public.
Isn't that impossible?
I mean, capitalism is literally profits above everything else. Since evil marketing == profits, it will never change. It will only get worse.
It's not impossible at all. Math tells me that growth capitalism can't be maintained forever. The only question is when, and under what conditions, it will end.
If a house can be valued at $4,000 one year, and $40,000 a few decades later, and $200,0000 a few decades later, what's the reason that "value" can't keep increasing eternally? There's obviously no real substance to "the value" of a thing, only people's interpretation and desire for it, and there's plenty of "value" where there is no physical substance at all, like exclusivity, or emotional content of art, or novelty of experience. What math tells you there is anything which can be full or supplies run out?
Because any exponential growth rate will eventually reach the physical limitations (i.e. carrying capacity) of the underlying processes that produce goods, whether that is fish or molybdenum. Eventually, even if we can keep scaling exponential growth by spreading to other planets and stars, the growth is fundamentally limited by the speed of light, which means expansion in space is limited by O(n^3), and oh yes, even O(1.00000tiny^n) will eventually grow faster than O(n^3).
Yes, I've watched Albert Bartlett's lecture several times; and if we get to talking about converting literally everything to pure computronium in a sphere expanding in all directions at approximately light speed, I admit that's a lot further into "forever" than I was imagining.
I was more thinking of the near-term future of resource scarcity, to make the point that "value" doesn't run out just because gold or oil extraction from the Earth runs out; people value intangible things and the economy runs on that being real value.
That's not growth capitalism. Growth capitalism requires constant growth in both supply and demand. Increasing supply requires increasing the usage of raw materials (not to mention the waste generated through their use). The reality is that we don't have an unlimited supply of any raw materials, so growth cannot be maintained indefinitely.
Recycling is not a solution at human time scales, because it is lossy. Recycling is a way of delaying depletion, not eliminating it.
And you're ignoring that we're talking about growth capitalism here. Here if recycling were perfect, if growth continues indefinitely then a point will inevitably be reached where demand exceeds the amount of supply that exists, recycling or not.
Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness.
One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not included."
Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective for a lot of things. Not only that, there are no scruples at all with appealing to people in this kind of way. It's not lying in the normal sense, but it is manipulation, or an attempt at it. Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.
I'm not a copywriter in the sense of "person who writes adverts," but I am someone who writes copy for website content.
One of the problems is that it isn't even good communication to say (for example) "This device has a 7 inch screen." That's mostly useless information for most people.
It's much more genuinely helpful to tell people something like "You can easily read our large screen even in bright sunlight." Most people aren't going to see specs concerning screen size and mentally translate that to "Woah, this will make my life easier because it will be more readable than the dinky thing I currently use."
Good product descriptions explain to you what this thing will do for you. If it gives a spec, such as weight, it needs to also tell you why this matters -- such as "this is lightweight for this type product, making it much more portable than average so you can take it with you to the work site."
There is no clear dividing line between the kind of description that explains you can do X with this product and the kind of advertising that leaps to implying "And then women will fall madly in love with you and you will be the new Don Juan of your neighborhood!"
Over the years, I've wondered a great deal where the dividing line is between good communication and active manipulation. I think that line is actually quite fuzzy.
When push comes to shove, if you want to tell people about X, you can be assumed to have an agenda of some sort. But, most days, I'm reluctant to suggest the world would be a better place if we all just stopped communicating entirely.
I don't see why it's hard to see the line. Real benefits are real. If Gadget X is easy to read and light, it's easy to read and light.
Imaginary benefits are imaginary. If you buy Gadget X you will not instantly become attractive to the opposite sex, nor will you be the envy of your friends.
The line is where you shift the emphasis from real benefits to imaginary social, emotional psychological, and sexual - i.e. lifestyle - boosts that the product can't possibly provide.
There is no clear dividing line because lifestyle enhancement isn't imaginary. If you brush your teeth, dress well etc, it actually does improve your sex appeal. So does being able to signal a good income by having certain goods, like a nice car.
Homeless men (granted, an extreme example) aren't seeing a lot of action. From what I gather, not owning a car as a man in the US is a serious barrier to having a romantic life. Etc.
Sure, some things are pretty ridiculous. But lifestyle enhancements that impact your love life are not simply imaginary. They can be quite real and tangible.
That's part of why it is tricky. If studies show owning a nice car helps a man's love life, is it outright lying to imply the connection by having some gorgeous woman lay across the hood of the car you are promoting?
That connection is not purely made up, though it may well be an exaggeration in some sense.
I've idealistically written useful information on multiple websites for years and years. People have gushed at me about the wonderfulness of my writing and how it enhances their life, but they mostly don't want to pay me.
Even before the ad blocker wars tanked online advertising generally, the HN crowd used ad blockers more aggressively than most other traffic to my sites. People on HN also routinely post some means to get past paywalls for articles posted here.
It took me about two weeks to write it. I have about six years college and years of experience pertinent to the topic, plus years of experience writing for pay.
It has gotten more than 60k page views. It did fairly well on the front page of HN.
It did not make me one thin dime.
I've talked about this on HN for years. I was actually homeless when I began doing product descriptions et al for pay. Every time I comment on this problem space, I get told "quit you're whining and get a real job."
This is not just about me. Local papers are folding left and right, etc. It's an industry wide problem.
The world seems to want high quality writing completely for free with zero means for the creators to pay their bills.
I generally like the writing I do for pay. But even if I didn't, I would have zero moral qualms about it. It isn't like anyone gave a damn about me being homeless and unable to afford a meal at times while they read my writing for free and sometimes cooed about it being good writing while simultaneously telling me to STFU about my problems, which were not their problem.
I would love to have my Patreon well funded so I can write fewer product descriptions and write more stuff like the above piece. But the world simply doesn't want to pay me for that.
I do have clients who love my product reviews. That's how I'm currently keeping food on the table.
People who de facto expect good writing to be done by unpaid slave labor are not people in any position to make me feel bad about writing product descriptions. That's a laugh.
> Most people aren't going to see specs concerning screen size and mentally translate that to "Woah, this will make my life easier because it will be more readable than the dinky thing I currently use."
This sentence really hurts my head, especially because I think you are right. In my mind, it is equivalent to being chased by a leopard, and not taking your knife out of your pocket because there's no one there to remind you that knives are pointy and can stab things. I dislike advertising that tells me suggestions rather than specifications; it keeps me from being able to decide if the product will work for the use cases I need it for. I don't think I'll ever understand why that works so well on people.
But what if you are encountering an alien life form from another planet? How will you know if it's basically like a leopard, in spite of being purple with green stripes, so stabby thing it is? Or maybe it's friendly and stabbing it would start an intergalactic war because it's actually a visiting diplomat.
It's my job to give such clues to the clueless. (Not intended to call anyone stupid. I used to routinely ask for clues for the clueless when asking questions for myself online and self identifyng as the clueless on topics where I lacked expertise.)
I think you took a personal opinion based on the way I see the world and turned it into a what-if hyperbole contest. But again, opinion, and not worth killing the conversation over, just a tactic used in poor taste.
I would prefer to make my own judgements. There's a better chance that I know enough about physics and biology and have a relevant understanding of the situation that I'm currently in, than the chance that someone else has all of those things and is paying as much attention to my situation as I am, has no agenda conflicting with mine, and chooses not to lie to me for any unknown number of reasons.
For what reason would I be unable to take a ruler, measure the screen of my current device, subtract that number from 7, and use the outcome to decide whether or not the device you are selling will have better visibility? It would take, maybe 4 seconds. I could even estimate it within an inch if no ruler was available. What clue can you offer that I could not deduce for myself given base information, and additionally make a better deduction, because you don't know that I'm colorblind and nearsighted. You simply aren't in a good position to offer me a clue.
Edit: I think that last sentence sums up why I dislike advertisements, but let me add an addendum: advertisements tend to offer me stories to distract me from the facts. I do not seek distraction. I want to understand the facts, and use the product to create my own story, for myself, because it will be more genuine than what is advertised to me, because it will be true, and be real, and be rewarding.
Do you not naturally do the same thing in your own life? If you're hanging out with some friends and want to recommend a certain drink or food, do you say something like "Oh my god, you've gotta try this, it taste so good," or do you pick up the packaging and read off some of the ingredients list and nutritional facts? Would you first say some cookies should be tried because they're "delicious," or that they are worth trying because of the measurements and other particular properties? Or, going to the extreme, would you say I should try something because of certain gustatory and digestive processes afforded therefrom, which create a positively stimulating sensation, as transmitted by the parietal lobe of the cerebral cortex?
For a long list of reasons that aren't especially pertinent to this discussion, no, I basically don't ever tell anyone in my personal life "Oh my God, you've gotta try this, it's so good."
I'm happy to talk to people in an informational way about a lot of things, but I basically think it is unconscionably rude to try to essentially dictate food choices or similar to anyone for any reason at any time or otherwise put them on the spot where they might need to turn me down and then have to wrestle with whether or not to divulge medical information or other personal info that I might not yet be privy to.
I do this in part because there is a long history of me just making small talk and, to my horror, people jumping on it like it was excellent advice and it going weird, weird places.
I've wrestled a lot with the question of "where does good communication end and manipulation begin?" precisely because I place a high value on self determination and respecting boundaries, yet have all too often had people react to my words as if I were trying to make them do X. It's often not only weird, but also some manner of train wreck.
I knew a woman going through a divorce who was feeling old and ugly etc. I casually joked that the cure for that was a younger lover. My real point was "Oh, don't let your ex make you feel that way. His opinions no longer count." But the next thing I knew, she had a younger boyfriend.
We weren't even friends. We were casual acquaintances and she treated me terribly every step of the way, which just added to the WTF?? factor.
I bring those same rubrics to my paid writing, so I try to be very informational and explain what x product is good for and who might want it and why. But I'm very clear that if I do that well, there are people who will find my words compelling and promptly jump on it.
I sincerely believe you simply cannot neatly and cleanly distinguish powerful and effective communication from intentional manipulation. If I make the case strongly and effectively enough that this is good for x, there will be people who will jump on that without further thought.
That works if there is a single source from where people learn about your product. If you product is popular enough someone else will simply make a nice table comparing your 7" screen with your competitions 8" and 9" screens.
And that may well be your competitor, whose goal is no more high minded than yours: promoting their own products.
And if it's me, I will probably be paid to tell you why you might want to buy each product listed.
Obviously, the 7" model is portable, no frills, fits standard pockets and you will appreciate it if you need a space saving model or are buying on a budget.
The 9" has all the bells and whistles, is a premium product and well worth the money, if you can afford it.
> One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.
Type 1 ads (if one relaxes the dry listing of specifications a bit) might be called "informational ads"; Type 2 ads might be called "aspirational ads".
The informational ads are often found in hobby magazines. Interests like woodworking, electronics, airplane flying, fishing, guns, gardening, cooking, crafts, etc. Many readers enjoy looking at those type of ads to learn about new and unknown products that are relevant to their passions.
The aspirational ads are the abstract visuals that really don't describe the product at all. They are meant to tap into the emotions. They deliberately avoid mentioning any concrete specifications. E.g. perfume ads where a model walks through the forest, or a Coca Cola bottle being drunk by a CGI animated polar bear, or Apple showing silhouettes dancing with white ear buds. Apple doesn't want to communicate the earbud's frequency response such as 60Hz to 18kHz -- that's too vulgar. So let's show happy people dancing instead. These type of ads are designed to prey on our feelings of inferiority and therefore, the advertised product promises to make us more beautiful and popular.
I agree with most of thing, but I also think it needs a little flavour as to "informational" vs "aspirational".
I agree with both of those, but would also classify the examples you gave below as the difference between "mass advertising" and "intent based advertising". TV ads vs AdWords essentially. One is to capture interest and change behaviours, the other is to sell to an audience who's already in the market for your product.
I call them German Ads. I used to live in the German speaking part of the world, and now and again I would see an ad that clumsily tried to persuade you by telling you about the product, what it was made of, and all that. And then a ridiculously lame attempt at showing a content housewife or something like that. Almost like the ad writer was trying to do a type 2 but was too honest.
Typically some ordinary household chemical.
I mean imagine a Coca-Cola ad where they talk to you about the fact that carbon dioxide is dissolved in the drink and it comes out of solution, giving you a tingling sensation. Versus what coke ads actually look like... snowy streets with trucks decorated for Christmas, a sense of warmth and expectation.
Drink Coke!
- Tastes good if you like sugar and caramel, much better than Pepsi
- Not the most unhealthy drink in moderation
- Carbonation that bites your tongue so you feel alive
- Our tax dollars subsidize the Georgia state government
You say that, but the very first thing I see is "Father’s Day Gifts Your Dad Will Love". Not "Recommended Gifts for Father's Day", or something similarly objective, just straight up manipulation like all the other adverts.
That's fair, the gift guides don't seem to be particularly useful; however, I've found the buying guides to be really useful, to the extent that I have developed muscle memory for "best X wirecutter" whenever I need to buy a thing I don't have strong opinions about / don't want to do a bunch of research for.
For instance "The Best Steak Knife Set" [1], lays out a couple of options and why you might pick them as well as their criteria and test methodology so you can figure out why you might want to pick something else.
Wire cutter is manipulation masked in honest reviews. I’ll say the unpopular because people are so hellbent on convincing themselves those reviews give a damn about products with no affiliate links. Oh “but they make recommendations for nonadfiliated products!” Yeah, what percentage of the whole is that? Mmmmmmmhmmmm.
Stuff like this is in a sense worse. Everyone knows ads are ads. But these are 'unbiased' reviews which are totally biased, requiring them to actually distort objective information where required.
If the product is big enough I'll skim reddit. Nothing like hearing the hard facts from a pissed off anonymous hivemind that isn't going to let anyone off the hook. Even the apple subreddit has been crucifying the company as they keep falling down the stairs with every keyboard half-fix they silently release (I think we are at 'gen 4' now).
On the other hand there's certainly attempts at manipulating content on sites like reddit too for advertising purposes. Though I don't know if there are good statistics on how prevalent it is
Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.
I don't know what you even do with that information. Are you supposed to ask your doctor to put you on medication? "Uhh, sir you don't even have that disease."
There is no reasonable argument that consumer ads for prescription medications should be allowed, and there are tons of reasonable arguments (including public health arguments) for why they should not be.
That they're allowed in the US at all is demonstration of caustic effects of high-dollar lobbying.
Prescription medications cannot be legally advertised in the UK, and this makes the ad space much quieter. All you get advertised is OTC painkillers and cold remedies.
I am, thankfully, pretty distant from things advertising these days, but one of the few things that stuck, and one of the first bits of advice is to move away from the factual type 1, to the vague aspirational type 2 on the grounds it works far better. I seem to remember one popular book picking on example type 1 ads from a newspaper or yellow pages and turning the boring lists of features into the hollow promises^W implications of type 2.
Which is essentially admitting it's very good manipulation so close to lying it should carry a warning or regulation.
It's the former type that's sometimes quite popular - like in the back of old computer or hobby magazines - precisely because it's handy for discovering new things.
TL;DR Type 2 is what marketers and advertisers do, type 1 is what a lawyer, gardener or software engineer might produce to sell their product.
Actually, ads on facebook are surprisingly beginning to look like this for me. I've found myself going from hating ads to finding them actually surprisingly interesting, and things I would have wanted to look at anyways (like, for example, interesting kickstarter ideas)
How does "Look at this beautiful person, just look. Your life isn't like this. Ha. You suck. You're a failure. You're ugly, you're stupid and nobody likes you and you haven't even got $product" "This family is so much happier and more well adjusted than yours, you're a rubbish parent and you don't even have $product"
Every ad in fashion be it for cream or stink or (gasp) sometimes even clothes. Loads of mirrors in every shopping centre aren't there?
Negging is exactly right. Make people afraid and sad. Fear of missing out, fear of weapons of mass destruction, fear that "maybe they don't really like me." Sometimes it's subtle eg Clooney selling coffee and sometimes it really isn't, eg Life Insurance ads and the Iraqi invasion. (Maybe some pushing the idea believed in WMD - that's not the point. It was levered very thoroughly to sell the war - be right or wrong).
Teaching children to identify and analyse psychologically manipulative techniques is essential for their mental well-being.
Obviously it's not just ads. There's a load of academic research that follows the same pattern. "You need to be terrified about your children's screen time." Maybe I do but do you have the research or are you just stoking fear to promote your career? The latter definitely exists.
I'd very much agree. I don't want people to preemptively try to solve my problems for me. If I have a problem that I've actively decided I want to solve, and have prioritized finding a solution, I'll seek out products to solve it. I don't care to randomly run across an ad for something that I could use, but haven't actively decided that I want to seek out and potentially purchase.
For this reason I block ads in every way that I can, no matter how "light-side" they might be.
Some, especially the Kato model Amtrak one, have some aspects of an aspirational ad, but I don't know if I'd condem them as such. They usually, as the Kato one has, information about the specific items that are now available and often some "ambiance" information that many hobbiests, especially people new to the hobby like to look at.
I don't mind ads like these as they're not designed to make you feel as though you need to purchase something to be better and they're not in a public space. They're they're to matter-of-factly says a service or product is available.
I could also show you the local pennysaver or Craigslist. All of those are also add, but they're not the "aspirational" kind. They're more matter-of-factly that someone is selling so (used) item, or provides some kind of service, or that there is a garage or estate sale at such-and-such address. How else would this information be made redily and easily available?
Why would I want to learn about new services or products?
Or more directly to the point, why would I want to let /you/ decide which services and products I learn about, when, where, and how often?
When that is a) more in your interest than mine, and b) inevitably going to turn into a "cover every surface and channel into advertising as you try to shout loudest for my attention in competition with every other vendor of every product and service in the world".
>Why would I want to learn about new services or products?
I think you missed the context of gp's comment. His example of ads was from a hobby enthusiast's magazine such as Model Railroader.[1]
Many readers buy hobby magazines in part for the ads. Yes, there are feature stories but the ads themselves are also informative of new products the readers want to learn about.
So to directly answer your question of "why would I want to learn about new services or products?" -- it's because that desire for ads was implicit in your decision to buy a hobby-oriented magazine. (The "I" and "you" is not you specifically but a rhetorical placeholder for the generalized magazine buyer.)
Another example of some people expressing a desire for ads is buying the Sunday edition of their local newspaper. (Many readers won't buy the Monday-to-Saturday editions but they'll go out of their way to buy the Sunday copy that's has the ad inserts.) They didn't buy it for the news articles written by journalists; they bought it for the stores' ads to see what's on sale and for the coupons.
An opposite example of buying a magazine because it does not have ads would be something like Consumer Reports.
> Humans learned about new things for thousands of years without the modern of technology.
> I have no fear that the news of useful and interesting information will spread just fine even if technology is massively reduced.
Sure, we don't need ads the same way we don't need computers. I however like being able to learn about things outside my physical filter bubble and immensely enjoy my used tools and electronics (along with the massive coat savings) I've bought from ads on Craigslist.
You would have been able to find those same tools and electronics, you may have had to just spend a few minutes browsing some sort of catalog. The lack of advertisements wouldn't cause any serious difficulties.
>You would have been able to find those same tools and electronics, you may have had to just spend a few minutes browsing some sort of catalog.
You may have read the gp's comment too quickly. The context was used tools and electronics from Craigslist ads.
The "used" would be pre-owned and less expensive, and "Craigslist" presumably means buying from a local seller.
Catalogs for tools and electronics are typically new items that are national in scope instead of local.
The Craigslist advertisements made him _aware_ of a local seller selling a used tool that he wanted.
What would be the non-advertising way to accomplish that same goal? Possibly driving to flea markets or swap meets every week? But the sellers with their wares on display are themselves a form of advertising. It's also an incredibly inefficient use of time to repeatedly drive to a location and walk away empty-handed compared to seeing a relevant Craigslist ad.
>some sort of catalog. The lack of advertisements wouldn't cause any serious difficulties.
Fyi in case you were unaware... Many retailers' catalogs are created with ad sponsorships to offset the cost of printing, mailing, etc.
In the new world, you would pay a small fee for a quality catalog.
I guarantee you some sort of comparable solution would arise for used goods. Once again, perhaps it is as simple as something like a craigslist requiring a small fee. It could be subscription based, a fee paid by the seller (to place the listing or when the sale is completed), and so on. Aren't there apps already doing this?
And of course, there are likely many other good solutions that I'm not thinking of.
Lastly, we don't have to ban _all_ advertising. We could significantly reduce it and gain many of the same benefits.
>, a fee paid by the seller (to place the listing)
Right, and the print version of that in newspapers was actually called "classified ads". The listing is an advertisement from the seller trying to make the public aware of what he's trying to sell. The seller paid a fee to the newspaper to list his item.
>Lastly, we don't have to ban _all_ advertising.
Ok, that comment changes things. I was interpreting your previous claim of "the lack of advertisements" as literal absolutism and it seemed to contradict the concept of "classified ads" which you approved of. I understand you just want less ads.
They are called classified ads if they are placed in the newspaper, as the primary purpose of the newspaper is to deliver the news, not sell things.
They wouldn't be considered ads if it was a dedicated medium intended primarily to facilitate the exchange of used goods (or whatever product). This is what I was referring to.
But even still, classified ads are an interesting case. They feel closer to a catalog than your standard advertisement.
>They wouldn't be considered ads if it was a dedicated medium intended primarily to facilitate the exchange of used goods (or whatever product). This is what I was referring to.
Then I admit I don't follow what your reply[0] was about to jimktrains2 comment "I've bought from ads on Craigslist."
With my straight reading of your subsequent replies, it seems like your suggestion of "a dedicated medium intended primarily to facilitate the exchange of used goods" -- is exactly what Craigslist already _is_ -- and you had originally dismissed Craigslist ads in your reply to jimktrains2.
Perhaps the conversation seems nonsensical to me because you were unaware of what Craigslist actually _is_? From the wiki[1]: "Craigslist is an American classified advertisements website"
It seems the difficulty here is identifying what is considered an advertisement, beyond the obvious display ads which are not intrinsically a part of the content that they are embedded in. But fortunately display ads (and their brethren) are the most problematic, so I think we would get significant mileage just focusing on that.
I don't think the "light side" exists. Advertising is fundamentally about convincing the consumer to buy your product, when they otherwise wouldn't have. That goes regardless of whether it's good for them. Sure, it might be good for them, but that's basically irrelevant. If you're giving someone an unbiased opinion about a product or service, that's not advertising - it's a review.
At its core, marketing is all about creating information asymmetry. You're not informing the customer, you're persuading them. They're opposites.
>>Light side: Closing the loop between what the customer wants, what their actual problems are, and what engineering and manufacturing can deliver.
>Marketing seems to have given up on that sort of effort years ago.
Marketing hasn't, but companies' hiring and organizational structure decisions have - especially tech companies.
As long as the only marketing personel a company hires are advertising personel, given authority and responsibility for advertising only, the loop can't be closed.
In tech, programmers are the "engineering and manufacturing", but they tend not to want to be told what consumers want by the marketing team (who, if hired and authorized properly, would be doing rigorous independent research and data analysis using data from that research, user data, and bought research, to come by those insights...)
> In tech, programmers are the "engineering and manufacturing", but they tend not to want to be told what consumers want by the marketing team
This is true. In fact, I'm currently engaged in a bit of a battle over this very thing at my current employer (I'm a software dev). They're hiring a brand new marketing team, but all they've been hiring are salespeople, and I've been pushing them to be sure to include someone who will do actual market research that we devs can use to inform product design.
actually, subjectively I get the feeling looking back at older ads post-industrial revolution that the weight has shifted, and that the abundance of it (such that almost all advertising is psychological/social manipulation rather than presentation of facts) is some modern phenomenon.
Previously the idea that you would struggle to know what specific product an ad is selling, where to buy it, what it costs, and what it's features are would seem obscene, but these days concepts of brand, desire, status, aspiration, are so omnipresent that deriving any pertinent details is now a common experience.
Pre that, it probably is all the same, because modern advertising is, fundamentally, just propaganda rebranded by ad men.
Some historians of advertising - probably most famously, Adam Curtis in "The Century of the Self" - argue that "type 2" directly fell out of World War-era propaganda research redirected towards consumerism.
Industrial printed advertising started in the early 19th century with the first stirrings of printed mass media.
But flyers and noticeboards have been around since at least Roman times, and limited-run pamphlet and newspaper/gazette ads were already a thing as far as back as the 16th century.
The propaganda research is more Type 3 - tailored ads designed and monitored for effectiveness. Before Bernays ads were hit and miss, usually made by someone with a brush who could draw and set type.
After Bernays it became a huge industry of influence, and concepts like branding, image, narrative, demographics, and dramatisation began to be used consciously.
The first two ads seem pretty Type 1 to me: they mostly consist of text straightforwardly describing what the product supposedly does, except for a smallish image in the first one. The descriptions are incorrect (cigarettes are not safe, and whatever was in those pills was certainly not as efficacious as the ad claims), but that’s basically an orthogonal issue.
On the other hand, your third example is definitely Type 2.
I see Type 1 as essentially honest and realistic, and Type 2 as essentially dishonest and unrealistic - the implication of non-existent benefits and lifestyle enhancements in a misleading way.
The presence of pretty women is a popular way to dramatise the "benefits", but it's not obligatory.
I don't doubt that WW-propaganda accelerated it, but manipulative ads were a big thing even in 1898, when William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell more papers.
I think type 2 has been around since Ogg sold "bright hot magic" to Urgh the thatcher. The big change is that within the last 60 years or so, we have developed very accurate scientific models of human cognition and behavior, and those models are being used to shape advertising to have measurable effects on how humans perceive the world. It's like we've developed Persuasion, the Force skill from Starwars, and now we are using it to control peoples' buying habits, and doing so in ways that are actively harmful.
> One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
I'm pretty sure that I haven't seen that sort of ad since the late '80s.
I have seen an ad that informed me of the existence of a product with a certain property, which I had wished existed but didn’t think did, and this led to a purchase of the product being made.
However, I don’t remember the content of the ad, so I can’t be confident that it didn’t also have an emotional appeal to it.
The company in question later did something else I didn’t like, but the added feature (really, the removal of a ubiquitous mis/anti feature) continues to be something I appreciate.
"We" had a chance to re-set this at the dawn of Internet Indexing and Search and discovery Optimization, but Overture (and then Google and later FB and TWTTR, at al) and "us" enabled and encouraged advertising to become the driving force of the internet. We could have had a different ad-free internet, but no one was willing to pay that bill.
We did reset this at the dawn of the Internet. Google's text ads were basically Type 1, and they almost completely replaced the earlier Punch-the-Monkey banner ads we had during the dot-com boom, largely because Google was so much more effective as a discovery platform that sites which advertised on it replaced sites that tried to do their own TV/banner ads.
The problem is that Type 2 ads are more effective than Type 1 ads for mainstream consumers, the ones that think with their emotions rather than carefully weighing competitive alternatives. So even though Google started as a Type 1 only company, the text ads on it have gradually been creeping back to Type 2 manipulation since, and they've expanded into more manipulative ad segments with the DoubleClick and YouTube acquisitions. They also face competition from Facebook (which has been manipulative from the start).
Manipulative ads became the face of the Internet because they work. For them to stop being the face of the Internet, they'd have to stop working. That either requires that 3B people take ownership of their emotions (which seems unlikely, given the general state of emotional education in the world) or that the Internet serve only the few million people in well-off, hyper-rational, educated professions (which also seems unlikely, and not even desirable).
I remember that. Google ads were actively helpful! I clicked them because they were cool.
Today, I run an ad blocker because most ads are manipulative again, I recognize I can be manipulated, and I have to do what I can to avoid it. I wonder if there is some way to configure uBlock Origin to allow informative ads while blocking manipulative ads.
> Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.
I'd rather just consign the type 2 adverts to the nearest null device and pick up a copy of Consumer Reports when I want factual information about a product. It helps that most of the women used in advertising are just skinny blondes that you can get for a dime a dozen in Stepford, CT.
I would go further and state that our entire economy and society are based on the manufacturing of demand. There are so few things we actually need. Food, water, clothing, shelter. Everything else is a luxury you've been convinced to buy (or it was given to you by someone who was convinced).
I'm not talking about ethics here, just straight facts.
Luxury goods are status symbols, we buy them because we crave status because deep down we crave recognition from others in society. So I wonder if urbanization/the trend towards more loneliness is the problem. If you have a tightly-knit community, you'd have people who appreciate you because of your character, sense of humor or good company; not because you drive a fancy car. And nowadays we don't really have real communities anymore, just polarization through the Internet, where people try to feel better about themselves by putting down others.
Status can't be all of luxury goods - although it may be for say fashion. Material comforts and perception of superiority are reasons - those who have a community and any disposible income have their own market "profiles" based on familarity. Even if it is just say preferred sorts of Whiskey by mennonites.
In a capitalist society status is defined entirely by ownership of capital, and low status is defined by very limited capital.
So of course luxury goods are defined primarily by their capital cost, supported by subsidiary markers like cultural capital and social proof. Actual utility (and quality) come second.
Competitive status display is entirely about the careful curation of success tokens - clothes (+ accessories), car, house, sexual and breeding partner(s), and the amount of autonomy, agency, and political and cultural capital at work.
Ads exist to promote competitive status display through curated consumption of success tokens.
It's a sport no one can ever win, but for some people it's enough to be on the leaderboard for a while.
Depends what you refer to when you say "need". Is internet a luxury? I want to video call my parents thousand of kilometers away (webcam). I want to do it without the connection being interrupted every second (good internet connection). I want to be able to distinguish my mother from my father (HD webcam) and hear them without buzzing sounds (good microphone). But wait! There's this thing called a "smartphone" that has good camera and microphone, and you don't have to be sitting in the dark corner where your PC is.
The problem with ads is that most of the times they promote a product for a need that either doesn't exist or does not apply to you, but still, after being spammed a lot you might give in and think you actually need that.
They're certainly enough to survive, which is why they're provided in prison. The argument wasn't that these are the only things you should ever have in life, but rather that these are the only things you need in life, and everything else is a luxury.
The punishment of prison isn't free food and shelter, it's a lack of luxuries. And people survive for decades in prison, so obviously what they're getting is, by definition, enough.
Words work because we agree what they mean in advance. You can't redefine "shelter" to suit your argument. Just make it with the standard definitions of words.
The things that make prison an undesirable place are lack of autonomy and separation from friends and family. You don’t need advertising or corporations to provide these.
> So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy
That claim doesn't follow. Some people actually are unhappy, or would actually be happier if they discovered and purchased certain products.
I'm not claiming that advertising is or isn't a net positive, but this part of your argument doesn't hold up. It's kind of like saying "dating, or asking someone on a date, is fundamentally trying to convince someone that they would be happier with you; if they were perfectly happy already what else would they need?; so you have to convince them that they're not happy just to get them to go on a date with you; thus asking someone on a date if basically negging."
I think advertising is to marketing as space travel is to rocket science. An ideal situation for space travel is to be able to teleport anything anywhere, but that's not possible yet, so they build rockets to travel as fast as currently possible. Similarly, an ideal situation for advertising is to read each person's mind, determine exactly what products they are looking for but aren't yet aware of, and make them aware. But that's not possible yet, so they use marketing spam to make aware as many people as possible.
> Similarly, an ideal situation for advertising is to read each person's mind, determine exactly what products they are looking for but aren't yet aware of, and make them aware.
If marketers had that power, that's not how they'd use it. Instead, what they'd do is deploy a powerful analytic system to determine what your touch points are, in order to learn how to more effectively manipulate you to make you want whatever it is they happen to be selling.
Or, to use currently fashionable marketer-speak, they'd use it to move you through the funnel more efficiently.
Yes, I understand they aren't identical (I consider advertisers to be less problematic than marketers), but they both are working toward the same goal.
except the goal of marketing is not inherently to meet a person's needs.
At the macro level, it's maximising needs met, but at the micro level this is done by both initiating and implanting desires that otherwise aren't present or necessary, and by creating problems/pain points (which then, as a second order effect, create a need, which is met by the product).
In economic terms, advertisers aim to maximise locally measured utility, but they do this by externalising the costs of the dis-utility they deliberately create.
Like the proverbial glass salesman, garbage man, or mafia, they provide a theoretical good, but they've found business booms if they can generate their own demand by throwing rocks through windows, trashing the town, or partaking in their own crime to sell their protection services.
In our instance, the town is our own psychological and social state, and while we don't account for these externalities andnegatives, they will keep actively damaging us because its in their interest and locally optimal from their pint of view...
Every single person responding to my comment is conflating advertising with marketing. They are not the same thing!
Advertisers are putting customers in touch with marketers for products. Marketers are trying to convince those customers to buy the product. If the advertiser somehow magically knew a priori that nothing a marketer could say would change a given customer's mind, it's in everyone's best interest to not waste any resources on that customer.
> Every single person responding to my comment is conflating advertising with marketing. They are not the same thing!
> Advertisers are putting customers in touch with marketers for products. Marketers are trying to convince those customers to buy the product. If the advertiser somehow magically knew a priori that nothing a marketer could say would change a given customer's mind, it's in everyone's best interest to not waste any resources on that customer.
I agree with the point, but not the rationale. The difference between advertising and marketing is simply a syllogistic fallacy.
All fat men are men, all men are human, therefore all humans are fat men.
All advertising is paid media, all paid media is marketing, therefore all marketing is advertising.
Marketing is a superset of actions that contains elements of direct advertising, paid influence (PR, influencers, "brand ambassadors", employee advocacy...), product development and market research, events and announcements, sales, and distribution.
I'm a marketer - my main job at the moment is advertising (which I hate, but am stuck), but it's not the only element to the role of a marketer.
You might conflate all of the above under "advertising", but even if you think it should all be burned to the ground, it's still helpful to segment is so you can choose the order in which you set it alight.
well, firstly, no, under that definition, it's not in the advertiser's interest to get the marketers to stop spending money (that generates the advertiser's profits) even if its not doing anything.
secondly, if we take your definition (and call me crazy but if everyone in a conversation is using a certain definition I generally find it more amenable to participating in a conversation to adopt that definition), you've got it completely backwards.
Marketers use advertisers to get marketing into peoples heads. Advertisers exist to make money by meeting the needs and desires of marketers. Consumers are not, as a general rule, paying to see ads.
The idea that advertisers exist to try 'deduce peoples wants and then met them' and they're the ones just 'using marketing because they haven't found a better way' is so..., and I try to keep things civil here on Hacker news but can think of no other way to convey this thought..., naively stupid that it's borderline offensive and disrespectful to the people on the other side of the conversation.
It doesn't just convince you of something, it even drives culture, like beauty and fashion. Advertising has changed how women look and perceive themselves and the products they buy. None of it is needed. Make-up, shaving products, creams, etc. Fashion has turned into fast fashion. It's just a waste of natural resources and creates plastic waste.
I guess that’s the current form of advertising. It tries to create demand where there has been none before. You could also imagine advertising that tries to address your actual needs. Unfortunately that probably would make a much smaller market.
> every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin.
At its best, advertising is a form of search technology. If I have a need A and there’s a company out there providing exactly A, it’s awesome if I find out about it - both sides benefit from the transaction. To me this sort of advertising seems ethical and useful. Unfortunately there’s of course the other kind, based on deception, psychological tricks, and appeal to emotion.
Advertising is not a good system for that. If there are multiple companies providing A (the usual situation), advertising will not help you choose well. If you think you need A but in fact A is quite harmful and you're best off avoiding it in favor of B, but there's no money in B, advertising will actively attempt to mislead you.
There is no magical ethical kind of advertising based on informing the customer. All advertising is 100% biased towards the decision of purchasing the product. That's what makes it advertising.
Nobody would enjoy having a diamond without advertising. Maybe a child, to put with her collection of other rocks and shiny things.
While I agree with your parent that advertising can help people enjoy things more, I don't agree with the implication there's a positive side to ads. Everything I can think of that people enjoy more because of advertising, they'd probably be happier not enjoying.
Also: advertising can make you enjoy things less (usually things you already have). Maybe things you'd be happier if you enjoyed more.
It's a fairly established finding of social science that associations change your appreciation.
By pre-configuring your initial reaction or associating it with something positive you feel actually better about it. There are plenty of documented examples of this:
Patients being told that they are switched from a brand drug to a generic one report worse results, or the mere increase in the price tag of a drug increases placebo effects.
Its a completely different experience to drink a coke from an official can, than to drink it from a silver-slated can and being told "it is cola".
And lets not even get into politics! Basically the game of changing how people react to moral issues.
The person that believes ads and marketing have no effect on what they like simply doesn't understand himself.
I would not say it works that way for me. I see most advertising as a visual noice and/or annoying interruption. I think majority of the time I am not even aware what is being advertised.
Same, but (unfortunately) I suspect we are in the minority. Whenever I visit my parents' house, there are at least two separate TVs on, regardless of whether someone is actually in the room watching. There's probably a 50% chance that there's an ad playing in that house at any given moment.
I ask my dad, "Why do you pay $300/month+ to have ads shoved down your throat?" He responded with some non sequitur like, "How else do you know what's going on in the world?" Wat.
Apparently there is some value in watching the same catheter ads over and over that I was not previously aware of.
People still look at me strangely when they say "hey have you seen that new ad for X" and I tell them I avoid advertisements. Likewise when I change the radio station the moment an ad break starts. I think the idea of ads as a negative influence has not penetrated very far in US society.
The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch.
I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!
It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games).
I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired".
This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car.
I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
> The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television
Yes, I agree with this. I gave up on television about 20 years ago, and it was the ads that pushed me that way. Every so often I'll see a TV program, and it's still intolerable -- things are so much worse than they were 20 years ago.
Cable TV used to be ad free when it first came out. The whole reason people were willing to pay for it was to not see ads like they got on the free broadcasts. Then once telecoms got their market share the ads trickled in, as was originally planned I'm sure.
I used to watch cable tv when it was ad free. Then ads came about and I was really baffled why anyone would pay to watch ads. That was the end of cable for me many many years ago.
Also, I’ll never forget the first day I saw and ad in the movie theatre. That was mostly the end of theatres for me except on some occasions.
>Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
I live in a metro area. Physical adverts are the worst type in my opinion. There are methods of eliminating every other type of ad: I use adblockers on my phone and computers, my network is pi-holed, I use plex/netflix instead of traditional TV, I pay for spotify instead of listening to the radio etc. But physical adverts? There's no way of blocking them, unless you consider "never going outside" an option. In a way, not having a method of opting out of billboards feels like they are being pushed on you without your consent, which is horrifying to me.
Physical adverts aren't nearly as intrusive and serve the interests of the locals at least. There's one right now in my town advertising addiction assistance, certainly not a bad thing. Then there's the electronic one they put downtown that is brighter than the sun and almost got me into an accident when it flashed stark white and blinded me.
>I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!
This is still better than what Netflix does, where they cram egregious product placement down your throat so you can't even just look away until it's over.
Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.
I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc.
It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
This. I am surprised to see hacker news jump on this as proof that advertising causes reduced happiness when this article can only conclude that they are correlated. The common statistical maxim is that correlation does not imply causation. A far more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that greater development is associated with both increased advertising and a reduction in happiness. And yes, the summary does state that they were able to show that it is uncorrelated with GDP but what's telling is that the prominent bar graph is "uncorrected". So, after correcting, the advertising effect may be so minor that they chose not to graph it at all.
I do my best to limit advertising in my own life because I myself believe that I am a happier person without it. This study, however, is misleading and doesn't give us evidence of much of anything.
> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.
You are wrong. The paper goes on to say, in the very next sentence, that 3% is "approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed", thus (while smaller), it's the same order of magnitude.
Presumably you do not consider the impact of marriage or unemployment "basically negligible"?
> It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising.
That may be as it may, but that is not what the paper is talking about.
> Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for
here s some more spurious correlations. Countries with very high happiness have some of the highest suicide rates. happiness might be dangerous to the survival of the species. We should optimize against it
I disagree - especially since optimizing for anything blindly/without constraints can lead to horrific outcomes.
Optimizing for happiness would logically call for denying unpleasant truths because pointing them out would make people unhappy and downright inhumanities - if the depressed commit suicide it would drive up the average happiness. Even if given tighter constraints it would still have disturbing ignorance is bliss promotion.
> Optimizing for happiness would logically call for denying unpleasant truths because pointing them out would make people unhappy
Not if you take the long term into account. Denying unpleasant truth might make people happy -- though I don't think this works if your subconscious still knows the truth -- but then you cannot deal with the issue and it makes you unhappy.
> if the depressed commit suicide it would drive up the average happiness.
If someone's life is so unpleasant it isn't worth living and they cannot be treated, suicide isn't inhumane.
> Even if given tighter constraints it would still have disturbing ignorance is bliss promotion.
Something being disturbing doesn't mean it's actually bad. Reactionaries find homosexuality disturbing.
Do you have a reason for considering ignorance is bliss promotion disturbing aside from lack of familiarity?
> I disagree - especially since optimizing for anything blindly/without constraints can lead to horrific outcomes.
I don't think an outcome that makes people happy, including in the long run, can be horrific.
Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did, there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow because of ads.
I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness.
Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist.
The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expand but advertising isn't free either. In any case, an independent press is much more suitable to actually inform people than the ad industry which at best informs people by accident while trying to convince people to buy $PRODUCT.
Ads are like military: It's mostly necessary because it exists.
Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.
There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.
How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?
1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.
2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.
3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.
4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.
See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.
This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
> Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.
That means plumbers don't care about plumbing news, including your app. You have no right to disrespect their choice by spamming them anyway.
In a world without ads, not subscribing to plumbing news would be a weird choice anyway. Refusing to learn about new ways to increase productivity – like your app – means giving your competition an advantage.
> It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.
Not subscribing to plumbing magaxines just means the signal to noise ratio in them is bad.
For the value part: What if plumbers use Facebook (which they do) and when they see your FB ad, they buy your product. Wouldnt that indicate they do care about your app?
So? Maybe some ends justify the means. Selling an app isn't such an end.
Is being able to sell your stuff all you care about? Because that's the impression I'm getting. I'd summarize our discussion like this (exaggerating for effect):
> Ads damage democracy, make everyone unhappy, they're a huge drain on our economy and can be replaced by better methods of distributing information.
This is fallacious thinking. If you had an app that would increase plumber productivity by 50%, plumbers would be lining up to get into the Beta. Find any plumbing supplier or trade group, and if the effects are actually that good, they'll tell their members at no-charge because that knowledge would be a service to them. Plumbers would be cold-calling other plumbers trying to get a beta invite. All you need is a marginally competent sales person.
Advertising is a waste money for quality products, only makes sense for inferior ones.
This is just not true. Example: I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app.
This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.
Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.
Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.
You can certainly pay for eyeballs, the question is whether FB ads are giving users with a retention level high enough to justify the advertising expense. Users from online ads tend to much lower quality than those that come from organic traffic, I would not expect your organic retention numbers to hold.
I've said why its not growing organically many times. Most businesses have no viral coefficient, so organic growth is linear and slow. Some consumer focused tech busnesses are the exception, not the rules.
And yes, all ad spend should be measured against true LTV.
If there were no explicit advertising, companies would use other, hidden means to reach customers' minds. Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content, and I think if we banned advertising it would create an unintended incentive that could lead to the destruction of unbiased journalism as we know it today.
> Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content,
You have heard of native advertising haven't you? Of course ethical journalists refuse to do this. They will still refuse when ordinary ads have been banned.
On the other hand, ads make the press less independent. No matter how much you try to avoid it: If someone buys ads in your publication they have influence over you. Be too critical of them and they'll withdraw their funding. They won't openly threaten you, of course, because that is not legal and not necessary.
I explain why this is a valid counterpoint in the second sentence of my post: Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content, and I think if we banned advertising it would create an unintended incentive that could lead to the destruction of unbiased journalism as we know it today.
I think the distinction between advertising and content is a lot more blurry than you realize. The majority of 'news' articles begin from some company's press release, product placement is common in fictional worlds, and journalists frequently self-censor to avoid displeasing advertisers.
Sentence 3 is also untrue. No advertising means people hear about much fewer brands, which means reduced competition, which means higher prices. This more or less balances out the cost of ads for the consumer.
I understand. I'm not saying that I accept that the correlation is accurate. I'm just saying that if it is, the tradeoff to stop making 3% of people less happy is totally worthwhile.
But of course, still in the hypothetical, it wouldn't be necessary for ads to disappear to accomplish this. All that would be necessary is for advertising to adhere to the ideals the ad industry itself says it holds: rather than manipulating people, ads could just inform people what the product is, what it does, and what its strengths (and, as long as I'm dreaming, weaknesses) are.
But the vast majority of ads do none of that. Instead, they engage in psychological manipulation.
I'd take issue with that. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... and look up some random brands you've heard of. The vast majority of ads are on the level. The ones that aren't are when the product itself is a scam most of the time.
I don't do Facebook, and have no clue what FB ads look like. I'm talking about advertising generally, online and off. I very rarely see ads that are like that.
Either advertising is so powerful as to rule the world, or it's so useless that nobody benefits from it. I 'd say , without adequate research on the effectiveness of advertising, these correlational studies are only marginally interesting.
The spending on advertizing likely has diminishing returns. The marginal decrease in satisfaction that would come from doubling the spending is possibly smaller than the baseline decrease caused by the initial expenditure.
There's nothing in their data to support this, and if the effect was there they would have seen it (since they have yearly happiness data). They describe a linear correlation.
They describe a linear correlation because they fitted linear correlation. All kinds of interesting effects could be hidden in the residuals, but they don't show them.
GDP measures activity involving money, but makes no distinction between useful, useless and harmful activity. the cost of cleaning up pollution is added to the GDP.
Not really, though -- it was empirical, and the fact that an estimate of the first halving does X doesn't imply that further halving will have the same effect, so a reductio doesn't work here.
I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.
Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products.
To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.
It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.
On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means.
Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' - an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.
To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads. Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore likely more cheaply.
The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential negative externalities might that have.
It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative ads per se, I think the more important difference for the majority of ads is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both advertiser and customer.
But they don't work. So many products and services are not useful. Simply not useful. On Twitter, I've started blocking every useless advertiser that decides to show me an ad... and I'm left with EXAAIR, who I'm sure is glad to target a computer software researcher with their compressed air-powered tools. There is simply too much advertising and too little space. How many advertisements, reasonably, can be sent to a person for things they legitimately want? Does that at all track with what they would see on the unfiltered web?
You're right, but that's a very customer centric viewpoint - from the point of view of the advertiser this is not so great.
This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you, when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area.
It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this service and not having to do the search yourself is a bonus, all things being equal (price and service level is in line with the local market etc).
> It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative.
I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the client (the client pays for being manipulated).
It is only ironic on a macro level. And, I think you extrapolated my thought out too far; I wasn't suggesting to never spend money. My concern is teaching two children how to manage their own consumption and to not spend money frivolously. We aren't at the point of asking 7 year olds to start businesses.
It is only ironic on a macro level.... that's true. At a micro level it's each to their own, look out for number 1.
But you did say "I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none."
The content of targeted advertising is usually way less spammy than untarged advertising. More or less
the only people who can make money on completely blind online ads are scammers (whiten your teeth! etc)
> I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.
Ok, what's your business? I'll gladly check it out! I'm open-minded, love new ideas, and admire integrity and good founding principles!
I should add, the related concept here besides 'consumer economy' which is kind of a fundamental of the US economic machine is 'velocity of money'. It's an intriguing economic concept for those unfamiliar. [1]
I'm party from a small town, my grandfather was notoriously thrifty (and a little wealthy) and he would never eat out. A dinner at the local diner would be a 'big thing' for him. Coffee shops and little such things are impossible to take hold in this small town because people are like this. They are not poor. Just thrifty. Which is fine ... but it means no secondary economy. The only thing that survives is the gas station / resto out by the highway for passers through.
The town is definitely large enough to accomodate 1 or 2 small places, but due to the culture, it's not going to happen.
It wasn't until later on in life (studying econ) did I realize the 'other side' of savings, and real value of money: When you buy something, you generally value it more than the money, ergo, you make a profit, we call this 'consumer surplus'. It increases the quality of your life by some nudge. Buying things that can improve your life, even if it's a coffee ... has many positive effects. Without consumption most of us would be out of jobs.
Capitalism is fueled by consumerism. Even if some choose not to play the game (by consuming and producing only the strictly necessary) it's in their interest that others keep playing it.
I spend no time managing expectations because my child isn’t exposed to advertising. There is no TV or social media in our household, and no ads thanks to multiple overlapping ad blocking solutions. There’s advertising outside, but it’s easy to ignore, and usually contains messages relating to things my daughter has no baseline for. For example, she doesn’t care about some billboard advertising a TV show because... you guessed it: there is no TV!
Popular culture in 2019 is worth opting out of. It brings no value, erodes humanity, and pollutes our minds. “And nothing of value was lost.”
I tried to think of a counterargument to this and drew an almost total blank. There have been some great works of art over say the last 20 years or so—"Breaking Bad," "The Sopranos," and the like—but it's almost completely trash. I can't name more than a half-dozen things I'd have missed if I had thrown out my television and deleted Facebook etc.
I've spent most of my self aware life so far online. I don't want to be one of those "phones are bad" people who are scared by technology they don't understand. But I'm starting to change my mind.
Recently while waiting to board a plane, I saw a kid browsing instagram. The speed at which they were consuming content actually shocked me. They were rapidfire scrolling through pages and pages of the same kind of junk that's been in tabloids for decades. ~5 pictures a second. For half an hour, almost non-stop. I'm not sure why, but it really stuck out as deeply unsettling to me. I can't imagine that being healthy.
Instead of letting the mind wander, it is trapped in a tight loop of looking at one picture after another. Like a book you can't put down, only you never finish it, and it's not at all compelling - just addictive.
This brings up an interesting topic for discussion. I think there are several modes of parenting: hands off, protective, preparatory, etc. I think most parents try to balance these. I've taken the view that for most situations I want to prepare my children for the world they will face given what I know today, be hands off to see how they react, and only protect them as a last resort. While, some kids simply aren't ready to handle the problems they face on a daily basis, mine seem to understand more than you'd think they would. I could see how removing these stimuli from the beginning might be a good idea when you know it is going to be a problem or you want to create a peaceful environment, but I'd really prefer them to make that choice, not I.
There is a balance to strike. Bringing up kids too far outside the norms that society sets can have all kinds of ramifications. Rather than shelter them, I'd prefer them to have things in common with their friends and teach them to make good choices for themselves given their own dispositions and circumstance.
I'd like to add that advertising is also economic pollution that goes against free competition.
The theory behind free markets requires that voters are more or less rational and well informed. That they will never spend more on an inferior product. Advertisement distorts that.
I suspect that banning advertisement altogether would make the economy gain a lot in terms of market efficiency. Can you imagine a world where pricing and quality would be highly correlated? A world where information on a product would be, if not correct, at least made in good faith?
I'd love to see an efficient market too, but banning advertising won't accomplish that, it'll just shift the burden of discovery elsewhere, like review aggregators, and information there is already questionably reliable.
In practice, I think the problem that creates advertising is that humans have limited bandwidth for ingesting information in general, so we have tons of tools to compile more information into less information, such as news, books, statistics, reviews, etc. (For example, how many people really entirely understand their health insurance plans? It's not for lack of trying.) Advertising is sort of an arbitrage of that communication bandwidth based on the fact that some actors (companies) really want you to see their information more badly than others.
That problem doesn't go away just because you ban advertising, it just moves the arbitrage opportunity elsewhere.
I don't know if you can ever fix that. Here's a complaint about someone being cheated on a sale, 4000 years ago (1). Probably long before the ad men appeared, but people have always been looking for their angle.
> Mises in Human Action (p. 19) writes "Human action is necessarily always rational. The term 'rational action' is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man."
> The rational being practicing rational-expectations theory only makes behavioral economists laugh. And the neoclassical construct of equilibrium prices requires assumptions that only tenured professors who don't get out much could believe, like perfect competition, perfect information, and perfect rationality.
Quite. If (which is now for obvious reasons somewhat unlikely) our global civilisation manque struggles on for another century, it will look back on the overconsumption propaganda industry very much like we now see slavery. Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.
That's a nice thing to say, thank you. I'm off to an Extinction Rebellion meet up this afternoon, where this kind of perspective is less alien than in the tech sector. They've had to book a bigger venue than originally planned because of a deluge of local interest. I have no great hopes, but there are stirrings.
> Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.
Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.
I understand that, and agree from a conventional point of view the comment does look nutty.
However the notion that the current so-called 'growth' oriented global order threatens the very fabric of our living planet, while not yet quite mainstream in corporate media, is gaining currency fast. It's well inside the fringe in academia and on the streets.
And the notion that marketing's most fundamental aim is to create desires for more consumption (hence more fake 'growth' aka ecosystem destruction) isn't a conspiracy theory (contra your 'Truther' jibe). It's quite open: philosophically-inclined marketers have understood this for a long time. They even used the term 'consumer engineering' in the early 20th C.
Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered?
- Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary.
- Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption.
- Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't.
Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".)
The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.
> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture.
> The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics.
I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available.
The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.
A game indeed. Our investments only grow as a direct exploit of the very “pollution” we try to avoid. As debt increases exponentially, so must consumption to cover it. So we shield ourselves and invest—because the game has winners, and it has losers.
People would still spend money and companies still grow even if you banned advertising. I still quite like having housing, good food, travel and so on even if I haven't seen adverts for those recently.
Marketers have always been clear that their task is to manufacture desire. Beyond the basics of food, sex, basic security, etc, wants are cultural constructions. Of course you want what you want. You did not make yourself. Your culture has that job.
If we had had a century of relentless propaganda installing onto young brains stereotypes of the glories of a clear night sky, or clean healthy rivers (instead of trivial comforts & consumer gewgaws), do you think people would still 'want' the things that destroy our natural rights to experience those things quite as much as they do?
Yes, because most of the things we want we want because of biological desire. Clean rivers and clear skies are nice for a brief moment, but they can't compete with the dopamine release of sugar and sex.
I'm reading Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda [0]. Bernays was an advertising and public-relations guy who wanted to rehabilitate the term "propaganda" and rid it of its negative connotations.
Ultimately, advertising, public relations and propaganda are about agitating and motivating people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do, and Bernays believes it's all for the benefit of the public.
Crucially, Bernays argues that it's not so much about the ad you see, it's about the social cues that have been engineered into your family, education, employment and political system that predispose how you consume.
Turning off the TV and Instagram are good starts, but I wonder what media you and your children consume that is immune to the methods of Bernays and those who followed him.
If everyone just "keeps their money" the amount of cash changing hands would be much reduced which has a big negative impact on the US market (for better or worse). It's why everyone's monitoring "consumer confidence index".
I moved to the US from a society where for almost any service or product, if there was a realistic option for the consumer to do their own thing and avoid spending money they would most definitely do so (even if that meant doing a worse job, wasting a lot of time on it). In the US I was surprised by the opposite attitude, if one affords to pay some money to avoid putting in the work they'll do it (and many times even when they don't have the cash for it and have to get credit). There are advantages and disadvantages for both approaches I don't think it's a clear win.
> I moved to the US from a society where for almost any service or product, if there was a realistic option for the consumer to do their own thing and avoid spending money they would most definitely do so
I'm in the US, and this is the predominant attitude amongst my friends and family -- so it's not unheard of here.
and it doesn't have to be but i do agree. jingles were a form of advertising and were kind of fun and had the phycological effect of getting stuck in your head. there were/are also quite entertaining commercials but still give visibility to their products tv and streaming. perhaps its the medium. of course we still have the equivalents to a infomercial on the internet though.
So, here's a paper that explicitly discusses "Keeping up with the Joneses" and Veblen's conspicuous consumption and all, and that claims to show that more advertisement leads to less satisfaction.
You can't really just walk in and say "Well, no, guys, listen, let me tell you how it really is" and just dismiss the whole basic notion of the paper without giving sources.
I'm on mobile, but https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... is a great place to start. It summarizes hundreds of academic sources and includes them in the footnote. Certainly better research than the main study we're discussing, for reasons I've commented on elsewhere in this thread.
Thanks. I haven't read that book, but I think it is fair to say that the advertisement business has changed a lot between 1986 (when that book was published), and now.
EDIT to add: The blurb says that the author "finds much lacking in the business's importance and effectiveness and much that is problematic in advertising's social impact." (my emphasis).
To tell a story. The specific brands paid to be there, but the idea of the glamorous item is always there. This is consistent with extensive literature showing marketing can switch brand preference but is very bad at getting people to change their mind about product categories as a whole (like smoking or drinking) they've already heard of.
Then don't talk about advertising but talk about the big brother, public relations - the inventor of which played an important role in positioning smoking as a pleasant and desirable activity.
Actually, the "inventor" of public relations, Edward Bernays, illustrates my point really well. He claimed credit for getting women to smoke with his PR stunts. The data shows that the trend of women smoking started years before he did anything, and the trendline was completely unaffected when he did his stuff. He, at best, got people already smoking to switch to the brand of cigarettes he promoted.
I feel like the data might not be a slam dunk for your case at all. Bernays started his "Torches of Freedom" PR campaign in 1929. The rate of women smoking actually dropped dramatically soon after thanks to the Great Depression.
Once the Depression was over, the trend line does not appear to be unaffected, though the reasons it trended as it did aren't simple to attribute. Cigarette companies were already advertising to women before Bernays' PR campaign, but they increased their advertising afterwards as a response to it.
Our disagreement shows the issue with correlation studies. People will interpret them to say whatever conclusion they wanted, reducing the scientific value to nil.
If the OP study found the opposite, it wouldn't have made it to the top of HN, and if it did, every comment would mock it for using correlation and would be pointing out other explanations.
One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts.
I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web.
So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work).
I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.
Plenty of people are probably chomping at the bit to get AR ads rolling . I can't wait for the youtube ads to pause and wait for my eyes to re center on them before they continue.
I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused.
Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about
Does Wikipedia count as a big content website? n=1 and all that, but I think it's a decent example of how things that are actually useful do just fine[1] without ads.
This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist. The 20xx equivalent of checkout aisle gossip mags going quietly into that good night is a feature, not a bug.
Beyond that, think about how many of the ills of the modern internet can be traced back to advertising profit motive. Shitty clickbait journalism? Yep. Engagement-optimized filter bubbles and radicalization machines? Check. Fake news (of the traditional definition)? Practically the poster child. Indiscriminate data collection? Of course. I admit that I'm far from a typical internet user, but from my point of view the death of ad-supported services is an unalloyed good.
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[1] Much of the funding from Wikipedia drives goes to other efforts of the foundation. The frequency and tone of drives might imply some precariousness, but taken alone Wikipedia is fairly firmly in the green.
> This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist.
That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination. This stance seems pretty closely similar in effect to "The only things that should exist are the interests of the rich."
I agree there are a lot of societal illnesses (even beyond those mentioned in the OP) that trace back to ad-supported websites, but ads have been the main reason information has been available to average people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century. I think if we want to replace them, we need to be thoughtful about how to do better.
> That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination.
I guess if you're feeling optimistic an argument could be made that the public broadcasting services of various nations provide a counterexample, although their political independence/status as maybe-not-propoganda is frequently contentious. The emergence of various low-budget OSINT-type outfits like Bellingcat is another indication that the future of investigative reporting doesn't necessarily have to exist within the current framework of media as ad-driven profit engine. Mass connectivity cuts both ways: obtaining and synthesizing relevant info is a lot easier when you can go pull videos of war crimes off of Twitter instead of shipping out an expensive war correspondent. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of thing will ever be a complete replacement for old-fashioned professional journalism.
> ads have been the main reason information has been available to average people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century.
One significant difference between then and now is that the cost of distribution of information is approaching zero. In the 20th century, much of what your newspaper's ads were funding was the physical newspaper itself. Broadcasting equipment was prohibitively expensive and you had to go through the FCC (and hope you were one of the ~epsilon sanctioned outlets) to not get shut down. Today, any CDN will happily sell you the bandwidth for millions of page views for a song. This definitely doesn't mean that good journalism is free to produce, but there's a lot of overhead that was being supported by the ad model that doesn't necessarily apply these days.
I agree that some form of revenue replacement is in order, but I hope that these and similar considerations mean that the gap that needs filling is smaller than a naive "well, ads made this much in FY 2018, better spin up micropayments for 100% of that" analysis would suggest.
To be fair the clickbait is a matter of incentives and essentially also exists in pure cash transactions and has existed since newsprint - they were called eyecatching headlines and yellow journalism.
How many are necessary, or even desirable, and not a net drain on human happiness by optimizing for endless engagement? I don't like the direction in which the ad-supported model is pushing content.
Internet pre-advertising had plenty of useful and interesting sites. And Wikipedia is ad-free as well. And without the competition of zero-cost ad-supported commercial sites, other business models would rise to take their place.
What I find odd about this is that there does exist at least one perfectly fine micropayment system. It's running in my laundromat (the company is Heartland Micropayments), where I can use my credit/debit or laundry payment card. When I wash and dry three loads of laundry, I don't get 6 charges on my card. I get one.
It seems like it wouldn't be a huge amount of work to bring this to the internet, particularly since it's using the internet for its communication in the first place.
Batching small payments is not the hard part of creating a payment system that can support the entire Web. Harder parts include problems like UX (e.g. balancing the need to make a system people will want to use against the danger of users unknowingly running up a huge bill), getting buy-in from websites (why should they use your service in particular?), and just convincing people to sign up for yet another godforsaken account on the Internet.
There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.
Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.
That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.
The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value.
It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)
i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff).
but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it.
the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products).
in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.
> Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising?
Well, in North Korea the only billboards I saw were of Kim Il-Song and Kim Jong-Il. The two restaurants in the hotel for foreigners on the island in the middle of Pyongyang were imaginatively called "Restaurant 1" and "Restaurant 2". So, not too much marketing there.
I do hope that there is some more sensible middle ground.
I could not agree more. I have gone out of my way to teach my children that advertising is lies. Literally. That's what I told them, and demonstrated to them.
I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript in browsers I control, plus my own DNS-based advertising domain blocklist.
well there's lots. in my country (Aus), there's regulations on tobacco, alcohol, gambling: each of varied levels of deliberate and actual effectiveness.
A lot of places limit billboards.
And then there's even cultural aspects: Melbourne culture says that the level of a places' 'coolness' is inversely related to its amount of external signage...
When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by children.
This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper.
That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.
There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.
Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.
That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.
this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service.
in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base.
In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising.
while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.
Hah, perhaps I was not clear enough in my original comment because I agree with everything you wrote after the first paragraph.
I strongly agree with this sentence: "in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base."
That is 100% accurate. However, that doesn't mean that ads do not affect the price of goods and services.
Businesses are always looking to find the sweet spot to maximize profits by pulling on different levers. These levers could represent price increases, advertising, lowering production costs, etc. Businesses will always be looking for the most efficient lever to pull. And I guarantee you that if you somehow figure out how to take the advertising lever away, they will pull a different lever. This could result in a higher price, a lower quality product, or something else, but ultimately something has to give.
This explains why advertising is likely to encroach on all platforms, because as users become more accustomed to it there is a higher likelihood that it is the most efficient lever to pull.
And of course I agree that it is generally not the case that you could pay 5% more to be rid of ads. The Hulu example was just a good illustration of how to think about the relative value of advertising to Hulu / the consumer.
That is, the services don't become cheaper in total, but their cost structure changes. A part of voluntary paying is replaced by a part of involuntary seeing, and the feeling that you are letting go some valuables is blunted.
> What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper.
There’s a reason services refuse to offer paid plans: people would realize how much the functionality of these services are destroyed in service of showing ads—you can see a tiny fraction of this reaction with the hulu anecdote. It’s also at the core of our “screen addiction”: imagine the savings in mental health care alone if ads disappeared....
Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue.
Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don’t smoke
I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung here.
"Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."
Imagine having a person constantly walking too-close next to you, picking just the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before every little thing you try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for everything! It isn’t exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for pretty much everyone.
my kids only watch netflix and shows/movies we buy on iTunes
so basically they see virtually no ads, SO unlike my experience growing up watching network TV where every 12 minutes there was a series of 5 or 6 30-second ads
Hell, I watched GI Joe, Transformers, and He-Man when I was a kid. That's basically 22 minutes of advertising with 8 minutes of breaks for more advertising.
That really seems to be stretching 'advertising' beyond its definition to me. That seems like even less of 'advertising' than looking at a menu and trying to decide what to order, given that you've already paid for the service (for now, at least).
assuming he's like me (ad blockers, limited tv, etc), I have a Netflix account, and I don't even honestly know what 'Netflix ranking' is.
Assumimg it is something like Netflix's recommendation service, well, this might come back to an difference in philosophy: I don't need/want to be recommended shows to watch, and I don't use recommender/suggestions.
One does not have a need/desire to consume media as an abstract concept, so the idea that one has a problem of "I want to watch something but i don't know what" is a literal nonsensical statement/problem.
How do you become aware of new shows you would be interested in?
For me this is one of the benefits of Netflix's recommendation service. While I feel like the quality of the recommendations has gone down over the years, it still has value. I tend to watch 1-2 shows at a time until I have watched the entirely of them. When I finish one I want to find another to watch, but don't always know what I want to watch next. So for me "I want to watch something but i don't know what" is the exact problem I have on a regular basis.
well, presumably the same method I use to figure out how to read books I haven't read yet, listen to music when I don't have a radio: organically or through picking some out from good reviews or subject matter sharing/experts.
An actual benefit to this in my eyes is that marketing and fads tend to have short attention spans, so if you're interested in quality as opposed to 'riding the social wave', most fads won't hold their quality/appeal after a few years.
And besides, we're so overwhelmed with media, the desire to 'get more' is about the definition of an anti- problem... we actually need to find ways to consume less...
But if you already pay for Neflix's service and this is just another part of it. Advertising is supposed to sell, or upsell a product, which isn't what the ranking system does.
Well if we're really stretching the logic, watching something is what signals Netflix Corporate to keep it on the service, thus you are _technically_ funding that specific piece of content.
Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative? If I open someone's fridge, I don't see a bunch of stuff with the labels conveniently turned backwards or removed, I see Coca-Cola and Sunny-D and Hellman's Mayo and Heinz ketchup. If I walk through a college classroom I don't see a bunch of laptops with featureless lids, I see Apple logos and Dell logos and HP logos. If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos.
Is it really detracting from a movie to have a bottle of Pepsi sitting on the table at dinner while they're eating their Pizza Hut pizza? Isn't that how the real world actually exists?
Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway?
> Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative?
If a product placement can't be justified on plot or characterization grounds, then I find it an obnoxious distraction and a sign of spinelessness on the part of the director and editors.
> If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos.
Do it really matter what kind of car James Bond drives? Not really. All that matters is that it's something only rich pigs can afford and was customized by Q with all kinds of non-standard and outrageously illegal features, like artfully concealed machine guns.
> Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway?
If I want reality, I know where to find it. If I go to the movies, it's to get a reprieve from reality. I'm paying good money for the convenience of a ready-made waking dream, and the presence of gratuitous product placement cheapens the fantasy.
If product placement doesn't bother you, that's fine. It annoys the fuck out of me, so I prefer to read novels or play video games when I want to relax.
(Besides, the prevalence of CG makes most mass-market movies nothing but defective video games anyway. Who needs MCU when you can watch a let's play of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Libertines?)
I think there's (at least) another factor not investigated here - advertising as a stress inducing, unnecessary noise in life.
People are trying to bombard you, through every possible avenue, with advertising. They want your eyes and your mind and they won't waste a second or a flat surface when trying to get at them.
Advertising is inherently predatory. I'm well aware of the arguments like "we're providing customers with useful information about things they might like to buy," but that's a lie. It's using propaganda and persuasion techniques that were discovered in the early 20th century and have been increasingly perfected. And that's just the first order effect. The higher order effects of advertising are even more pernicious. Advertising has destroyed far more lives than guns ever have. That's not hyperbole, the opioid epidemic is the result of predatory advertising and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma.
> Michel C, M Sovinsky, E Proto, A J Oswald (forthcoming), "Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One Million Europeans", to be published in 2019 in a volume in honor of Richard Easterlin.
Real luxury is being able to pay for the content you want, to watch how and when you want, without subsidizing the experience with attention-sucking ads. I refuse to hook up our cable box for this reason.
Big Advertising is a root cause not only for mass mental dissatisfaction, but also mass health epidemics (i.e. obesity in the US), and ecological destruction/climate change.
Advertising is a cancer on our society. Every time you see an ad, make an effort to to make that impression net-negative ROI. Tweet about how the brand causes horrible health problems, makes customers look like idiots, has disgusting business practices etc. Who care's if it's true, most ads (or tweets for that matter) are not either!
I remember developing an App. And then we have talked about, how can we be seen. And then all my grudges on advertising disappeared. Thank god, that it exists.
I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues.
If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.
There is a documentary from BBC about the history of philosophy of happiness that was on YouTube, in the documentary it is mentioned that the Greek Philosphers had discussed advertising as lowering our happiness in order to replace the hole with their product. I think it was epicurus but I am not certain. the narrator is Alain de Botton
Our economy is dependent on advertising so that revenue increases every quarter. Any curtailing of advertising would also have a impact on revenue and then result in job loses. We need to arrive at solutions that is able to reduce such impact on individuals and families.
I've wondered if the reason governments haven't passed legislation taxing or otherwise outlawing advertising is that they rely on advertising companies to get elected (election advertising)
It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this finding still hold true?
I read over the page twice, and didn’t see an actual study linked. Does someone have a link to the PDF? And was this actually published in a peer reviewed journal?
I've asked academic economists about this, albeit indirectly. I've asked if any studies of the effect of advertising have ever been made, if they've been replicated, etc etc. I tried to vary phrasing, and use the jargon.
I got a lot of "I don't know" and variants. It seems difficult to google up references, because the key words are common words.
As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a good group of friends improves your health so much as you grow older.
Admiteddly we were sitting in a restaurant, where the food and drink cost money.
Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."
Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect on life satisfaction?
I suspect the root of the problem is with the way we view our economy. Instead of measuring happiness we use e.g. GDP as a metric, but I wouldn't be surprised if a high GDP correlates with and causes unhappiness and on top of that it certainly also negatively impacts the environment.
Also, capitalism/the free market seems like a very unfair system (no need to provide examples I hope), and unfairness is also a known cause of unhappiness.
But meanwhile, instead of addressing these problems, our brightest minds are trying to make people click more ads ...
Well there are some people trying to measure happiness now eg https://worldhappiness.report/ and there seems a trend in that direction, may it continue.
Ironically, advertising your position against advertising is also a form of advertising. I dont think it's right to view advertising as inherently unethical. Communication and signaling are parts of human nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
From the video description -
"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."