Advertising is not a 'foreign exchange for attention currency' (metaphor used by author).
On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies.
But that isn't the real problem - the real problem with advertising is that it works.
Why is that a problem ?
Because advertising is manufactured demand.
Last time I looked at the 'Law of Supply and Demand' on Wikipedia some time ago, the word 'advertising' appeared 0 times in there. I've just checked, the word is there 1 time as the 6th item in a list. I think it deserves way more attention (pun intended) in the economic theory.
Just look at that simple chart. A positive shift in demand results in an increase in price and quantity sold of the product.
In other words, you can make people consume considerably more stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.
Given that 'stuff' are nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard, the result of this macroeconomic ideology - destruction of nature and change of climate in half a century.
We all know the names of the big tech companies who are exceedingly efficient at pushing up the global demand curve.
I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things?
Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all have that would exist completely independently of any kind of outside influence, and that advertising is bad because it tricks us into addressing other manufactured desires instead of our real, true desires. And that there's something wrong with addressing a manufactured desire instead of a "true" desire? Like, when you address a manufactured desire you don't actually feel the joy/fulfillment you would from fulfilling a "true" desire?
I don't think that's right. I don't think we really have true, "pure" desires. Almost all of our desires are a result of social influence in one way or another. And even to the extent that some desires are less a product of influence than others, I'm not sure satisfying those desires is necessarily better. I've bought things after I saw an ad about them, and they're things I now genuinely enjoy. Why does it matter if that enjoyment is a result of the ad or would have existed either way?
Maybe a much shorter way of saying this:
> In other words, you can make people consume considerably more stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.
Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want?
I share the gut sentiment that it feels wrong to be manipulated by ads, but I feel like there needs to be more to this argument. Though I think you can still think advertising is bad in an "arms race" kind of way (if everyone stopped doing it at once we'd possibly not really be any worse off and have all that time/money to spend elsewhere).
>philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong
Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own.
I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you don't agree with this argument so much as you think it demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with none being really any more better than any other. I do agree that you would have to believe something like that to defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen to think that's absurd.
Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we really do need certain things: safety, security, to be understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a highway do more to reflect human nature than something like Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough argument to make.
I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!) captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality itself.
Lets take the most basic form of advertising as an example. If I put a couch in my yard with a price tag on it, I'm wanting people to notice and desire to buy it, but there's no malicious intent. I have a thing I want to get rid of, maybe someone wants to buy it. If I don't do that, no one will know it's for sale.
So I do think advertising is fundamentally benign, and despite what the original comment said, is absolutely part of supply and demand. People are supposed to generate supply and then sit around waiting for people to come see it?
Of course there's lots of bad stuff going on in advertising. Lies, inducing FOMO, unnecessary gathering of personal data, etc. But I'm not convinced that advertising is morally wrong in it's purest form.
Can we perhaps draw a distinction between "selling" and "advertising"?
"Selling" is simply informing people of the availability of one half of an economic exchange. Putting a notice up that says "Sofa, $50 ONO" is no different than putting a notice up saying "will pay 50$ for sofa".
"Advertising", on the other hand, attempts to persuade. It endeavours to use psychology to create a transaction when one would otherwise not have taken place. It's a sign that says "Sofa, $50. Incredible value!!". This is not ethical because if we assume that the market would have converged on the correct price in the absence of advertising, then advertising distorts the market and makes it less efficient.
Note that unadorned "buying" and "selling" are mirror counterparts, but there's no buyer's counterpart to "advertising". This is because the value of money is well known and non-negotiable, while the value of the good or service is subject to influence. This is an inherent bias that always works in favor of the selling party.
I don't think this argument works. The acceptable price for a good is not actually clear cut. "True" market value is an equilibrium price between supply and demand. Both the supply and the demand will fluctuate and change over time, with many underlying factors influencing the aggregate number. The acceptable price is also different for different buyers, and in different regions. Advertising is just one of the factors that may affect demand alongside many others.
Additionally, you can argue there are many buyer's counterparts to advertising. At its most simple, the buyer has many tools to find items they want, i.e. search engines, etc. Additionally the buyer in many cases can inform the seller of an offer (generally below their desired pricing) and the seller can choose to accept or not. In some marketplaces, the buyer can effectively put out a request-to-buy, e.g. an open offer that many potential sellers can see and one may choose to fulfill.
The buyer often may not know a product even exists that would fill his need.
For example, my car's cooling system was leaking. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out where it was leaking.
It turns out there's a perfect product for it - a device that pumps air into the radiator. You spray some soapy water around, and where it bubbles is where the leak is.
So in 5 minutes I could have found the leak, rather than wasting a great deal of time because I did not know such a tool existed.
That's not a point in favor of advertising, it's a point for the lack of general education around maintenance or mechanical devices among the population. Using pressurized air and soapy water to find leaks in things is a well known technique among those who regularly have to find leaks in things.
I'm sure there was a point in the past where something like this would have been taught in school in a classroom that had all kinds of tools and machinery in it.
I think that's hanging onto the example the OP gave a little too closely.
I found out about the company I've bought several sets of sheets from because they were a podcast sponsor, I happened to need sheets, and I liked their designs more than other ones I was seeing at comparable prices. If I hadn't heard that ad, would I have still found sheets I liked? Maybe! But is that really a convincing moral argument against those ads?
That’s the thing, there’s no line between what’s an ad and what’s just informational. Somewhere between “Joe’s Sheet Emporium down on Main sells Egyptian cotton sheets” and psychologist-engineered gambling ads there’sa boundary that’s crossed, but I don’t know how you can quantify that, but I know the latter end of the spectrum is wrong. Unfortunately it’s kind of a matter of “I’ll know it when I see it”.
I'm thinking of the classified ads that used to be in the back of gaming magazines. There would be pages of small print only black and white listings of everything from miniatures to game supplements that you could purchase by mailing the given address. You had to go looking for them.
In the front of the Mag between the articles you would have full page colour ads, some with skimpily dressed women selling boxed games, computer games etc.
In some of the mags, some of the articles were reviews of products, some of these reviews were obviously promotions, very much trying to sell the product. Very few were critical of the product under review.
There is a continuum in advertising from simple "this product exists" to "Will change your life". Far to many of the adverts we see today tend to the targeted "change your life" category.
Add to that that many of the ads on the internet have there own tracking built in that allows your existence to become a product that is sold without your knowledge or consent and you have a situation that has a bunch of moral questions to answer.
>if we assume that the market would have converged on the correct price in the absence of advertising
>the value of money is well known and non-negotiable
I wouldn't start with these assumptions since prices fluctuate on their own for somewhat unpredictable reasons. Just because advertising is immoral in some ideal world, doesn't mean it's immoral in a real one.
The immorality is whether the product/service is any good.
Perversely, the more expensive a product the more perceived quality a product has, its perhaps why German cars are so popular. People like to show off their wealth which is what makes designer brands popular.
There is little point advertising monopoly products like fuel though, any advert is just going to be brand awareness maintenance in those situations, which also helps to keep the media/newspapers onboard for PR reasons to keep the bad press at bay!
The reciprocal to advertising is education. Not like professional training, but general citizenry that develops self-awareness and critical thinking skills.
This is relying on the assumption that it's unethical to distort the market, which I don't think is a given. Unless you're an anarco-capitalist, and I'm pretty sure they're cool with advertising.
Advertising is informing people that you've got a solution to their needs. The most effective salesmen are people who figure out what the customer needs and provides it to them.
Yes of course. I just have to find out they lied after I do all the recommending.
If what you were saying were true, then it would not be economically profitable to lie to customers. However we see that lying to customers is more or less rife. Therefore we must conclude that it is profitable to do so.
The guy who taught my accounting class was a former used car salesman. We were talking once, and I asked him how to tell an honest dealership from a scam one. He said it's easy, the honest ones have been in business for more than 5 years. In 5 years, one runs out of suckers, and goes bust. An honest dealership makes bank by selling again and again to the same people.
These days, with Yelp and such, it's even harder to get by by defrauding your customers.
I like to look at this through the lens of push vs pull.
I don't want people pushing things at me that I'm 100% uninterested in in the off chance that 1% of those ads is actually interesting to me and I otherwise wouldn't know it exists. I do want to be able to search a database of vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with objective descriptions of available goods and services at known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking for something that's completely new, I should still be able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance, labor chain, etc.)
So, no, I do think someone using their front yard to sell a couch is bad provided we have the internet and a good marketplace built on top of it. Who wants to see human junk covering nature solely so it can impinge on others' field-of-view in order to be sold? I don't think it's bad for them to register the availability of said couch in the hypothetical regulated marketplace.
And, for those who consent, they can ask to have relevant categories of ads pushed at them. But leave people like me out of it. No such consent can be obtained when you just e.g. put it on a billboard.
Yes, I know what I'm saying is probably naive and would never work, or something, or that's where governance is supposed to come in, but it's a nice dream.
>I do want to be able to search a database of vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with objective descriptions of available goods and services at known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking for something that's completely new, I should still be able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance, labor chain, etc.)
Exactly this. It's not necessarily wrong that advertising is justified on the grounds that it serves the interests of advertisers. But the attempt to justify it as beneficial to the consumer, well, every case where advertising is serving such a pro-consumer purpose is a case where a general purpose information directory would serve that same purpose better.
It's not convincing if you look at it through the lense of a one-off cartesian hypothetical. But that is not a systematic understanding of what advertising is that makes clear the underlying interests and incentives that drive the process.
It's a process that by its nature perpetually transforming in the never ending race to compete for your attention, and the "bad stuff" is a reflection of the interests and incentives essential to the nature of what advertising is.
The anti-advertising stance taken to reasonable conclusion is indeed absurd. You couldn't even mention your sofa to a friend without risk of "inciting" unnatural demand in them for a sofa.
And you couldn't even allow third party mentions either as are fundamentally indistinguishable in terms of effects on artificial demands.
But hope isn't lost. A natural limit on advertising is completely eliminating surveillance capitalism. Even the kind enable by credit cards selling your purchase history. Or stores issuing loyalty cards.
> whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own.
It sounds like you're saying something like: "advertisers have their own desires that are different than ours, and so it's more likely that they'll get us to desire things that are bad for us"
This I think is a fair point. It's not especially unique to advertising as opposed to other forms of influence, though maybe it's most pronounced in advertising. Nonetheless, even if it applies to all forms of influence, it's a fair argument for why influence is categorically at least risky of being bad for us.
I think you're right of course that primal needs like Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we create with advertising or other kinds of social influence. But I don't think that's what we're really talking about. I think it's more stuff like "I would have wanted to cook tonight but instead I saw a Dominos ad and so now I'm eating Dominos. This is a false desire!" Why? What makes the desire false just because it was created by an ad? You could have a genuine desire for Domino's created by the ad that you've now satisfied and feel good about.
To the extent that ads distract us from pursuing more basic human needs and cause us to be more consumerist, fair. I think that's a broader, different point about the nature of consumption period.
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I don't think I'm making an argument for moral relativism here at all? I don't think I'd consider myself a moral relativist.
>It sounds like you're saying something like: "advertisers have their own desires that are different than ours, and so it's more likely that they'll get us to desire things that are bad for us"
It is a rare but very satisfying experience to see yourself quoted and feel like you're being interpreted correctly. Yes, you are right, I'm saying that, more or less.
>I think you're right of course that primal needs like Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we create with advertising [...] But I don't think that's what we're really talking about.
I take something like Maslow to be comprehensive, and so always implicated. I think your dominos example serves to suggest that there are cases that are mundane, harmless, or where nothing is at stake.
I think so far as something like that is concerned, I think that's true and those things happen. However, I think (1) even seemingly benign examples really do have important issues at stake. I think American consumers have trouble budgeting and a huge input into that is innocent-seeming habit of ordering out, which, over time, ads up in significant ways. Also (2) while we can contemplate one-off examples, I think the primary frame of reference should be a big picture, systematic look at the incentives. The system writ large serves interests of advertisers, not consumers, and the legitimacy of that lives or dies with systematic arguments about the incentives.
>I don't think I'm making an argument for moral relativism here at all?
I think the idea that our preferences are transient, that none are really more right than any other, and that therefore there's nothing really at stake in letting your interests be swapped out for different interests, is what I regard as moral relativism. You have to believe there's some underlying truth at stake and real interests being defended to make a case against ads.
> I think the idea that our preferences are transient, that none are really more right than any other, and that therefore there's nothing really at stake in letting your interests be swapped out for different interests, is what I regard as moral relativism.
I don't really see this as moral relativism at all? It's maybe a kind of psychological relativism, a la nature vs. nurture. And there, yes, I'm definitely skeptical of the idea that we have "true" underlying desires/preferences/values as opposed to "false"/influenced ones.
This is (maybe a bit ironically) sort of inline with Buddhist views of self. Though I don't think you have to go as far as saying that the self is an _illusion_ to at least acknowledge that the self isn't immutable.
That said I'm _not_ claiming that any desire is as good as any other. There are certainly desires that are worse to have (smoking, murder) than others.
>I don't really see this as moral relativism at all? It's maybe a kind of psychological relativism, a la nature vs. nurture
These things all overlap, depending on what you are trying to emphasize. So it can be both. If you say it's psychological relativism, nature vs. nurture, whatever else I think there are senses in which those can all be true.
I think a pattern I'm seeing here, though, is to say that whatever is at stake in questions of advertising, surely it isn't moral. But morality isn't just trolley problems, it's everyday choices too. It's getting people to eat Dominos, getting people to smoke, getting people to accept credit cards with low introductory rates, it's getting people to pay more for Medicare advantage plans.
>This is (maybe a bit ironically) sort of inline with Buddhist views of self. Though I don't think you have to go as far as saying that the self is an _illusion_ to at least acknowledge that the self isn't immutable.
I think that's very commendable and good!
>And there, yes, I'm definitely skeptical of the idea that we have "true" underlying desires/preferences/values as opposed to "false"/influenced ones.
But you're also claiming there are definitely desires that are worse to have than others? And smoking (which is advertised!) is an example.
> whatever is at stake in questions of advertising, surely it isn't moral
Wait what? No, of course it is, almost everything effects morality in some way.
> But you're also claiming there are definitely desires that are worse to have than others?
Yes? I'm not seeing the contradiction. Whether a desire is bad or not is unrelated to whether it's a "true" desire (or whether the idea of true desires makes any sense at all).
Dumb on-the-spot analogy: there's a bunch of silver metallic balls rolling down different tubes, the tubes are painted so as they roll the balls get colored different colors. Further down, the balls all get merged and then a robot destroys any red balls, and sorts blue balls into one box and green balls into another.
Being red is clearly worse for the balls (smoking is clearly bad for you, moral absolutism). But the balls didn't start out red, green, or blue, their environment molded them. If a blue ball gets painted green at some point in the future, it doesn't make sense to say that the ball is _really_ blue: the ball was metallic, all of its color was painted on one way or the other.
Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making the fulfillment problem worse?
This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.
There could be an argument made that we face challenges for fulfillment from the inside out. Therefore objecting to one external force misses the forest for one tree.
>Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making the fulfillment problem worse?
Yes.
>This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.
It doesn't assume that. It just assumes we're influenced by everything else other than advertising.
>and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way.
This however assumes that advertisers are beneficial correctives rather than accelerants of adverse behaviors.
Rather than building an encyclopedia where every positive and negative case is examined, I'm suggesting that you zoom out and think about the underlying incentives in a systematic way. Advertising is in the interest of the advertisers, not the consumers. You don't have to assume that consumers never make mistakes in seeking their own fulfillment.
Everything we do involves being influenced by the interests of others. I'm curious what makes advertising A) special B) necessarily negative.
Advertising is bad therefore it's bad doesn't really prove anything. Is that what you are saying? A good business will provide for at least some interests of its customers, so it's not clear to me that advertising is negative.
Yeah, but in practice... the iPhone/Apple represents an example par excellence:
Planned obsolescence, dated features, software deprecation, false narrative (e.g. privacy).
The plan is to always provide that fulfillment until it is time for you to renew your subscription. Then the fulfillment reward is attached to a new product and the consumer must acquiesce.
Consumerism is this forest. Stepping any deeper into the waters, keep this outdoorsy pun rolling, is an arbitrary excersize. "What does it mean to 'be'?" Abstraction does not undo the real harm caused by corporations.
> iPhone/Apple represents an example par excellence: Planned obsolescence, dated features, software deprecation, false narrative
I feel like people say this and then don't provide any decent examples. iPhones hold value and are usable much longer than most Androids thanks to Apple's willingness to support the devices.
HN loves to hate on Apple but I don't find these examples and arguments very compelling.
Really? How much? If you use your iPhone for two years, what would be the TCO?
> are usable much longer
Fairphone is supporting their devices for 5 years at a minimum. They promised 7 years for their latest model. And the Fairphone (who has the burden of promoting ethical manuafacturing, using only fair-sourced materials and fair pay to all their workers) still comes at less than half the price of the iPhone.
Or say that you don't care about ethics and you just want your devices to be as cheap as possible. You can buy "budget premium" Androids (Moto Gs, Nokia 6/7) that are very serviceable for less than €200. The Nokia I bought in end-2018 would still be in use today if I hadn't gone to /e/OS, so €180 bought 4 years of "phone". Economically speaking, there is no way that an Apple device can beat that.
One is a device made by a company with a minimal ethical standard, which is not willing to sacrifice those for profits.
The other is a trillion-dollar company that manages to convince billions of people world-wide that their products will make them smarter/more creative/just like the good guy on TV shows. This image and feel-good ads also gets them to convince people that is totally fine to pay hundreds/thousands of dollars to upgrade their devices while talking about "social good", "climate-conscious" and every fucking talking point of the "progressive/anti-capitalist" millenials. IOW, all the feel-good talk about issues gives them enough cover to get to exploit mass-scale consumerism.
I wonder how they do that? Perhaps it's this thing called "marketing"?
Yeah, you have missed the entire point and evidently context. You have been sold a narrative, which you choose to believe. There is evidence, some of which I have referenced, that you ignore. Nothing will be compelling for you because you have attached worth to the brand and by extension of possession, inhabit that worth. This was the intent of the brand marketing. We are taking about marketing
First, name one bank that is not willing to provide you service if you don't have a smartphone. Even if you do find it, ask yourself if this is the type of bank that you really want to work with.
Second, how was it that banks managed to operate for centuries and now there is the idea that people simply can not live without a mobile banking app?
Third, minority rule[0]: the best way to make sure that we can see apps being develop for other platforms (not just KaiOS, but Linux devices and even ungoogled AOSP-based systems) is for us to cultivate the intolerant minorities who simply will refuse to run iOS/Android.
> First, name one bank that is not willing to provide you service if you don't have a smartphone.
Monzo comes to mind. Also possibly Revolut and Starling.
> people simply can not live without a mobile banking app?
The idea isn't that I'm not capable of banking without an app. An app offers concrete advantages such as being able to view your current account balance in real time, and view the amount of recent transactions. This lets you keep a handle on spending, possibly help with making ends meet if you are a student living on their own, or in poverty. Sure you can do it by hand, but only the most dedicated did it because it's a significant effort.
> cultivate the intolerant minorities who simply will refuse to run iOS/Android.
Good luck with that. I tried the dumbphone lifestyle, but ultimately not running Android or iOS will cut you off from basic services like Uber or public transit navigation/timetables (unless you are lucky), group chats with family and friends, and basic conveniences like said mobile banking.
> Convenience is nice, but freedom is much better.
With all due respect, no. We all have a threshold where it's just not worth it. I am not Stallman and I am not willing to put up with this much pain (or to rope my family and friends into my crusade by demanding they accede to my idea of "mobile purity").
> An app offers concrete advantages such as being able to view your current account balance in real time, and view the amount of recent transactions.
Do you really need that? Did you ever get into a situation where you couldn't wait to see your bank statement? Couldn't you wait to get to an ATM or just get home to see in your computer?
How much of the things that are sold to us are really necessary? To get back to the topic: how much of the modern world is driven by manufactured demand?
> Sure you can do it by hand, but only the most dedicated did it because it's a significant effort.
False dichotomy. Plenty of budgeting/accounting software out there (free software, even) that you can use to connect to your bank account. They are just not made for mobile.
> basic services like Uber
Again, manufactured demand. There is nothing "basic" about Uber and we could go by in any big city without it before 2010.
> public transit navigation/timetables
There are free alternatives for Linux and ungoogled-android.
> group chats with family
Use Matrix, bridge it with whatever the others want to use.
> We all have a threshold where it's just not worth it.
Right. The problem is that you seem to be too quick to fold.
> Did you ever get into a situation where you couldn't wait to see your bank statement?
Yes. As I mentioned, students and people on the edge of poverty must keep a vigilant watch on their bank balance, lest they literally run out of money (or hit an overdraft, or an overdraft limit, and therefore have to pay banking charges) while shopping.
> how much of the modern world is driven by manufactured demand?
Rent is expensive, and rather essential.
> Plenty of budgeting/accounting software out there (free software, even) that you can use to connect to your bank account.
Majority of banks where I am don't expose an API. CSV exports don't cut it on GNUCash, and I tried it.
> There is nothing "basic" about Uber and we could go by in any big city without it before 2010.
Please realise that black cabs and taxis cost a fortune in some cities. An extensive public transit network doesn't help at all if you're stuck at the edge of a city, the transit network has already shut down because it's 2am, and you don't have any family or friends nearby to rescue you. This has happened more than once to me, and in the pre-Uber era, my only choices would be to eat the huge cost of a taxi or spend the night sleeping/waiting it out on a bench until things reopen.
> There are free alternatives for Linux and ungoogled-android.
You cannot assume that. Your city has this, it doesn't mean that mine does.
> The problem is that you seem to be too quick to fold
You think I'm too quick to fold, but have you considered that I spent over a decade trying to defend my privacy? That I gave up many, many things, to the extent that family and friends who don't share my beliefs would think I'm weird if they knew the full extent of what I've done? Having a pain tolerance makes me human, not weak. And it's already much higher than the average person's.
Sorry, still seems like a lot of your argument is just trying to rationalize your decision to not get out of Android/iOS - which was the whole point of the conversation.
- Even if a bank does not have a mobile app, they still have a website which you can then access from any phone with a web browser. It does not depend on an Android/iOS app.
- Even if your city does not have an alternative app like Magic Earth (doubtful) you can just use the Google Maps website.
No. Try a lightweight distro & just install Kodi or Plex for a media server. I have several old laptops (hp 17yrs, Toshiba 8yrs, Acer 11yrs) for that purpose
One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads. Companies know this, and often give users an option to pay extra for ad-free versions of their products. I can think of many premium products that where being ad free is a selling point; I can think of _any_ premium product where additional advertisements were a selling point, and the idea is probably laughable to people.
I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is true.
All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net negative for society.
Evidence for your position: people pay for newspapers and magazines, and pay more for newspapers and magazines without advertising; indeed, the newspapers and magazines with less or no advertising charge less.
Also evidence for your position: the Computer Shopper (US, not UK) eventually bulked up to 1000 pages per month, almost all of which were advertisements by computer companies -- PC builders, parts suppliers, manufacturers, and so forth. But what it did was act as a catalog for all those companies, because you couldn't find them on the web back then. You can track the page count decline against the advent of ubiquitous Internet.
I think it needs to be emphasised that advertising in one of the catalogue magazines and even the classified section of many specialist mags is very different to most of the advertising on the internet today.
Those ad's were informative for those who were looking to see what services or products were available. Little or no possibility of creating demand where it did not exist. Internet ads are almost universally designed not only to create demand for a product, but also to feed the fear of exclusion if the viewer does not have the product.
> One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads.
Not really, or actually people hate excessive in-your-face advertising which unfortunately is the dominant form now online, but at the same time the loss in paper-based and other "traditional" advertising has plateaued, even during these times. In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
It's not just online. For instance, Hulu's ad-free subscription cost is almost twice that of it's regular cost. This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service[1]. If you go to the SiriusXM radio site right now, you'll see that they advertise it being ad-free.
When people are paying extra to avoid something, it's a clear sign that they see it as detrimental.
> This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service.
And how many have actually bothered to? The problem is that you're treating it as a black-and-white thing which is not true at all. It is true that there's a percentage of people who do prefer advertising, 17% in current online advertising (which shows that majority hate online advertising) and 54% in traditional advertising (both are for the US only, data tend to fluctuate but in general this holds nearly everywhere but Asia where they tend to view advertising as more favourable).
There is, of course, a balance where the majority of people will be fine. For example, European television and radio stations do have limits on advertising: it definitely helped a lot that it allowed them to know what new services and products are available. Coincidently, they have strong consumer protection - lies in advertising are actively patrolled and most people do get angry when the advertisement is misleading. Unfortunately, the US - which tends to have low-quality, clickbaity commercials - never saw a better alternative, and concluded that all advertising is bad. I'm not surprised that there's a backlash against advertising - they indeed lost the trust in people. Unfortunately, the American model served as the global model online, so here we are.
We have premium subscriptions that show that people value no advertising. I haven't ever seen any premium subscription that shows anyone values advertising. Have you ever seen any subscription that says the user will get more advertisements if they pay more? I think most people would view the concept as ridiculous.
Hulu could have two premium options, one where you pay more for no advertising, and another where you pay more for extra ads. If what you are saying is true, every company is leaving money on the table by ignoring this demographic. I think it's more likely that this demographic doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
> I haven't ever seen any premium subscription that shows anyone values advertising.
So you haven't touched industrial magazines. Explains everything.
Pre-internet, the way that you can actually get information in a field is to have a publisher collect advertisements from related companies and send it to you. That's beyond "hate", it's the opposite: you are interested in any offerings but are not sure of who will you go to.
This was covered earlier in the thread. Print buyers in certain markets - mostly technical - appreciated the catalog model.
This does not mean they would pay more for advertising.
There were markets - specifically classifieds and listings - where buyers did very much want to pay for ads. But those were very specialised, and it's debatable whether a personal sales listing (dating notice, pet offer, etc) is in any way similar to a corporate ad.
Realistically, absolutely no one was going to pay for a version of Computer Shopper which had zero independent content and was just a giant ad directory.
Just as absolutely no one [1] will pay money to view a movie presentation made entirely of ads. Or watch a TV channel [2]. Or listen to a radio stream. Or view a web site.
[1] It's possible there are a few individuals who would do this, but clearly not enough to support a viable market.
[2] You might think Home Shopping Network, but HSN is free to air not pay to view.
Fortunately, now we do have the internet. And if I ever want or need something, I can research it myself on demand or ask my friends, rather than rely on advertisers wasting my valuable time and attention with their junk.
I'm talking about advertising in general, you specifically focused on online advertising - which I agree that it's so blatant and obnoxious.
> In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
I would further hypothesize that the number is broadly near 0 for any broadcast, propaganda-based advertising - TV, billboards, etc. I just don't have the ability to block those.
The kind of advertising people will readily tolerate is the kind you expose yourself to. E.g. Seeing a sign in a store window or a flyer for a show on a community bulletin board and going to look at it.
I enjoy seeing good ads between TV program, it's often entertaining and better then complete silence when you pause something to go grab something to eat or go to toilet or read some hacker news
There's indeed a tolerance point for most people for...pain. That doesn't make it desirable. Just the fact that you framed it with the world "tolerance" already implies a negative association.
> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things?
Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying.
But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways. If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha.
My main objection is advertising steals my attention without my consent and actively works against me in order to try and get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy, but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about ads which resonates with me:
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."
In th 80s and early 90s I subscribed to several computer magazines "Creative Computing", "Byte", "Compute", "Wired" and a few others. I also subscribed to gaming magazines like "Computer Gaming World", "Electronic Gaming Monthly", "Joystik", "Edge", "Game Developer Magazine". I and everyone else bought them in part for the ads. It was how we found out what new games and products where available.
I don't like ads spying on me and I don't like intrusive ads but ad in general are not evil to me.
Another example, I actually enjoy reading ads in public transportation. I'd find out about museums, festivals, and even various interesting services and products I didn't know about.
The advertising in the 80’s and 90’s often also served as a kind of catalogue because there was no other way to find things except word of mouth. That’s a solved problem with the modern internet, if you want to find a type of game, find a good community or similar to the magazines of before, follow a YouTuber or Twitter or whatever you like.
Yes, but not necessarily. I have ads turned on for The Register because they cater to a specific market segment, and also because I like to support the site.
The ads are pretty tightly focused on new technology companies, which I'm interested in. BizCoFoo with a new DB technology that turns stored procedures into pimento cheese sandwiches is not going to find a lot of traction on r/SQL except to generate a lot of noise from people who hate pimento cheese.
Ads aren't an "all this" or "all that" sort of thing. I'm not a fan of billboards, because I think they're ugly and hateful, but when I'm travelling in a place I'm not familiar with, it's handy to know that there's a BBQ joint in 17 miles, which may not be featured on Yelp or Foursquare or whatever.
Ads can be great if they directly inform you of something you want, need, or are interested in. The ad-tech companies, though, are terrible at doing this algorithmically; e.g., seeing ads for dishwashers everywhere right after you've bought a dishwasher. They're also terrible because the first instinct, when a Web site's ad revenue starts to falter, is to add even more ads from other networks to pump it back up.
One or two ads on a Web page is tolerable. Ads that show up every time you hit Page Down? Cancer.
Now you can find out what's available from the internet, on demand, when it suits you and not when it suits the advertisers.
There is so much choice now that you suffer from analysis paralysis unless you get recommendations on what to get, or know how to curate and ruthlessly filter down the firehose of choices down to a manageable trickle. Of course you don't need ads adding their 2¢ to that stream.
Maybe? I’m an old millennial and I never subscribed to magazines for ads. I found out about my interests in other ways, but I did have the Internet by the time I was maybe 12 (in 1996 I’d guess). The only magazines I got as a teenager was 2600 and adbusters.
> I don't like ads spying on me and I don't like intrusive ads but ad in general are not evil to me.
For me I find all advertising intrusive and manipulative. I’ve never owned a tv because I just can’t understand why anyone would want to watch ads like that. I don’t like thinking in moralistic dualisms like good and evil, but I will say I’d be all for a world where advertising doesn’t try to steal my attention and manipulate me.
To this point, that's actually what I use Instagram for now. I'm almost more interested in the ads on there than the content of the people I follow. I've found clothes brands that I'm interested in, new shoes that fit my vibe, and lots of concerts that I'm interested in. I think the biggest gain for a lot of them is brand awareness. I haven't actually bought much because I don't need new clothes at the moment, but come spring when I'm looking for a new outfit or two, I'm definitely coming back to a couple of those sites.
> Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying.
As you more or less say in the next paragraph, you're answering a different question I think. Can advertising make you want things that are bad for you? Absolutely. But so can lots of things. I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire itself is good for you.
Advertising a product that does X/Y/Z but also causes cancer without mentioning the cancer means people want a different product that isn’t being sold.
Currently (edit:some) prescription drugs are being advertised with mentions of side effects like death, but what’s being treated isn’t mentioned. That’s clearly not advertising the actual product being sold either, yet it’s also effective.
> I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire itself is good for you.
Yes, I think. For example, if I develop a desire because someone lies to me or manipulates me, then the formation of the desire itself is bad (and potentially corrupting since believing lies or being subject to manipulation can lead to further cognitive problems).
As you say desires can push you towards both good and bad things. But we value not only those good or bad things, we also value autonomy and good habits of mind. So in various ways, ill-formed desires can be bad for us.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, you might find Vices of the Mind by Quassim Cassam interesting. It's more about belief than desire, but I think that the issues are closely related.
Through the various replies here, there's more than enough evidence of harm. It seems you are, at this point, merely defending your prior statement and not addressing the issue in any way. We can attempt to nullify all harmful things by redirecting them with some philosophical meta-analysis, e.g.: harm is good because it leads to growth/development/character. Ultimately, that's an easy way to abstract your way out of recognizing facts. The powerful tools available to advertisers and the persistence of those tools across devices & platforms is beyond most minds to resist.
If you want to be philosophical, a better position would be to view such as enslavement because that is the logical endpoint.
> Through the various replies here, there's more than enough evidence of harm. It seems you are, at this point, merely defending your prior statement and not addressing the issue in any way.
What's the original statement you think I'm defending? It sounds like you and a few others are responding to the claim "maybe advertising is completely fine all the time", which is not what I'm saying. I'm responding to one specific argument against advertising, namely the idea that "implanted" desires are fundamentally worse/different than "true" desires.
> We can attempt to nullify all harmful things by redirecting them with some philosophical meta-analysis, e.g.: harm is good because it leads to growth/development/character. Ultimately, that's an easy way to abstract your way out of recognizing facts.
It sounds like you're saying you're against this kind of low-level philosophical argument analysis? Like, if advertising is bad, we should only ever be talking about how advertising is actually bad and never talk about anything else?
If someone said "advertising starts with an A so it's bad" and another responds "are you sure? I think some things that start with A can be good", would you say that's a bad thing to say since advertising is bad overall, so why defend it in any way?
I think if you think advertising is bad and dangerous, it's all the more important to have robust, clear arguments on why exactly it's bad.
> If you want to be philosophical, a better position would be to view such as enslavement because that is the logical endpoint.
"If you want to be philosophical, a better position would be <my position> because <it's correct>".
I guess there's no pulling you through the loop, out of your constructions. So to clarify: implanted desires are worse. This is demonstrable if we only consider the unaccounted cost of profiteering, whether it be ecological or the debasement of other humans. There is no need to transcend to philosophical inquiry because the harm imposed is so evident. You have to acknowledge that, but you chose to elevate your position in argument to the abstract where harm is only theoretical. Second, this is a somewhat absurd oversimplification of my position to create a strawman and, again, elevate your position in some moralistic superiority hierarchy built around meta thinking (all too common) The reason they killed Socrates? Mayhaps.
Then you repeat yourself and again strawman my argument. No Advertising isn't bad. There are insidious techniques that the mind cannot distinguish. These are evil/wrong/bad, whatever Newspeak you prefer. Once they are known, they must be prohibited, e.g. as subliminal political messaging was banned.
Lastly, it is clear you think highly of yourself and your thoughts... this is clear. However, I believe your rhetoric falls short in this instance
Yeah, I'm pointing out the thing that I find the most objectionable about advertising which is that it's main function is to steal my attention.
I don't think there is such a thing as a good desire or a bad desire, they are just desire and all desires are something to work on bringing awareness to so they don't rule you.
For the sake of argument I'll say the way a desire comes into being has no bearing on making it good or bad. What is the implication of this with respect to advertising in your mental model?
This is just another version of people thinking that because something is offensive it should be banned.
Practically speaking what would banning advertising look like? Who gets to decide what is a "worthwhile" product. Sure banning smoking adverts most people agree on as it gives you cancer, maybe alcohol too. But saying if I invent something I'm not allowed to advertise anywhere because someone has decided they want the world to look at certain way, no thanks.
At least in one iteration it'd maybe look like what Sao Paulo did [1], which to my eyes looks quite a lot better than the before pictures. No one is saying what is or isn't a worthwhile product, just don't advertise.
Someone one hacker news pointed this out to me before. I'm not convinced. Poor planning law allowed bill boards to be thrown up every where, I've no problem with advertising in my own country (UK), as it requires planning permission.
Also would Time Square be better with no advertising? Another extreme example for comparison.
I was in Times Square last night and yeah, for sure, it would be way better without advertising.
But we definitely should keep the guy that was wearing a mask that looked like it was from the Lion King musical, shirtless, ripped, doing bicep curls with resistance bands, blasting DMX at midnight. I'm here for that.
Oh? So by a similar theory, it's ok when abused women stay with abusive husbands because who knows what people truly want? Like if the abuse has made them "genuinely" want to stay in an abusive situation, that's cool, and in fact justifies other dudes abusing women until they get the women to that point?
Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.
>there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. //
Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose the characteristics I want to search on.
Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it, they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made opaque on purpose.
Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call monitoring.
Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless.
I had to download the manuals and read the usage instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for the lower priced BT phones, crazy).
Ebay are pretty good, not perfect.
Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose AMD or Nvidia cards first.
Then you get the search results and the most expensive cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by "recommended", argh.
Sure. I don't do much product discovery via Amazon either. For that I turn to places not trying to sell me things like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Also forums where other users talk about our shared problems and what has worked for them.
It's a good analogy to think about, but surely you wouldn't say something like "we should never take people at their word, we have to decide what we think they feel and then assume that's how they're feeling, regardless of how they say they feel".
Sure, in some cases people get trapped in patterns where if you ask them, they say they want to stay in them, but it's pretty well established that actually they'd be happier if they broke out of it, and the desire is probably not really genuine and more a result of fear/shame/etc.
The existence of cases like this doesn't mean we can just blindly apply this argument to everything. It can easily go wrong: "you say you want to be an artist but you're just being manipulated by your lazy friends. Trust us, you'll be much happier becoming an accountant like your dad"
> In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.
Yeah this is more or less what I mean by the arms race argument.
You are correct that I wouldn't agree with that straw man that nobody would agree with.
My point is mainly that we should default to not manipulating people, especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest, which includes the vast bulk of paid advertising. And that secondarily, it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.
I was responding to your straw man ("if you think that sometimes people can be influenced into having different genuine desires, then you must think this is true any time someone is manipulated, even in the case of spousal abuse") with another to demonstrate that there's a spectrum and more subtlety here than your initial response was acknowledging.
> especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest
I think the conflict of interest argument is a good one for why advertising is generally dangerous.
> it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.
Eh, fuck that noise. "Advertising is definitely bad so we shouldn't ever try to be clear about why exactly it's bad, since that might involve discussing some ways in which advertising is not bad, and we know it is bad."
I don't believe that's a fair statement of my point regarding abuse. And it's an entirely unfair restatement of my concern about your post. So I'm done here.
I have no problem with people nagging me and annoying me in their own premises. It's another matter if the persuaders are after me in the street, or in my own home.
I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away, because the slot didn't sell)
I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses, ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on.
Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends to distort the content on the website. When did you last read an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away from those sites.
Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid.
I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there. But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there; it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive brand advertising. That I can do without.
> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want?
Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to get new things and I enjoy what I have more.
It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items too.
In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want stuff way less, and use what I have more.
At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.
philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things?
If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.
> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want?
This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want?
There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons.
Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population?
In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them.
Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.
Thanks for that perspective. When reading these replies, each person contributes such a distinct and yet clear analysis, it begs the question of whether we are delivering the intended outcome of an agent provocateur. Alternatively, can one view today's advertising techniques in a positive light? The mental gymnastics required to answer that question are certainly more acrobatic if you choose any but the most shallow reply. This is the nature of insidious yet profitable devices. We all know the answer, but the persistence required to defeat these efforts is beyond most.
> There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest
Most of your argument hinges on the idea that there is an objective "best interest" that exists. Not all ethical (or religious) philosophies have this idea. There's a longstanding debate between the subjectivist (Hobbesian) view on ethics and the objectivist (Aristotelian) view on ethics, and this conflict arises often between non-Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which often can be varying degrees of subjectivist depending on the religion) and Abrahamic religious ethical philosophies (which are objectivist and rely on Divine Will to create the standard of goodness).
> Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money.
This too depends on the ethical philosophy. Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means. The opposing view, consequential ethics, often argues that the desires or values behind the choices have no bearing if the effect of the action, its consequences, are positive. To sum up, your view is deontological and objectivist, often views ascribed to adherents of what scholars today call Virtue Ethics.
All this to say that there is good reason for there to be debate in this space. A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking. In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.
> Most of your argument hinges on the idea that there is an objective "best interest" that exists. Not all ethical (or religious) philosophies have this idea.
To quote somebody somewhere that I've forgotten, "there's no right way to write a song, but there are wrong ways." We do not need to come to a consensus about the best possible outcome for the world to understand that some states of the world are preferable to other states.
I would challenge you to find any Hobbesian or Arisotelian philosophy, or any non-Abrahamic religion that concludes that making companies money is the ultimate telos of humanity. Certainly the Buddhists are not running around advocating that priming people for consumerism is good.
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> Your arguments are from the deontological view of ethics, the idea that consequences of some actions cannot justify their means.
No, not at all. I'm arguing from the consequentialist point of view that it's bad to have a society where everyone has been wireheaded into getting a stab of pleasure every time they drink Pepsi. I'm arguing that the consequence is bad. I'm also arguing that the means (wireheading) are also dangerous and should approached cautiously, but that's not really the crux of what I'm saying.
And I really don't think that consequentialism or deontology comes into this, I think they're in agreement with each other on this point. If someone argues that it's bad to wirehead citizens for entirely amoral ends (particularly when they're being wireheaded to consume products that are objectively shortening their lives and that are objectively unhealthy), and that it's bad to do all of that purely so that people will be more loyal to a company -- you can argue that position from any moral framework.
Morality is complicated, but that doesn't mean that we can't say anything about morality. There are outcomes and processes that pretty much everyone agrees are bad. If we look at someone beating a cat to death, we might argue deontologically that this is inherently bad because all violence is wrong, we might argue from a consequentialist position that it's a bad outcome for the cat and for society overall. We might argue (as some religious scholars do) that the abuser is sinning against themselves, or we might argue that the cat has inherent moral worth and is sentient. But the one thing all of those frameworks agree on is that it's bad to beat the cat. Similarly, we can argue endlessly about what the telos of a modern member of society is. However, pretty much all moral frameworks agree that manipulating other people for purely selfish ends without any consideration of whether there is any benefit to them is at least morally suspect if not outright morally wrong.
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I don't think I'm saying anything that is particularly controversial, either in Western society or in broader philosophies. I view the retreat into "how can we philosophically say that anything is right or wrong" as something of a deflection of that point. It conveniently sets up a world where we can't say anything about the outcome of any policy or criticize any system until we solve an unsolvable debate on the origin of ethics. And I think that's an ultimately a self-defeating philosophy.
Just to kind of flip this around:
> A lot of folks angrily shout at each other when it comes to advertising and let their emotions do the talking.
Who's to say this is bad? Maybe people shouting at each other over advertising is good actually, how can any of us say for sure? Maybe there's a religion somewhere that thinks yelling at advertisers is a moral end-goal. Would you say it's impossible to condemn ad-blocking without first solving these eternal ethical debates?
The problem with treating literally everything like it's unknowable, even when there's broad consensus that certain outcomes are bad, is that in the end you lose the power to condemn or advocate for anything. This is convenient for advertisers and existing structures/businesses that want to shut down conversations about their morality under the guise that it's impossible to have those conversations, and therefore everyone should just debate consequentialism and stop trying to change the world and stop being angry about anything that existing power structures are doing.
And reminder that we are talking about the idea that advertisers might manufacture a new urge in someone to drink Pepsi, purely because that makes them money. If you want to argue that wireheading people to drink Pepsi is good, pick a moral philosophy and argue that drinking Pepsi is a moral good using that framework. Don't just argue that it's unknowable.
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> In reality advertising ethics often delve deep into longstanding unresolved ethical debates that several scholars over millennia have argued positions over.
Just as one last aside, I want to push back on the idea that advertisers are sitting around talking through moral frameworks before they put out these campaigns. They're not.
Companies are amoral, they exist in a system designed to make money. I like free markets, but to the extent advertisers broadly are thinking about morality within free markets, they are thinking about it through whatever moral framework is immediately available to them, and through whatever moral framework most easily justifies the decisions that benefit the company's bottom line. Independent of your philosophy on wireheading and manipulation, it is very important and relevant for us to question whether companies are the best people to make these moral decisions.
If advertising ethics are actually dependent on large ethical questions, then it does not follow that a board of directors at Walmart/Amazon are the best equipped people to tackle those questions. The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input. For some reason this is not viewed by advertisers as a problem; they don't feel that they need to get my sign-off on the ethics of the situation before they manipulate me.
Regardless of the morality of the situation, it's pretty simple to see that the advertising industry is not equipped to decide the outcomes of longstanding unresolved ethical debates and that it might be a bad idea to give them that power.
> To quote somebody somewhere that I've forgotten, "there's no right way to write a song, but there are wrong ways." We do not need to come to a consensus about the best possible outcome for the world to understand that some states of the world are preferable to other states.
Sure but you're _not_ going to find consensus here. Just look at the whole thread. There _isn't_ consensus and getting emotional about it isn't going to help.
> I would challenge you to find any Hobbesian or Arisotelian philosophy, or any non-Abrahamic religion that concludes that making companies money is the ultimate telos of humanity. Certainly the Buddhists are not running around advocating that priming people for consumerism is good.
This framing comes off as juvenile to me. A "company" isn't some abstract philosophical evil. And many, many ideologies are absolutely fine with large agglomerations of human enterprise used for means outside of the individual's benefit. Just read through a couple chapters of Machiavelli's The Prince or any work by Georges Sorel. Several Jacobins, Marxists, and fascists have argued in the past that all forms of organization should flow from one unified state and that humans exist in symbiosis with the State.
> Morality is complicated, but that doesn't mean that we can't say anything about morality. There are outcomes and processes that pretty much everyone agrees are bad. If we look at someone beating a cat to death, we might argue deontologically that this is inherently bad because all violence is wrong, we might argue from a consequentialist position that it's a bad outcome for the cat and for society overall.
Again I don't think you can find this consensus. There are entire schools of modern economics that disagree with you.
> Companies are amoral, they exist in a system designed to make money. I like free markets, but to the extent advertisers broadly are thinking about morality within free markets, they are thinking about it through whatever moral framework is immediately available to them, and through whatever moral framework most easily justifies the decisions that benefit the company's bottom line. Independent of your philosophy on wireheading and manipulation, it is very important and relevant for us to question whether companies are the best people to make these moral decisions.
Yes and this question is as old as political philosophy itself is. Again, I'm not sure if you're just in a bubble or you're just extremely passionate about your own views, but the idea of who should own the telos of humanity, and of whether _any one person or group of persons_ should even decide on the telos of humanity itself is an open philosophical question. The question of how society should be organized and who should own its decision-making is one of _the_ oldest questions, Rousseau has one view, Burke has another, Bakunin has another, John Stuart Mill yet another, Marx a different one, Bentham a different one still.
> The advertising system that we have today exists without my consent or input
Ah I'm glad we got to the heart of it. The thing is, it doesn't matter what _you_ (or I) think. The West has a longstanding tradition of individualist thought, that the government should take a light touch and guarantee fundamental human rights of individuals. Social consensus in the West treats corporations as, well, unions of individuals with a limited liability structure. There still is broad support in Western societies for limiting the rights of the State. You can work within this framework to advocate for the harms that corporations provide, but your current position seems to be weirdly out-of-touch, and only really common on the Internet from what I've seen.
Following these thoughts, and flipping the argument the other way:
For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup, the startup would ping him), but for most people, including me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the attention of employers.
This is a terrible analogy, because I certainly don’t have billions to spend to put billboards of me near the places I want to be hired at. Sending a resume to recruiters is part of the hiring process (although, arguably, in our trade, it is often the other way around as well), being constantly bothered to buy more crap or subscribe to new services is not part of the buying process.
The point about $B is a matter of scale, so I don't think it matters, unless you are saying that companies with only $hundreds to spend on ads do not count as advertising.
The point about it being part of the hiring process seems to be pointing out that it is a codified and accepted process. If presenting ads are a codified and accepted practice (which I could argue it already is), does that make it acceptable?
The difference here is that the company actually wants to hire people, and is generally not that efficient at reaching out by itself (hence headhunters, etc), so sending your resume is helping them. Me, on the other hand, I do not want to buy a samsung S22 ultra edition.
By your statement, it would seem that you would find advertisements in response to your requests acceptable, is that correct? For example, you don't want a Samsung S22 Ultra Edition, but if you searched for car insurance, you are ok with ads.
Also, regarding unsolicited ads, it sounds like you will not send your resume to a company which does not list a position that fits you, regardless of how much you want to work for them. Which is fine, not everyone wants to take the extra effort. I have had companies create positions for me when I contacted them, even though they did not list an appropriate position originally.
I don't think that's a good analogy. We don't generally post our resumes as inline adverts on web pages, or on billboards outside tech campuses, hoping for a job. Companies start the conversation by creating a role and giving it to recruiters or advertising on a job board. We are basically just responding with the requested information.
Regarding posting inline on web pages, and on billboards, you seem to be discussing locations which are acceptable and not acceptable for resumes and ads. So could I summarize your point as resumes are acceptable if they are posted in certain locations (LinkedIn, AngelList, for example) and not others?
Regarding companies creating a role, would that imply that ads as a response to a search would be acceptable?
If you want to summarise my point, it was that your analogy was poor. It doesn't make any sense to compare sending a resume in response to a job listing with adverts for products I have not requested information about being inserted inline into web pages.
One is a response to a request, while the other is unsolicited and usually explicitly undesired.
A better analogy to sending resumes in response to job ads would be a salesperson describing the features of a product I've gone into a store and explicitly asked for information about.
> Regarding companies creating a role, would that imply that ads as a response to a search would be acceptable?
Most of my searches are not for products, so it doesn't make sense for Google etc to shoehorn ads for products into the results. If I'm searching for a product, then yes I want to see some ads for those products.
When I was talking about summarizing your point, I was looking to summarize your main arguments, as the statement "your analogy is poor" is fairly content-free.
> One is a response to a request, while the other is unsolicited and usually explicitly undesired.
..
> If I'm searching for a product, then yes I want to see some ads for those products.
It looks like you find ads acceptable when it is relevant to your search (e.g. a search for a product), but not when it's not solicited. This would seem to imply that even if there is a company that you really want to work for, if they do not advertise a position that you would like to fill, you will not contact them hoping to find a fit. Which is fine, not everyone wants to do that. I personally have contacted companies which didn't have appropriate positions listed, and have had them create positions which fit me.
The real problem is that we have a default theory of value: stuff is just worth whatever people paid for it, otherwise they wouldn't have paid for it is the short version. It's a gaping hole in our economic theories, and unsurprisingly advertisers have driven a goods train through it.
It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think people only pay for stuff that they want.
A part I feel like you're missing is that it's perfectly possible for someone to want less, and to have their wants stimulated by ads. So whereas the person might have been perfectly content before (pre-ad) they now want something that they otherwise wouldn't, which induces demand that didn't exist. You're focusing on fungibility of wants and ignoring the idea of totally new wants arising from advertising.
In general I would agree. I was thinking about what you wrote in my current context. I very much don't like ads. I don't like the described feeling of generated want.
On the other hand I am currently trying to help a local rural coworking space find an audience and customers.
So I plan to additionally to other means also employ search advertising targeting keywords that people use when looking for a coworking space. Locally targeted and so on.
Am I creating demand? Or am I trying to shift demand from potential others in the market towards my client?
I would say a bit of both. Because in targeting keywords I will probably also reach people not looking for a coworking desk right now, but are informing themselves. In them I might create the wish to try it. But others might look at the place and decide to give it a try instead of the place in the next big town.
Are you pretty or ugly? Are you smart or stupid? Are you successful or failing? Do you have high status or low status?
Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I have simultaneously ’manufactured’ a ‘need’ where there was/is none.
some kinds of ads are pretty bad, and some are fine.
consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool people drinking the product and having a great time. this does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too could be cool if you drink bud light.
on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison of features and prices between their product and that of a much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.
>Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all have that would exist completely independently of any kind of outside influence...
This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach millions of people means that capital can be used to manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital, the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can I prove that society would be better off without advertising entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society, and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.
> I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things?
Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked. Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before. It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you ignored it.
Is that wrong? I would say no.
But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the person you are envy the person you could be with the product. In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and then offer to sell it back to you."[1]
Is that wrong? I would say yes.
How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who don't use it are.
Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How many are giving you information that something is out there? How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or sexier if you bought their thing?
[1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where due.
> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong
In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally, suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and cruel thing.
I don't see my "true" desires as some platonic ideal, but I prefer to thinkmit it like the fast and slow thinking idea - what I would like my desires to be and what I can be manipulated into in the moment.
I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go.
Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals. Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't particularly care which provider I use
The GP's premise was that wanting things is bad because the "thing" in question is generally "nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard", leading to environmental devastation. It's not the same as "wanting", say, to spend time with friends and family.
I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want anything, and convert them to a state where they do want something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered their well-being.
we're supposed to be telling the market what to produce through demand signals. this is how we believe that monetary value translates directly into personal value. if instead the market tells us what to buy - who is driving?
philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things?
Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious actors to take, etc. are all wrong.
Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it is probably the most prevalent.
I think that might be (even) more interesting as a behavioural psychology question than philosophical. It's.. probably been studied? Seems like it would be interesting even to advertisers themselves, since it tells you who is worth advertising to.
What was the first time you were disappointed by a toy as a child? When you opened the box, starting playing with it, and found that it didn't live up to your expectations. Were those expectations based on a reasonable evaluation of the toy, or were they based on the excited cheers that played over tv commercials for the toy? Who deliberately cultivated unrealistic expectations, profiting from your disappointment?
How much time do you spend researching a product today before buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?
One useful framing is to ask not about the mechanics at the individual level,
but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable civilization).
There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply shape not just individual behavior but individual understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep.
A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves?
This converts readily in to the question facing societies since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in the related question, "what is 'the good'?"
This problem–the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-manufacturing, resource-consuming culture–has been explicitly analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist revolution.
Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand" for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot.
TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that addressing these requires systemic (legal, political, economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal responsibility" which however drives that change.
Let me offer a different perspective: I'm as little pro advertising as I am pro drugs, but I see both of them in a similar way: As having some negative consequences to society, but also being backed by a real world demand that doesn't stop at the borders of legality.
And the same way alcohol prohibition counter-intuitively had an even more negative effect on society, the same thing would happen with advertising.
I would rather tolerate transparent advertising with a clear, public framework and enforceable rules than I would want to tolerate a world where advertising demand creeps into every other form of communication.
We already live in a world where it's hard to trust any person or organization. I'm personally against drastically making that problem worse.
Your theory is that people who are willing to manipulate others choose to stop at standard advertising?
A long time ago I had a friend who did "contemporary marketing" for Budweiser. Half her hours were spent getting bar owners Bud Light neons. The other half were sitting in bars, drinking Bud with other beautiful people while wearing Budweiser clothing.
Who knows what horrors they've invented in the years since. But I will bet cash money that there are a lot of them.
The main difference between advertising and booze is that beer consumers wanted beer, but advertising consumers don't want ads. (In the rare case that they do, they can just go look at corporate YouTube channels.) So there's no particular reason to suspect society would be any worse off if we banned advertising.
Babies and bathwater, here. Many people legitimately would like to have Thing/Service but don’t know it exists, and may even not realize the possibility of other options exists.
> Many people legitimately would like to have Thing/Service but don’t know it exists
Sorry to burst the bubble, but that's *the proof that adv is manufactured demand*!
People interested in having something will find a way to know about them.
I think people are confusing the idea of advertising (AKA publicizing) their products or skills, with the advertising market we have today.
They are not the same thing, they only share the same name, for historical reasons.
It's like comparing Risk with WW2.
21st century advertising is nothing but bad news.
If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that sells them.
If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is wearing them)
If that’s your definition of manufactured demand then even making a product is manufactured demand because making the product means people will become aware of it therefore creating ‘fabricated’ demand by them discovering it. In reality a crowded/undiscovered market needs discovery mechanisms so in theory the right product finds the right person. But also in reality and the point I think you’re trying to make is that the wrong product with the biggest advertising spend will find someone instead of something that’s be a better fit.
> If that’s your definition of manufactured demand then even making a product is manufactured demand
sorry, but you are confusing making a product to solve a problem or fill a need with lying to get the attention of people to sell them something that does not solve the problem nor fills the need.
have you ever lied to these adv platforms?
I have many accounts were I blatantly lie about myself, like for example I say I am fat, I post pictures of fat people pretending it's me and immediately I get bombarded by ads for products to lose weight, training programs that "promise" you results in 2 weeks and dating apps.
I can assure you that I’m not confusing anything just extrapolating your argument in that prior post. I agree though that advertising is a pretty lousy discovery mechanism a lot of the time.
> People interested in having something will find a way to know about them.
[Citation needed]
This is might be true with commodity products, but with disruptive products—the kind most people here are producing or selling—that's absolutely not the case.
> If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is wearing them).
Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling. Some of those needs are caused by problems the individual isn't consciously aware of. Some of them are caused by problems the individual is aware of, but isn't aware of the available solutions. Marketing that seeks to educate the individual about the solutions available to them is a net-positive, both for the consumer and the producer.
You are the one who needs to prove that without ads people won't get what they want.
> but with disruptive products
Disruptive is a synonym for "unethical"
> Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling.
[Citation needed]
> Some of those needs are caused by problems the individual isn't consciously aware of, but isn't aware of the available solutions
and the solution is advertising?
you're kidding, right?
T: Hi J, I have a problem X, can you help me?
J: Hi T, I don't know much about X, but M does. Ask him.
2 hours later
T: Thanks J, M was of great help. Now I've solved my problem, I am happy, and my trust in you just got bigger.
advertising is *lies* so people not only will try to fulfill a fabricated need, they will also be frustrated by the fact that advertisers *lied* to them.
No, Nikes won't help you to "just do it"
Running won't be easier, if you never did before, because you buy a pair of shoes that sells you the idea that everyone who's wearing them is an athlete, and that athlete could be you, just buy the shoes.
> You are the one who needs to prove that without ads people won't get what they want.
This is the default mode for startups. It results in failure. "If you build it, they will come," doesn't work in the marketplace. Try it yourself.
> Disruptive is a synonym for "unethical".
Hard disagree, sorry. I don't think you're going to find many like-minded people on this site.
> > Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling.
> [Citation needed]
I'm not even sure how you can deny this. Do you really think everyone out there is living their best lives? Are businesses out there just performing at 100% efficiency, with no need for any new products or services to help them improve? What do you think economic growth is based on, if not the creation of new value?
> and the solution is advertising?
Yes, the solution is marketing—advertising being one piece of that puzzle. How did 'M' in your example find out about the product? Are "experts" just born with inherent knowledge of their fields?
> advertising is lies so people not only will try to fulfill a fabricated need, they will also be frustrated by the fact that advertisers lied to them.
I advertise. Nothing I say is a lie. I advertise that I can help non-technical founders build their MVPs better, faster, and cheaper than my competitors. That's true. I advertise to people that want to build an MVP. Their need exists before I advertise to them. Nobody is going to see an ad of mine and go "Oh man, I was going to spend my paycheck on food, but now that I've seen this ad about NoNerds.com building MVPs, I guess I'll starve and give them all my money instead."
> How can you not see the fraud is beyond me.
I'm not the one speaking in absolutes. There is bad advertising out there. Most brand advertising is bad. But ~50% of the advertising market is PERFORMANCE, not BRAND. How you can not see the difference between "Buy budweiser and get laid," and "Buy Infotex solutions and save 15% on monthly payroll costs." is beyond me.
> that's grotesque.
Agree to disagree. The economy is based on the creation and distribution of value. Good marketing seeks to inform individuals of potential sources of value to them. It creates efficiency in the marketplace by allowing new solutions to reach more potential buyers more rapidly.
Does it grant airtime to "bad" solutions occasionally? Of course. But in your own arguments, the buyer is ultimately the one responsible for the purchase decision. And if good products are being advertised as well, the buyer is given an opportunity to discover alternatives to the solutions they're already aware of. This increased information allows them to make better economic decisions.
> This is the default mode for startups. It results in failure. "If you build it, they will come," doesn't work in the marketplace.
It worked for many open source products. It worked for games like Minecraft and Factorio.
Looks to me, if you're unique enough, they will come, but if you're not, tough - perhaps nobody really needs another crappy version of what's already out there.
> Looks to me, if you're unique enough, they will come, but if you're not, tough - perhaps nobody really needs another crappy version of what's already out there.
You should try raising funds with that attitude. See what YC's response is during an interview when you suggest that your marketing plan is to be "unique enough [that] they will come".
I don't get the "well technically advertising can be good" argument in its favor, yet it's the most common one I see on this site.
If 5% is good (I'm being very generous) and "seeks to inform individuals of potential sources of value to them", that's still 95% manipulative, deceptive crap.
The inconvenient truth for the anti-advertising crowd is that modern digital advertising is one of the most democratizing forces in business history. I can develop an offer in minutes and spend less than $20 to get *thousands* of eyeballs on that offer by the end of the day. I don't need a $100K marketing budget, I don't need representation on Madison Avenue, I don't need to hire a sales force to make cold calls. For small businesses, that power is revolutionary.
If you're honestly looking for a citation, start with Galbraith's The Affluent Society. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society). This was old hat in the 50s. They just didn't realize it was going to burn the planet (and us with it)
I rarely go to Taco Bell. I would never have known about the Quesarito if I didn't see an ad. I was very glad I did. This same thing has happened many times with many food items.
Same for seeing billboards for various places across the country. I love Taco John's, Taco Time, and Del Taco, and wouldn't have found them without advertising.
The ads' "manufactured demand" improved my life in these instances. Same for various other products in other instances.
A couple of genuine questions for you, not to lessen the good fortune advertising has brought you.
Did you go to eat at Taco Bell because of the ad? Would you have already, and perhaps seen it on their menu boards and tried it as a result?
Were you really not aware of these other taco places, and only became aware of them due to billboards? I know of 2/3 of them, I haven't heard of Taco Time (live in the midwest), but I've heard of the rest from people I know. I don't think I've seen any of them advertised here, but I could be wrong.
> Did you go to eat at Taco Bell because of the ad?
Yes, I don't go there usually. I might have eventually seen it but probably missed out on various short-lived items.
The other taco places I only get to go to on a road trip since I live on the east coast. I can't be sure how I found them at first but it was either conventional ads or those standardized freeway exit food signs, which certainly also count as an advertisement.
The taco bell bit makes sense; promotional period items like that might be entirely missed by infrequent guests, and may be enough to drive them in.
I guess I hadn't much considered the ability for something like a billboard to influence a traveler like that. A very good portion of their audience would see it day after day, but if you were just passing through the area, you wouldn't otherwise know some of the local options, interesting point.
It's funny. Taco Bell to me is _the_ poster child for anti-advertisement sentiment.
I have completely dissociated all correlation of a filling meal/nourishment with this brand.
Again, to me, Taco Bell is a marketing company with a new product-of-the-month every month whose products just happen to be something that you chew and swallow.
Everything there gives me watery diarrhea. Granted, I couldn't get enough of the Volcano Tacos when they were a thing (unless the sauce had been sitting out for hours, at which point it was disgusting; it was very easy to tell by taste how fresh it was), but on the occasion that I walk by a T.V., there's often a silly, attention-grabbing commercial for Taco Bell.
Improving my life? At best, sure, when I was a kid/teenager/broke college student. Kind of like toy commercials, I reckon.
Fast food is one of those cases where I'm completely happy to get their ads for a similar reason to the poster above. Youtube's non video ads too, though for a completely different reason (I get the oddest ads for spinal implants and petabyte storage arrays)
So, I create a web page that describes a product ("Quesarito"). You, the consumer, find out about the product by stumbling upon the page by luck; if you decide to try the product and don't like it does that mean you were fooled?
Can you only be fooled when you are alerted to the presence of a product without your consent?
>If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that sells them.
>If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is wearing them)
My feet hurt. The shoes at the shop only sells shoes that make my feet hurt. How do I discover shoes that don't make my feet hurt?
He just went into a shoe store. How would he know which shoe store to call? (I remember this, it was pre-Internet and it was awful.)
> Google (in a world in which it didn't have ads)?
In a world without ads, Google would be a bulletin board (no meaningful revenue means no petabyte-sized index). You can replicate this experience on Craigslist today. Good luck!
> Ask a podiatrist?
In the USA, this adds a time tax (many people need to go to their primary doctor first to get a referral, then would have to be seen by the podiatrist to get to ask the question) and a money tax (all those doctors have to get paid).
How is clicking an ad better than advice from someone who should know? Maybe this is just a weak example but an ad that's like "do shoes hurt your feet for some reason? Maybe it's this! Buy our shoe to fix it!" seems a hell of a lot less likely to be useful than finding out why your foot hurts and getting informed advice on what will help.
Seems like you're just very lucky if the advertised product ends up solving the problem. I get that asking people or looking things up is effort but it's also a hell of a lot more likely to yield good results than trusting a stranger's ad to be accurate and helpful. The world would not end without advertising (or with very limited advertising), and people would not be unable to find things they want or need. They might not as often stumble on that information while doing something totally unrelated, sure, but I don't think that happens often enough to offset the harmful effects of advertising.
> Maybe this is just a weak example but an ad that's like "do shoes hurt your feet for some reason? Maybe it's this! Buy our shoe to fix it!" seems a hell of a lot less likely to be useful than finding out why your foot hurts and getting informed advice on what will help.
You're absolutely correct. It is also true that many people will not have the means (insurance, for example!) to do that, nor will they have the motivation to do that in every case (think of how few people employ personal financial advisors, for example).
Also: an environment free of ads would almost necessarily eliminate (or corrupt, via paid placement) product review sites that seek to help people make informed decisions. De-monetizing impartial information sites seems like a bad outcome.
Also: an environment free of ads would also by necessity eliminate
My friend discovered them with his eyes when he went to a different store that sells different shoes. He picked a pair that was visually appealing to him, tried them on and they turned out to be really comfy.
But I'd visit a doctor if your feet hurt no matter the shoe.
> If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that sells them.
> If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is wearing them)
This reasoning is flawed because it ignores a common scenario: I want a pair of shoes, but none of the ones I find could fit me well enough. In other words, existing demand has not been met. Discovery has value.
> People interested in having something will find a way to know about them.
Ouch. This couldn't be more wrong. Throughout my life, I've met so many people who wanted something and didn't find it by trying very hard. Sometimes, they finally find it via an ad. Ads definitely helped them.
A world without advertising is - by and large - a world of entrenched megacompanies that dominate their space without fear of usurp. It's a world where the only viable politicians are popular actors.
Like it or not, advertising is an important way of spreading new memes in a liberal society based on voluntary exchange. Banning advertising is a recipe for stagnation.
that's nonsense. memes do not rely on advertising to exist, and as advertising is a service (that costs money) it's the biggest wallets that benefit the most from it.
hell, look at Facebook and Google, both advertising companies and I'd argue two of the biggest and most entrenched.
Organic meme spread is extremely random and unpredictable. Yes, rich people (and conglomerations of not-so-rich people) have better access to advertising. So what?
Facebook and Google are just mediums, like "television" in the abstract. The social value of advertising comes from the people doing the advertising. Like everything, some of it's crap and some of it's great.
It would be strictly worse. Advertising is at worst an annoyance. On the other hand, a legally-enforced gatekeeping bureaucracy that decides whose speech is allowed to reach other people is an Orwellean nightmare. Do you trust <insert your opposing political tribe here> to decide which political ads are acceptable?
Despite HN's fixation on G and F, there are multitudes of advertising channels both online and offline.
My main concern's dragnet spying and user-targeted (not content-targeted) ads but I do think it'd be nice to get rid of (nearly) all ads, too—it's just that if I can only pick eliminate all ads or eliminate all spying, I'd pick the latter. I think that priority order is why people tend to fixate on big tech, for which the spying is all tied up with the advertising, but I also think magazines selling subscriber lists should be illegal, the CRAs should either be eliminated or much more tightly regulated, credit card companies shouldn't be able to sell your purchase data, et c. No companies should be able to do those things, it's just that Big Tech does a lot of that (but so do financial institutions and so on, sure, and those shouldn't be able to do it either).
Separately, yes, it would be nice to at squeeze all advertising down to some very small factor in the economy, if not completely eliminate it (which is probably impractical).
[EDIT] But back to the original point, your scary-no-advertising-world post mostly just describes the current state of our has-advertising world.
Yeah. Along the same lines, anyone who has ever attempted to start a business knows that advertising in various ways is essential.
If you banned all advertising, you'd be doing a huge favor to the largest, most established companies--the ones that already have high brand awareness.
As much as ads suck, they also provide a relatively democratic form of access to markets for new entrants. Without them, the only hope is going viral organically, which is more or less equivalent to winning the lottery.
That does not justify advertisement. The problem you describe could as well be solved by a neutral third party actor (could even be a public service) providing impartial news about the kinds of products that exist in the market.
> So then what, you get curators like Google who become super powerful?
Doesn't Google currently own one of the biggest advertising platforms on the entire planet, and don't they curate what categories of products are allowed to appear on it?
There are lots of problems with curation, but I am not convinced centralization is one of them. At least, I'm not convinced that centralization is any more of an issue with curation than it currently is with advertising. There's no reason to centralize curation and give control to one company/government any more than there is reason to centralize Internet ads with one company/government.
Advertisement I would say on Google are more free then their "curated" search.
When ads for instance are not allowed on Google, all that's left is google's opinion on whats useful. Which is weirdly enough most likely less free and more opiniated.
I don't really understand where the difference is that you're seeing.
Google bans categories of ads, and bans advertisers that it views as bad actors, the same way it does with search. It also uses an algorithm to figure out what ads to show you, the same way it does with search results. It uses a lot of the same data (location, history, preferences, etc) to make those decisions.
The only difference I can see is that advertisers pay money to influence that algorithm (ie, a company willing to pay more money will win an auction against a company that has less money). Is that what you're referring to as the thing that makes it more free and less opinionated?
I think, logically, if they wanted thing or service, they'd know they want it, yes?
What you mean is, they want it after being told how this and that it is, how utterly special, how pathetic they are for not having it, how bad they look without it, and a spell of desire and want are cast over them, to covet thing $x.
So many things, are only a thing because someone else has it.
Most successful startups provide products or services that address problems that lack solutions, where the solutions aren't sufficient, or where they cause additional problems. When these new, "disruptive" products emerge, the marketplace needs to be educated about them.
This is what the term "Marketing" means: it's about creating a market by injecting demand into the marketplace. If people aren't aware that a product exists, they can't demand it.
It's easy to focus on Budweiser ads, because those are the memorable ones. But only ~50% of advertising spend is brand advertising [1]. Most advertising isn't about making you feel less cool, or promising increased sex appeal. It's about identifying with a customer, calling out a problem they're having, and educating them about a solution to that problem.
> Most advertising isn't about making you feel less cool, or promising increased sex appeal. It's about identifying with a customer, calling out a problem they're having, and educating them about a solution to that problem.
This is quite a bad faith description of "performance advertising".
I'd say it REALLY depends on the implementation model.
Non-intrusive adverts that are relevant to the content are something that I sometimes literally seek out - because they bring me information that I want, and may lead me closer to buying a thing I want. I've even been frustrated that an advert displays, and when I try to view it again to get more info, it's already gone. Sometimes, I buy trade magazines just for the adverts, or to scan the sponsors/advertisers guide at the back.
At the other extreme are popup/pop-over/slide-over adverts especially on mobile that we cannot get rid of. Those are not an exchange of a portion of my attention to support what I'm reading, they are a wholesale hijacking of my attention and holding hostage the thing I want to read/view. It is literally like walking into the store and having my pocket picked.
One model is completely legit, and the other is pretty much spam and legal constraints could be justified.
An interesting read is Galbraith's "The New Industrial State" which lays out an argument that the US is also a planned economy, just with non-state planners. It came out before the 80s so things have changed from the era of corporate conglomerates in the US, but the underlying nature of advertising as a mechanism for generating the demand that is allowing companies to continue to convert resources into sellable products I think is spot on.
People exhibit an spectrum of interest in products in the market, from “zero interest in buying” to “shut up and take my money”. Advertising works by convincing people close to the “shut up and take my money” part of the spectrum to actually buy.
Yes. And sometimes it even connects people with 'I have this thorny problem to which I would love to buy a solution instead of relying on manual workarounds' with people selling the actual solution, leading to win-win for everyone.
I'm sure you know that when you use Google, search results are a side effect which is used to draw you to use Google, the main product being provided are the ads.
We're talking about the user's perspective here, not Google's. For the user the search has one purpose, and that isn't looking at ads. Just like nobody opens a newspaper to look at them.
The point was that nobody really needs advertising to learn about available products. Google search stays just as useful if you block the ads, the other way around nobody would use it.
I think that's too narrow a scope you are putting on people who do searches. I in fact have searched on Google for ads, when I was looking for car insurance. I'm sure other people have searched for ads as well, I can't be the only one.
I guess kickstarter is basically advertising and should be banned.
Paying for an ad on a result in a google search for legos is manufacturing demand for a product?
I think any serious discussion has to be about the ad medium.
I had email thanks to netzero way back in the day because it was ad driven, I think it's perfectly fine for an adult to consent to ads in exchange for services. I couldn't afford AOL, so without that service I have no idea how I would have gotten into email. I couldn't afford 10 cents a minute long distance calls and my physycial mail never got to my grandparents overseas.
Billboards on the other hand... those are intrusive... buildings with their company logos by the highway, maybe those are too.
Of course his is a sort of perverted view that focuses on the supposed good that comes from the shaping public opinion to the exclusion of the form of slavery that is inherent in its successful application.
Thanks for summing up my thoughts exactly. I'm radically anti-advertisement for these reasons exactly. The world would be a much better place without ads.
Advertisements exist on a spectrum of manipulation. For example, old ads in the 50's sometimes used phallic subliminal messaging to attempt to get viewers to misappropriate their sexual urges with the thing being advertised (no kidding, see [1]). Even though it probably doesn't work it's the mindset behind the attempt that is gross. The goal was to manipulate.
On the other side of the spectrum you have the ole soap in the pickup's window saying For Sale. Somewhere between these two extremes is a line where advertisements go from being ethical to being unethical. Clean one-size-fits-all solutions don't work here, we have to go through the trouble of defining what manipulation is and when it applies. Simply telling people that your product/service exists in the world is not by itself manipulation period.
> On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies.
This belief is actually compatible with my argument, thanks to the "on average" qualifier! I've never said that "most advertising as it exists today is good," rather my point is "advertising in a fundamental sense doesn't have to be bad." I think there is a real need that can be served by advertising, and thus we should find good ways of serving that need which don't involve "manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies."
I agree, I think people who ask "well how do you know the product exists" are missing the point of advertisement, which is not to inform people by factual arguments and discussion, but to convince them through emotional manipulation.
> On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies.
What's even worse, the same emotional manipulation methods that are used in advertising are now applied to the political domain, and they seem to lead to increased misinformation and political spectrum fragmentation. It is especially easy to instill hate or anger into people.
I don't think modern society, where people are expected to be as rational as possible (in order to participate in improving the society), can survive if at the same time, we weaken this rationality by circumventing it through an endless stream of emotional manipulation.
In the 18th and 19th century, it became widely accepted that public education is beneficial for everyone, i.e. it's worth teaching everybody how to read and write, as well as other stuff like civics. It's not obvious at all this is the case, there certainly was lot of resistance to this idea from elitist classes of nobles and clerics.
I think there is a similar conflict coming up in 21st century, where we will have to recognize, to progress as a civilization, all humans should have the right to be as emotionally stable as possible (and learn the psychological tools to that effect), so they could make rational decisions most of the time. But the very existence of advertising and other forms of commercial psychological manipulation threatens this general right, and so they will fight against that very idea.
Without advertising how are you going to find out about anything? Are you going to search all the buildings in your neighborhood to try and figure out which one sells food? Signage is advertising. Every way for you to find out about anything to buy is advertising. You can have an opinion that some forms of advertising you would like to curtail but a blanket statement is nonsensical.
> Every way for you to find out about anything to buy is advertising.
I don't think that's right. If I use a product, like it, and tell my friends about it, that isn't advertising because it isn't funded by anyone who gains from the purchase of the product. Similarly, Consumer Reports isn't advertising, because they are funded by their members. General review orgs like The Wirecutter may or may not be advertising, depending on how successful they are at preventing manufacturers from influencing their reviews.
> Without advertising how are you going to find out about anything?
If I don't know I have a problem to solve I probably don't have a problem to solve, or at least not a problem big enough that it requires me to be forced to consume hours of advertisement per year
But that's the same as saying ignorance is a bliss.
You might have problems but you haven't thought about them, or in some case you can't even verbalize them.
Other times problems just become background noise, and they're there in plain sight but you're used to them - and they can have negative impact on your life.
We're not machines, problems aren't binary.
Now if you say that we as a society, sometimes, value the "wrong things" (which is subjective) and see problems that aren't a big deal, it's true. But you can't pin that on advertising - those are symptoms of poor education systems, poor health, and I'd go as far as poor value systems.
Well a problem could be averted before you have it. There are lots of examples: Like buying a kinesis keyboard before you actually get RSI. Or an ergonomic chair. You were heading towards a problem, but might not know without an “ad”.
I think a large number of HN posts can be grouped under the term advertising. Spreading awareness of a product, company, or service is probably the number one motivator for posting things here.
Of course there are many factors involved, but in the end increased demand is the primary goal of advertising.
If it were purely about informing that the product exists, ads could just be text instead of flashy animated popups. That's a form of advertising I could get behind. Would even be more accessible.
> Advertising is manufactured demand. [...] This business model really needs to stop.
While I don't agree that all forms of advertising is about manufacturing demand (i.e. creating desire for stuff people don't really need), let's assume a significant portion of it is. The huge problem with "stopping this business model" is consumer markets are huge; it's $20T in the US alone, and I imagine a significant part of the whole ecosystem will implode if people only bought things they needed with cash the actually have.
Suggesting we move away from advertising is equivalent to going against the economic status quo. Not saying there's no merit to this (e.g. we can argue the impact on the environment), but it's an incredibly uphill battle.
What makes matters worse is that the current monetary system of centralized currency issuance creates an anti-competitive environment which increases the power of advertising. Supply-side economics is demand-constrained so the game is all about the monopolization of consumers... Which is good for advertising.
Under a demand side economy, nobody has priority access to cheap capital so the constraint is on the production side (this is more natural)... So acquisition of consumers is a secondary concern. It's more about product quality and production efficiency. It's not feasible to fool consumers with artificially deflated prices (subsidized by cheap capital from above) and spamming of ads.
Here's an example from yesterday. I'm visiting a new country. I knew I wanted to go on a tour, not sure which one. I went to Airbnb to check my messages, and was ADVERTISED an "Architecture tour of the city".
We booked it and had an amazing time.
Advertising isn't strictly immoral and artificial, but a lot can be.
Spreading dogmatism based on emotion is _generally_ (see what I did there?) not a viable way to spread information.
Not at all. When there's something I need, how am I supposed to find it without looking at advertising and marketing materials? How am I supposed to even find out a product I could use exists?
If you need your roof fixed, whatcha going to do? If your favorite band is coming to town, how would you know? If your bank is now offering a cash back credit card you want, how are you going to find out about it? If you're on a road trip and you're hungry, which exit has your favorite burgers?
> If you need your roof fixed, whatcha going to do?
So you are suggesting that if my roof needs fixing, the only solution is that I first have to be interrupted and distracted numerous times during work, by various imagery and popups?
So should it be pull or push-based? Because all the cases you've stated imply one, whereas the active tracking pervasive in modern advertising implies the other.
I've bought things I didn't know existed because of push advertising. For example, ads for upcoming movies I didn't know would interest me. Songs I hear on the radio I never heard before and like and want to buy. Tools that make my life easier working on my car that I didn't know existed.
Sure, but the demand for these things didn't exist _until_ you saw the ad, and the value add becomes that much more abstract: i.e. what if there's a movie you would've liked more instead?
I can't quickly find the bookmark to the source, but someone had clearly framed how advertising is used towards increasing demand to make production highly profitable via economies of scales but also at the added expense of creating more of a monoculture, a similar problem that exists with agriculture.
I'm planning soon to launch a platform to compete with Twitter/Facebook, and one of the foundational design principles will be having no ads.
"Commercial forces are determining your consciousness - that's the sickest way to develop the human society." - Sadhguru
I couldn't agree more and I too am shocked by how people continue to believe we live in a simplistic demand-supply economy.
We live in a supply economy that fabricates demand by means of marketing. And there's an additional amplifier: social demand. My neighbor has it so now I want it too.
Advertising, marketing, propaganda [1], campaigning, “persuasion”, there are lots of words across a broad spectrum of, what is, a variation on a theme. Ultimately it comes down to manipulation delivered through multiple methods. Perhaps sometimes that manipulation is unavoidable, maybe even beneficial and not nefarious. But when you look at it in the context of economics - a “science” that is an artificial construct with none of the immutability of, say, the laws of physics, even though in some circles it is treated and discussed as such - and our false god, capitalism, it is vital, if not intrinsic to that domain.
It is our system a values, collectively, as a culture and a society, that allows it to continue and thrive, albeit often having to adapt. Because to ultimate goal is to keep us spending. To keep us acquiescing, complacent and conforming even when we believe we are not, striving to contribute to the not-so-greater good. Generating monetary wealth, not necessarily for ourselves, at the expense of, one could say, the wealth of the planet.
We’ve been groomed [2] in this way for a long time now. And the discontinuities that are beginning to manifest [3] are revealing how brittle and finite it all is.
a lot of people opine on adds have no idea what its like to run a business.
do you think big businesses want adds? they'd love to get rid of them. then no one could ever knock them out of their spot. They'd just rule by dominance and no one would ever know about the competition.
its not brain washing. advertising is no different than finding a mate, finding an employer, finding an employee.
what needs to stop is absolute narrow minded thought. thats what 'This business model really needs to stop.' is. like really, stop. the world isnt like you, what you propose is not feasible and is in fact harmful to almost everyone.
I dont want to pay for facebook, so I deal with adds. Also, quite a few times I saw things I really needed/wanted on facebook. it was beneficial. I don't want to view adds on youtube, so I pay for the premium service. vey few people are willing to do so, even when capable. but there is a key point here, CHOICE.
Stop this one way thinking and understand the world is more complex
All demand beyond necessities (fixed demand) is manufactured. The problem with advertizing is that it became ubiquitous and lost all function (product discovery, comparison, brand recognition etc.), now its just self-referential self-replicating garbage that spreads across the Earth on all surface areas like a weird semantic plague.
I tell people sometimes that if I could go back in time and do one thing I thought would make the world better today, I would try and kill Hitler. Partly because everybody tries to kill Hitler, and it never works. He survived about a zillion assassination plots and quite a few actual attempts. It's almost like he's got some kind of special protection or something.
No, I would kill a contemporary of his, though: Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays. He is single-handedly responsible for most of the way advertising and PR are constructed today. He literally introduced the concept of FOMO in advertising. He's not everything that's wrong with society today, but taking him out has a decent chance of improving things. Besides, he's not constantly guarded by SS soldiers, or anything, so it would be easier than killing Hitler.
I think it's quite necessary to differentiate two different values that advertising delivers. Advertising allows products to overcome obscurity so that consumers are made aware of the product and Advertising allows products to stimulate demand in the market.
The first kind of advertising is the one we can pretty much all get behind - if you offer a service that's better than a competitor advertising can allow you to overcome the natural knowledge and networking advantages that your competitors might be skating by on to keep their sub-par product selling. This kind of advertising allows goliaths to be thrown down by davids and can help improve folks quality of life by minimizing the amount they're spending on unnecessarily inefficient products. This kind of advertising has been around forever and constituted the vast majority of advertising up until very recently - once a brand was well established they'd start slashing advertising since their reach was already pretty effectively covering the market space.
The second kind of advertising is to drive up demand in consumers that already know who you are - into this bucket falls every ford advertisement since about 1940 and every Coke ad since the 60s - these products are already completely known by consumers. CocaCola doesn't run advertisements because they're afraid you've never heard of their product, it runs advertisements to drive up demand - and the advertisements of competitors products are usually symbiotic - whether Coke or Pepsi sponsored the ad you just saw doesn't generally matter, you're going to end up buying a soda and in a significant number of places you can purchase one there is a local monopoly anyways - rare is the restaurant where you can get a Coke and your date can get a Pepsi. These advertisements intend to modify your preferences and create demand - rather than insuring that their product is known as one of the options to fulfill an existing demand... if you believe Coke advertisers don't believe everyone on earth is aware of their product then I've got a bridge to sell you.
The second kind of advertising makes up nearly all of modern advertising, it is a parasitic practice that reduces the efficacy of the free market (by levying a cost on attention in exchange for no added information delivered to the consumer). It is also responsible for the aggressive increase in obnoxiousness of advertising - since you're not trying to simply inform a consumer but you're actively competing with other advertisers for the limited amount of manufactured demand that each consumer can afford.
In my eye this second form of advertising is utterly without value and if we need to ditch the first form to safely escape the second form its still absolutely worth it.
But certainly you want advertising for things you consider good and important, like maybe climate protection things, or mask wearing and vaccinations, and so on.
For example a company could offer a more efficient heating appliance for homes. Then it would be a good thing if they advertised it, so that home builders could become aware of it.
> On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies.
> Because advertising is manufactured demand.
> This business model really needs to stop.
Understandable advertising is a controversial topic, and change needs to happen, but this is just ridiculous. True the “consumer culture” does need to shift for environmental reasons.
But your argument is that effectively there should be “no unnesisery spend ever”. So that’s an end of:
- coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, for pleasure.
- all entertainment, no tvs, film, theatre.
- all travel for pleasure, no tourism.
How is buying a few unnecessary nick nacks online worse than the global travel industry?
Obviously that’s all completely mad, but so is your argument.
Frankly HN is completely bizarre at times. For a community focussed on entrepreneurship when it comes to advertising it’s become so incredibly negative, practically toxic.
I imagine the vast majority of people on here would be out of a job (directly or indirectly) without advertising.
But my final two points stand, it frustrates me when I see arguments suggesting that all advertising is a net negative to society (ethically, environmentally, socially). The economic growth, and increase in quality of life, we have seen in the last 30 years is directly related to the web and therefore advertising.
Of course. And now that we've done that, it's time to use all those resources and knowledge and rethink the core algorithms of society.
That is, if we want a chance to bring back the beautiful world we've inherited intact from so many generations of ancestors. My daughter can only see half of what I saw when I grew up, maybe less. There is no horizon without smoke, mountain snow contains ash and there are few bird that sing in the forests because insects are nowhere to be found.
Eyelashes or plane tickets, those things cannot be compared to what we're losing in the process.
No amount of micro optimization is going to stop this train, we have to look at the algorithms.
The mental loops the author jumps to justify/accept ads themselves is interesting. We agree any of these is bad:
- I used to treat my employees well, but my agency was not sustainable with it so now I crank the whip every time someone wastes few minutes.
- I used to sell fresh food, but my restaurant was not profitable so now I sell low quality food while claiming it's organic.
Both of these are also clearly immoral, but in these fields it's clear that they don't become moral because of the profit factor. However the author seems to be saying because the business is not profitable that makes ads morally correct*? That doesn't seem good reasoning, I'm all for changing your own morality over time and each person having a custom set of rules but "profitability" is/should def not be what makes something moral or immoral.
Maybe the author unknowingly had a more complex set of rules to define ads as moral under certain circumstances, maybe they just changed them, or maybe they are doing something they themselves consider immoral, but I find it strange to say profitability is part of moral.
*Edit: actually the author doesn't talk about morality so these are more my rumblings/ideas based on the article than a correct review of the article. Probably because right now I have a somewhat strong moral belief, fairly weakly held, about ads and I'm thinking about similar questions as the author :)
When you say: "you can read all the content on my website for one year for $2".
...nobody will give you $2. Because they're conditioned that content is free. Because payment is a hassle. Because they may not know one year ahead what the value is.
Same thing with games in the app store. A game you love and play a lot, clearly would be fairly priced at 5$. And still game developers are forced to make them free to play with in-game purchases to make up for it.
People really do not want to pay for anything in the digital space. They won't pay a fixed fee, hate subscriptions too, and don't really donate at scale.
As still people eagerly consume all this stuff anyway, I think the ethical point is incredibly one-sided if not hypocritical. You claim that the economic value is zero yet consume it anyway.
Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No other successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads, they have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral ones.
With no immediate successor on the horizon, I think ads should be redesigned to be less invasive. No excessive tracking, no absurd resource usage, and security protection.
> Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No other successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads, they have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral ones.
This is why I don't think the ethics are worth considering - this isn't a failing on individual users making personal choices. The ad industry has essentially made parts of the economy anticompetitive. Facebook and Google pick winners and losers via the ad market (whether intentionally or not), subsidized by private equity, which most of the actual producers of games do not want to participate in, but have no choice. Consumers may or may not be getting the best products, they are getting the products promoted by the ad industry.
I don't see how any reasonable legislator or regulator can look at that situation as healthy, competitive or sustainable.
I agree with you that most internet content and mobile apps could not exist without advertising because they would not be profitable.
But similar to D&D alignments, whether something is profitable is completely orthogonal to whether it is ethical. Human endeavors may be profitable but not ethical, ethical but not profitable, both profitable and ethical, or neither ethical nor profitable.
So I share the parent commenter's concern about people who seem to be claiming that a thing must be ethical because it is necessary to be profitable. It's perfectly possible for a profitable thing to be profitable-good, profitable-neutral, or profitable-evil.
I agree with this separation of concerns, but you have to paint the full picture.
Without ads, we have a pure ethical situation. Desirable content and an eager reader to consume it. All is good. Except for the fact that this content cannot exist unless the producer runs ads, which some consider unethical.
If we end the story here, the content disappears since there's no ethical way to sustain it. So the original ethical transaction (content -> reader) is gone. Also known as throwing away the baby with the bath water.
If we are to complete the picture though, you might as well claim it's the consumer being unethical here, for flat out refusing to offer any payment for a service they want, and clearly costs money to produce.
Perhaps you are right. I can think of a couple additional considerations:
First, it's worth acknowledging that some amount of desirable content already exists without advertising. My partner and I pay a subscription to three streaming services, a couple local newspapers, a town newsletter, and a physical news magazine. Besides the magazine they do not use ads to supplement their revenue. Having said that, I certainly agree that content that is only marginally valuable to people (who have money) would cease to be profitable and would therefore decrease in a world without advertising.
Second, I think it depends on to what degree you believe that the ends can justify the means. How acceptable is it to manipulate consumers if it means you can achieve a more ethical end like giving them desirable content? Do those things cancel out? Personally I think it depends on how unethical one finds the advertising and how beneficial one finds the content. We already restrict certain kinds of advertising to children or for addictive substances. Many countries do not allow advertisements that encourage consumers to request brand-name medications from their doctors, and China has even banned advertisements for luxury products. Many people are concerned about advertising that creates unrealistic body expectations in children or promotes excessive levels of consumption.
(Having worked on a DARPA project in a war zone a decade ago, I have spent a lot of time thinking about to what degree the ends justify the means, and I still have no good answers.)
I think steam and world of warcraft would say otherwise with respect to gaming. Most of my friends have large catalogues of $60+ games that they've bought on a whim and probably never played much.
No, I think that's absurd. People pay for all kinds of shit all the time, and it's silly to say that game developers are forced to do anything. They're certainly incentivized to try and make the most money possible, but that doesn't mean that fixed price digital or subscription games are exceptions. Every console platform has some kind of subscription service, and wouldn't be around if people didn't buy fixed price games. Blizzard and Activision's main cash cows are fixed price and subscription products (that also have additional superfluous purchases) and were just purchased for $70b. Ya there are a ton of super profitable free to play games, I play one of them, but I originally bought it before it was free. But it's not freemium exclusively.
Steam isn't mobile gaming. You're ten thousand miles outside the scope of the discussion. You might as well say that people pay for bread, if the point is that people do pay for some things.
> However the author seems to be saying because the business is not profitable that makes ads morally correct*?
As your edit admits, this is not at all what I said. To expand a bit--I think there's a big distinction between advertisement in a fundamental sense and how advertisement often is implemented today. I think that advertising can be done in a good way, and I'm concerned that too many people dismiss advertising altogether because of things like real-time bidding.
So some advertising is ok, while the vast majority of online advertising today falls into the bad category? I think I could agree that advertising is acceptable if we'd have:
* No personalisation
* Full transparency (must be publicly available who is paying for this, ...)
* No brainwashing, lies, propaganda, ...
* No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)
Since we have basically no restrictions today on what is allowed, I'll still use ad blocker, advice everyone to do the same. And of course I'll rant how ads are bad on the internet.
Yes, sorry for putting words into your mouth, I hope I correctly added the edit. I kept the comment just because I thought it'd still add value to the overall conversation.
Agreed again, but IMHO even if you go with "traditional" advertising it definitely can be done too much, it's (in)famous now between us people who are overall against ads the pictures of cities that banned ads:
I am from an old European city and I love looking at the buildings and public spaces and not being bombarded by ads. In contrast, I think it's interesting now that I live in Tokyo and there's areas where ads creep up buildings, but because it's a somewhat very jarring visual experience in some places, in general it's one of the things that I really dislike here, beautiful buildings covered by giant ugly paper ads.
So rephrasing things, where do I think ads are okay? I haven't thought about it too much, but possibly:
- On a sidebar in a website, like Google did back on the day
- On a magazine, both full-page and in-page, as long as they are limited
- On TV as long as they are limited (they are by law in Spain)
- Newspaper ads section
- Specialized magazines, websites, directories, etc (white-pages-like), including Google Maps
- Recommendations within the page's theme (a section with new or highlighted restaurants in tripdavisor/yelp).
- Probably few more places like this.
For things that you _need_ to do to live your normal life I don't think we should be forced to stare at ads. I'm sure a lot more people would stop staring at their phones if the train/bus showed art, interesting videos, etc. in their tvs instead of ads (as they used to do in my hometown). Now wherever you look, it's all ads.
You never really answered the question "Why I changed my mind" in your post. You adopted a new model and that allows you to look at advertising favorably, but why you made that change in the first place isn't clear. Advertising hasn't changed, nor did you discover any new information about it.
Your post reminds me of a friend who was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries, until Bernie lost to Hillary, and this man became a huge Hillary champion overnight. It wasn't enough for him to vote for an odious candidate for practical reasons. Now, Hillary was always the best candidate because she's very "qualified" or "details oriented". Nothing about Hillary changed, nor did he learn any new information about her. But he changed his mental model of Hillary to support his "change of mind".
To your credit I agree that it takes a particular type of person to be very thoughtful about ads but not have any thought whatsoever on their morality but rather in their utility.
How anyone can look around with even the foggiest of eyes at the current incentive structures around ads and say “this is providing a moral and helpful service” is a bit beyond me.
It turns out that the employees prefer the whip and before that they complained about not being paid enough. And new studies show that organic food is not particularly different and the suppliers are lying anyway, so people really just want to feel good about what they're buying. /s
I also changed my mind about advertising, a few years ago. I used to not want to use an ad blocker, due to my love of defaults (one extra thing to install, messes with the page possibly breaking it etc.) but also so that I could effortlessly support the content I was consuming. But the online advertising industry has gone too far and for me at least, I don't think there is coming back. Too much manipulation, too much tracking, too many obnoxious ads, auto-playing videos, outright scams and so on. I will block any ad I can. If too many people do it and the outlet I am reading / watching videos of can't no longer afford to produce content, they can open up donations. If they still can't support the effort on donos, then I think it's time to close shop. I feel like the reality is, someone else will step in. There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized. I am happy for every one of those people who can make it their business and scale their operation up, truly. But I do not feel obliged to keep supporting them being able to produce online works as a business by giving away my privacy and sanity through being subjected by awful ads run by ad networks who think my online data is theirs and that it hasn't made its way to their database yet is a bug they need to fix.
> There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized
I had the same thought. Ads enable people who previously put up their content out of passion to do the same thing to commercial gain. Is this good or bad? On the plus side, it incentivizes the creation of more quality content. On the other hand, "labor of love" content is homier, less corporatized, and the extent to which they will help you on a given problem is not biased by their ability to earn money from said problem.
It's a similar situation between mom and pop restaurants and chains. Now it's hard to say that one or the other is definitively better -- depends on what you're looking for. I wish there were resources out there to help understand the nature of this tradeoff and how it has played out in different areas of the economy.
I theory, I don't mind ads. For years I avoided ad-blockers. Then...
Ads make pages load slower. Ads on mobile browsers make the text jump around while I'm trying to read it. Ads put giant pop-ups over the text that I'm trying to read. Ads start playing loud music, or flash.
The problem isn't ads, it's a lack of bounds about what ads can and can not do.
The web ran fine for years with ad-blockers as a niche; but ad-blockers only got popular when the ads themselves overstepped their bounds and became too intrusive.
I'd be much happier if ads were reasonable and I didn't feel like I needed an ad-blocker just to view the %$#%@ website.
* first-party hosted: no needing to fetch content from 10 different servers
* verified by the site publisher: all ads are relevant and are not obviously malicious
* predictably sized: this goes with the other two, ads must conform to a size that fits in the content and does not push content around
* oh and of course they must never, ever autoplay video or audio
I don't particularly care if this is all too hard to do. If it's just too much, make your product a paid service. Or just don't make it at all, that's fine too.
Yes! Ordinary people like ads. They put magazine ads up as posters in dorm rooms. They quote TV commercial catchphrases and jingles to one another. They watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People talk about podcast host read ads and do parody versions. And people love "influencers," who are just advertisers who say sassy things on Instagram or whatever.
But no one likes web banner advertising. It's just a bad experience! At best people like it when you search and the thing they wanted is at the top of the list because of paid placement. They don't care if the placement was paid or not, but they like seeing the thing they wanted. Banner ads make the experience of using a web page worse, but unlike TV ads or magazine ads, they don't contribute anything good back. It's just "here is an ugly square that disrupts your browsing experience." Publishers should think about other ways of engaging reader attention.
The worst offenders seem to be news sites run by traditional newspapers. Friends share links to these quite a lot, and very often I follow the link to an article that sounds quite interesting, and then... As you say, text jumping around, giant pop-ups, videos playing. I put up with it to a point, but if it's taking me three/four seconds and I'm still trying to close things down to read the article, then I'm thinking "That's a shame. I was interested to read the article... but not _that_ interested". I don't really understand why this happens. Isn't it just obviously bad web design at that point?
My problem with ads is how obtrusive they are nowadays: Ads in the middle of an article, banner ads while playing a video, etc. Those are the ones I hate.
Back in the day my wife was subscribed to Total Film (a UK film magazine), which had several full pages of ads related to sex phone numbers and other similar "services". These were pages at the end of the magazine that where full of ads. We really liked that format, because you could read the content without interruption and sure, if you wanted you could check the ads.
It's the same reason why I hate TV ads that happen at different times within a program, but I don't mind ads in the SuperBowl that happen during the half time. Also why I don't really care about Youtube Ads that happen before a video will start (but if it interrupts the video in the middle, it sucks).
I would be ok with pages that show you an ad when you load it, and then it completely goes away and leaves 100% functionality in the page to do whatever you are supposed to do there.
Yep. I can remember the exact moment I decided to install an adblocker. I was on a comic site, and my entire browser got minimized, to show me a popup. That was it for me.
Exactly. I am perfectly happy to view ads in a context like readthedocs.io- a simple image (with link, of course) placed prominently yet still out of the way. Unfortunately too many sites have decided to make their content impossible to view without an adblocker so I just use uBlock Origin on everything.
It's never going to get better. Sites are going to continue to squeeze every cent of revenue they can per user which will just drive more users to adblockers, making them need to make the ads _even worse_ to maintain income.
I disable my ad blocker on certain sites like Reddit, Twitter,or forums I visit daily. I want to support those sites and I'm fine with ads as long as it's done respectfully.
> You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency.
This is a very superficial take. You obviously don't just pay with attention. You also pay with actual money -- you do, or the friends or family you talk about the product with do. And you don't necessarily do it completely consciously, because one of the effects of "raise awareness" advertising is to make things that are familiar to you seem more attractive. Given three equivalent options, one of which you vaguely remember from somewhere, you're more likely to pick that option.
One could of course argue about whether this payment (using actual money) is good or not, and whether using advertising in this way is ethical, but extracting money from you or your social network is the end goal.
Somewhat-unbelievable arguments about advertising as a whole being a con aside, if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
Right, the attention is only valuable as a way to get to your money. If we somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases, it would seem to be better[0] to just pay with the same amount of money. That would free up a bunch of attention that was being destroyed to redirect the flow of money. That attention could be used to do self-directed research into products and services that you might value ("pull advertising"). On net, this would be far less predatory and more pleasant.
Of course, we can't somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases involved. Pretending we can leads to ludicrous conclusions like mine here: obviously the world is never actually going to work in this way. I think the closest we might get would be to clean up certain types of predatory advertising, maybe starting with anything aimed at young children. Which is of course what most of the world has been trying (and, to a limited extent, succeeding at) for decades.
[0]- There is a credible argument here that the advertising model allows people with more money to subsidize people with less money, but since we have a magic bias-removal wand in this hypothetical, it's still more efficient to just do that directly.
Nobody ever pays with attention. This is a total nonsense idea created by the advertisers to justify their own existence and guilt people who don't accept their noise. It's an attempt to frame us as thiefs and just as dishonest as the copyright industry comparing infringement to high seas piracy.
Payment is when we exchange money for something else. It's a transaction: can't have one without the other. Advertising is when the company sends us stuff for free while hoping that we'll see the noise they bundled alongside it. Absolutely nothing stops us from just filtering that noise. They were hoping to inject some brands into our minds but their attempt failed. Too bad, they need to suck it up and stop whining. Nowhere is it written that we must bend over backwards to make that happen. They don't get to complain about it because nobody owes them a single thing.
This is a really good point. The only reason your attention is valuable is because it is (on average) going to cause you to spend enough money to actually pay for the product, but in a sneaky way you won't quite notice and won't associate with the product itself.
Paying with attention also means paying with time, which is arguably worse than money because time is lost forever. Also, having to pay attention to an ad breaks your focus and flow, and therefore adversely affects what you actually want to do.
> if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
Not necessarily, it could also be a red queen's race. But that also is a net-negative since money gets spent on advertising instead of passing the savings through to the consumer.
I see, you changed your mind because you're now profiting by stealing our attention and hacking our minds. Good thing ad blockers exist and keep getting better and better, hopefully one day they will completely nullify your profits and you'll be able to change your mind again.
It's really as simple as that. The author tries hard to frame it as a learning experience of some sort, but what stuck for me was he could not argumentatively distance himself from the most obvious ulterior motives, making money, the gain from it.
This self-reflection is too shallow and comes across as an excuse imo. But still I appreciate a lot that he actually talks about it to create a discussion.
> but what stuck for me was he could not argumentatively distance himself from the most obvious ulterior motives, making money, the gain from it.
Sure, that could be influencing my reasoning, but it goes the other way too. It's easy to criticize ads as a business model when you don't have skin in the game (ducks). That's why I decided not to bring up either of those points: I'd rather write for people who are willing to focus on the argument instead of assuming bad faith.
Of course, same goes for me, for everyone. I just hope I will stand by my principles even when confronted with frivolous amounts of money, but it didn't happen yet, time will tell.
But I have it easier in this case - because I view subliminal manipulation in advertisements as something horrible. Freud's legacy is one of deception for profit, something immoral right at the core. Creating useless needs, producing useless goods, deception has become the norm.
The playing on the weakness of the human mind is something horrible. It makes a mockery of our intellect.
I can't wait for the author's follow up, "I've changed my mind about hijacking visitors systems to mine cryptocurrency" once the ads don't pay well enough anymore.
The whole article could have been replaced with the line "I changed my mind about advertising because I now make money from advertising". The fact that the author feels compelled to spin it out to a 480 word article suggests some deep-rooted unease with this, and also illustrates one of the (many) issues with an advertising-based revenue model - you have to learn to waste users time (aka "maximise for engagement") to maximise revenue.
Digging a little deeper, the fact that 10% of forwarded emails are sponsored[0] highlights another major issue with advertising - the conflict of interest between user needs and site operator's profit. How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which are potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the site operator's desire for profit)? And what is to stop the signal to noise ratio becoming completely untenable over time in the desire to maximise profit?
I'm not completely anti-advertising BTW - there is a time and place for it. Just not when you are trying to use informational sites on the web. The analogy I've used is that you don't want annoying salespeople in a library getting between you and your books, but you don't mind them so much when you are down the high street shopping.
> The whole article could have been replaced with the line "I changed my mind about advertising because I now make money from advertising".
I responded to this sentiment in another comment, but I'll just quote from the HN guidelines here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."[1]
> How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which are potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the site operator's desire for profit)?
Because ads are clearly marked with a "sponsored" label.
> And what is to stop the signal to noise ratio becoming completely untenable over time in the desire to maximise profit?
Because if we send people newsletters they don't like, they'll be more likely to stop using the service.
> the conflict of interest between user needs and site operator's profit.
Interesting anecdote: I haven't measured this in a while, but at least when we first introduced ads, the sponsored newsletters tended to be rated more highly than the "organic" newsletters.
>> How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which are potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the site operator's desire for profit)?
> Because ads are clearly marked with a "sponsored" label.
You've already demonstrated that you're willing to go back on previously held principles and commitments for profit. Why stop with just putting in ads? Why not stop marking ads with a sponsored label? Why not include a cryptominer payload? And why should anyone believe you when you say you won't?
- being tracked around the internet without a very good reason
- being lied to by advertisers that make spurious claims
- adverts that use flashing/moving things to draw my attention
- anything that makes my computer make a sound when I might be somewhere quiet
- anything that grossly wastes electricity or bandwidth
- anything that's not related to the context of the page I'm looking at (see point 1)
Ad platforms like Google AdSense's text adverts, or Carbon Ads, would be kind of OK if they didn't track the heck out of me. It's the ever-escalating attention war between content and ads that's the main problem. It started with "punch the monkey" ads that tricked people into clicking, and it's continuing with full-page-take-over-the-browser-video-ads now.
Advertising is fine. Taking my full attention away from what I want to focus on without my permission is not.
Ugh honestly the text adverts are more annoying than banners and the like. It makes it feel like the _content of the site itself_ is being optimized for revenue, rather than being useful content. And god forbid you hover the wrong word and bring up a 400x400 popover telling you how great some product is.
Maybe these aren't AdSense text adverts, but this was my general experience with text adverts as a whole.
People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things. There is a happy medium where good advertising can subsidize things people only kind of want to pay for.
People are largely indifferent or sometimes like good advertising. Super Bowl ads, for example, often draw as much of a crowd as the game itself because the ads are well produced and entertaining. The problem is there is always pressure to make more and more money and eventually that leads to bad practices in advertising.
Examples of Bad Advertising:
- Popups or other types of digital ads that compromise the user experience
- Privacy compromising tracking
- Misleading / false advertising
- Over-saturation of advertising
- Outdoor ads that block a beautiful view
The whole digital advertising landscape, unfortunately, is filled with some of the worst advertising we have seen in the modern era. The ads are sold too cheaply and at too high of a volume causing over saturation.
I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an advertiser, with the following features:
* it's a different interview each episode
* many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff. For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good advertising for them.
* I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast
Now that is a lot of effort both for the producer and for the advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several years, so it seems to work.
---
The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small podcast. You really need something bigger to make it worthwhile.
The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising. Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more. Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial.
What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know, the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying ads.
Covid lockdowns shifted attitudes about wfh so significantly.
I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways. Would be really interesting to see what would happen after the prohibition was lifted.
> People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things.
People hate having to put effort or risk into paying for things. Online payment was ridiculously blasted with friction even before PSD2 hit thanks to all the fraud going on, now it's even worse. Not to mention you can't just go and pay 10-50 cents to view a single online news article behind a paywall - the papers all want your personal data to upsell you, don't offer non-subscription models, and make bailing out of subscriptions ridiculously hard. And the credit card industry wants their cut on top, too, which makes micropayments even more expensive to offer.
How did iTunes, Spotify and Netflix get so big and essentially killed piracy in their respective markets? They offered an easy, risk-free way for consumers to access content they want. Everyone else - particularly news media - hasn't gotten the hint yet.
How to fix it? I think the situation needs to be fixed from two sides:
First is obviously banking. There should absolutely be an international (!) instant banking network - I'm thinking about something like expanding SEPA Instant payments, but specialized on nano-transactions, and correspondingly low fees. Then, a bank issues auth tokens that allow a set budget of micropayments to users; their browsers then upon authentication (e.g. fingerprint or user's password) automatically emit a micropayment transaction - basically, the user visits a paywall site, an OS/browser dialog pops up that asks for confirmation to pay e.g. 10 cents to the New York Times, the user presses their finger on Touch ID, and a second later the NYT has their ten cents and I can read the article.
The other side is content authors themselves. They absolutely need to get rid of the need to know everything about their customer and to lock them in. Provide good content and the people will come.
Written media hasn’t figured it out yet. Though NYTimes is trying to get there with their recent acquisitions. I would pay 10-15 bucks a month to access a lot of quality written content, but print charges more and is more limited in the amount of content you receive. And it feels like you should have access to everything when you are on the internet. Hitting a paywall when trying to read a 500 word article is a bad feeling.
The problem is, how to actually fund decent journalism? Quality journalism costs money, and personally I pay about 40€ in total a month for a selection of quality media.
Crap journalism - and I'm not just talking about clickbait of the Buzzfeed style, but especially right-wing-leaning rags - in contrast are funded by dark or enemy government money, so they can publish their crap without needing paywalls... which leads to people drifting towards these for getting their news.
Austria has experimented with a different system, in contrast: there, the government pays a ton of money in advertising, so newspapers are essentially free - but at the cost of corruption like the scandal that (thankfully) caused the demise of the former Chancellor Kurz.
As someone who lost a day of work because a clever ad prompted my partner to install malware (it looked like an official Adobe Flash update), I'll continue blocking most ads for the foreseeable future.
The only ads that I don't block are banner ads posted by small time websites. For example, a sports blog for my almamater hosts their own local ads. I don't block those because all their ads are image banners with a link to local to the university businesses.
Consider a newspaper with articles and ads. The customer is absolutely aware of the attention currency when there are articles side-by-side with ads. And the customer may decide NOT to pick up the free local "paper" in the supermarket bin that's 80% ads with only a few articles.
On the other hand, when there are ads that are formatted like articles, but with a little disclaimer ("This is a paid advertisement"). Those can be confusing. Better newspapers will do things like using a black border or requiring a different font to make it easier for customers to tell the difference. Finally, there are articles written by the newspaper's journalists about a topic chosen by an advertiser -- those are VERY subtle and confusing to the customer.
I presume you can on your own extend this metaphor from newspapers to the Web.
Just for a moment imagine a world without any ads. I for one do not have to imagine that, but just have to remember back, when I grew up in the eastern block.
What you wanted to buy was available in the stores and you could always ask someone, if you needed something very special.
If an ad were merely a statement of existence - but that not what ads have become: "brand refresh", "pivot", "awareness", "emotion", or any other subtle or not so subtle message that wants to influence you. I see so many people driven to "buy" things they do not need and then "buy" again books on how to clean the mess up. From where I'm standing, this is all just very ridiculous at this point.
Note that I am not saying there is a free will, not at all, but hey, do I want to this endless mostly senseless stream of unneeded stuff let influence me or something a little more grounded?
There is little to distinguish paid advertising to content marketing or PR. Which both easily bleed into the larger media ecosystem. If you take a step back most of our experiences, even on HN, are from press releases or news articles driven largely by marketing. It works. I’ve spent over a 18 years understanding and working in the sector. You can’t escape it. There is no centralized view on its ethical responsibilities. But there is no doubt that advertising and marketing and the media at large influence people and alter their behaviors.
Yes, we should replace "free" ad supported business models, which are in fact anything but, with ones where the customer pays and are therefore the beneficiaries of the work being carried out.
There are technical challenges to doing this as it requires sufficiently frictionless micropayments, but the biggest challenge is cultural. People are pretty addicted to "free" crap, so it's far from a given that most people will ever be willing to pay whatever arguments there are in favour of it. I think there's something of a pushback brewing though.
If nobody was ever in a position where they had to compromise their principles in order to not die, it would be easier to look down on people who do compromise their principles for money.
That's what I thought you meant. So in the analogy that means we should ensure people have a source of income that means they don't have to compromise their (anti-ad) principles as the author did. Which I agree with.
If you didn't mean to further the analogy but instead were expressing a general desire to live in a Star Trek like post scarcity world then I'm with you on that too, but I don't see the relevance.
I suspect the disagreement stems from the idea that to remove advertising we have to find another way for people to pay for services which are currently ad-financed. It neglects other options such as those services getting banned and ceasing to exist because they're not economical.
Or perhaps, if ads have any positive value at all, capturing that value in a less adversarial way and financing things we want through that. E.g. if we had an objective recommender service that made the economy more efficient we could tax it somehow and distribute those taxes to economically marginal but desirable services.
Attention as a currency is an interesting mental model to approach it from, but I think it makes advertising look even more unethical.
There’s no contract for my attention, no agreement for me to pay. It makes ad supported sites less like a museum with a suggested donation box, and more like a museum with a pickpocket. Their business model may rely on that stolen money, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.
This also has me thinking about the monetary cost of ads to the viewer. Ads consume my time, my electricity, and wear and tear on computer components. It may be a faction of a penny, but ads only bring in a fraction of a penny. All without my permission.
Coping recently have taken on a negative meaning that was previously served by "apologist" among others. In this case, OP just became an apologist for the advertisement industry, because he found that it can make him money that he couldn't previously achieve.
This, and only this. He literally states "Fast forward two years and several pivots, and my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads."
I used to hate ads, until I started making money from ads. Now I am writing this fluff piece where I try to use rhetoric to re-frame the paradigm where I was once a disgruntled user, but now I am a profitable pusher.
Particularly distasteful is the notion that "attention is a form of micropayment with low friction". If in the Library of Babel, all combinations of words are possible, I do not believe a more loathsome or self-serving bit of drivel could be found.
We as humans are quite excellent in judging our own behavior as correct. We are not so good at imagining the downstream effects of our actions. The author is no doubt correct that there are not catastrophic effects from his choice of business model, but then to conclude that it means that advertising is really fine as long as some constraints are net seems to ignore that combined with corporate directives to (by law) maximize profit, large-scale ad-based businesses will find more and more justification for releasing those constraints. I’m a fan of brownies but it doesn’t mean I’m going to argue that sugar is not harmful and the sugar industry not a driver of poor health outcomes.
I have this theory that without ads 90% of the web as we know it would end immediately. And nothing of value would be lost.
Without all the noise created by the web supported by ads it would be way easier to find what really interests me on the web: hobbyists and people that love to share information for the value of sharing alone. Not SEO optimized crapware with uncountable 5 best this, 10 best that.
Yeah. Who really cares if these shitty websites go away? I'd very much enjoy it if the web went back to its roots where people made a website because they actually had something to say instead of inflammatory clickbait bullshit designed to optimize "engagement". I don't even surf the web anymore, this is one of the few sites I still visit.
Remember when early Google ads were useful? And not annoying. If you can hook me up with a product or service I might want that's great. In contrast I switched from liberty mutual insurance because their ads annoy me.
> In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low friction.
No. Modern targeting includes at least dozens, maybe hundreds of ways to surveil you without your knowledge or consent. A micropayment would transaction would include your full knowledge of what you were giving up in exchange for a commodity you consciously chose to pay for.
We should commend the author for the transparency with which he describes the philosophical progression from "against advertising" to "in favor of advertising, now that I'm making money from it".
The worst argument I hear all the time, is that ads help pay for the content you consume. That's not true. The money still comes from you.
It's just charged extra the next time you buy a product, given to a marketing team, who give it to Google, who then give it to your content creator. And you better believe, that every party takes a sizeable cut. [1]
And for what? What's the value added by advertisements that couldn't also come from independent reviewers, journalists or comparison sites?
It's obfuscation. Make a product appear more popular than it is, close out the competition, stay in peoples minds, _lie without repercussion_ [2].
The author argues that ads are low-friction. It may seem that way when all the infrastructure is already set up: The automatic auctions, the marketing teams scripting, drawing and filming the ads, the confused and annoyed consumers, the additional bandwidth...
But surely, we can come up with less frictional system, right?
You don’t have to. Getting paid from something you disrespect is more or less okay and ubiquitous. It doesn’t even have to be symmetrical. I bet that ads are the way they are not because ads bigcorps are 99% stupid, but because it actually 99% works better than we fantasize here about how nice and discovery ads could be. It doesn’t work for you, but it probably does for average Joe, so put it on your site and use adblock.
Ads aren't a problem if there are multiple competing services to choose from. If customers care about the ad-related UX then they'll switch to a better competitor. The problem is monopoly (as usual).
I recently switched to a new tech publication because the old one had a "page jumping" problem (related to ads) that they didn't fix for a while even after I sent them a message. No big deal - this is how a good market works.
Another problem is bad discovery mechanisms. Google search should de-rank pages with to many spammy ads, but that's not in their interests due to their control of the ads ecosystem. This does kind of come back to being a monopoly problem.
A cool feature of ads that's not mentioned in the blog post is that they automatically price discriminate. Rich people effectively pay more and subsidise the content for those from developing countries. This probably angers rich people more because they (somewhat subconsciously) value their attention at a rate which makes the content seem expensive.
Of course, there are still problems to solve with malware, excessive tracking, etc. but these don't seem intractable.
> When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer.
That isn't really true though. The company that uses an ad-supported model can't pay its bill with a user's attention, it pays its bill with the revenue it gets from funneling those users into clicking on ads. The author can try to redefine what a customer and a product is, but the bottom line is that they are receiving money in exchange for ad clicks, which means their customers are the ad company, and the product are the clicks. This whole article reads like the author is trying to cope with the fact that they are willing to do the thing that actively makes their product worse, if it means they get more money.
I haven't changed my mind about advertising, even if it means my project will always operate at a loss, I'm prepared for that. People that want to support it can subscribe to the Patreon, and they get some extra stuff, but I'm not going to try and monetize bot traffic by stuffing my pages full of ads.
The article even states at the end that it doesn't touch on the fact that advertising has shifted how content is displayed and even created, which I find hilarious. Adblockers have mitigated a lot of the "attention cost" associated with ads but not the fact that clickbait, "list" articles that require a page reload for every item, etc are now the norm.
>I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
And of course there are people who disagree ( but the upvote suggest otherwise ). I am not sure if this submission was a response to that or a coincidence. But a lot of the replies here pretty much make my point.
A lot of people on HN either have an idealistic view point of Ads, or a near zero understand of Ads as a business.
> Along the way I've also adopted a new mental model for advertising. Basically I think of attention as a currency and advertising as a foreign exchange. When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency.
This is missing what I think is the most important value proposition of online advertising these days: your profile, your data, what you like, so that you, personally, can be psychologically squeezed for money.
"Your attention" is a small percentage of the value proposition compared to the tracking and all the things that tracking enables (profile creation, targeted advertising, etc.).
What would everyone think about trying to increase ad payouts?
My feeling is that Google took 50% of the ad revenue 20 years ago and Facebook took perhaps 40% after that, so the remaining ad networks are trying to operate on 1/10 the revenue they enjoyed in the 1990s and that's why ad income is no longer viable for most of us. My numbers are probably way off but my sentiment isn't.
It seems like we could fix that through various privacy/legal channels (breaking up big ad agencies?) and organizing against monopolies and duopolies.
I don't expect that to be successful, but it could open a broader conversation about where the web went wrong doubling down on in its ever-escalating wealth inequality instead of engineering stuff like UBI that would have brought shared prosperity for everyone.
This reads to me as: "I couldn't make money from my business without ads, so now I think ads are okay."
I've been living advertisement-free since 2010. My mother thinks she's immune to advertisments. Her reasoning is that ads are so annoying, they'll have the opposite effect on her.
I respect her line of thinking, but a while back when we discussed ads, I asked her the following question:
"How often do you think about buying something?"
She thought about multiple times per week, probably even multiple times per day.
She asked me the same question, and I had to dig really deep to finally answer:
"I haven't thought about buying something other than groceries for months."
So people are mostly talking about ads in general or hypocrisy, but I do think the author's point has some merit here. Frictionless payments and eliminating transaction overhead is a real benefit of ads, and I think one way to reduce reliance on ads would be to explore other avenues of addressing this problem.
Like, riffing: you could maybe have some kind of automatic implicit patreon type thing. You sign up for "auto-patreon" and put $5/month in your account, you allow any site to charge up to $.10 a day, then you just browse the internet and sites will automatically charge you for usage.
My small input to this debate: I know I certainly bought—-actually paid for—-magazines like Computer Shopper just to browse the ads. I think many folks on HN of my generation likely did the same.
> When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency.
The problem with this view point is that it's not just our attention that's being taken. If it were then the notion that "you are the product" wouldn't have gained such currency in the first place.
I look forward to UBI making it more profitable to sell people the shit they already want, than try to farm up some new demand when there is already plenty.
Humans are not very rational, to our detriment. Most advertisements make use of logical fallacies to convince people they need a product. Most advertisements are therefore mentally unhealthy both because they actively deceive people and because they lower the sanity line in public discourse by getting people used to believing bullshit unquestioningly which makes them more vulnerable to propaganda.
My startup eschews ads and has a low cost subscription news service. However, both models work for different market segments.
1. The segment of users that doesn't really care about the quality of news and is happy to skim headlines is best served by ads. (This is the largest segment)
2. The segment of users who wants to be fully informed, as quickly as possible, is better served by a subscription.
> Fast forward two years and several pivots, and my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads.
This entire piece just feels like someone trying to rationalize their choice to do something they previously considered yucky, because that thing turns out to be lucrative.
> In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low friction.
This is an interesting way of framing it, one I am surprised I actually like.
When framed this way, it's easier for me to coherently say "I don't agree to use this payment method". I say that by using an ad blocker. And if you still give me the content of your site, despite the presence of the ad blocker, that's on you.
This framing does have flaws. A traditional payment goes through some kind of order and confirmation flow. "Taking my payment" -- i.e. foisting ads upon me -- before confirming I am ok paying that way, is not ok. I'd be fine with a page that popped up a modal saying "This site requires payment in the form of attention (advertisements). Click 'Accept' if you agree to these terms." I would be happy to see sites being up-front with that, so I can choose to close the browser tab rather than waste my attention. (Sites with ad-blocker blockers more or less do this, and I'm fine not consuming their content.)
I get that cash micropayments have all sorts of problems, but I do wish that was at least a viable option.
> This doesn't address more salient concerns with advertising, like sharing data with 3rd parties or the question of if it pushes companies to maximize for engagement more than they otherwise would.
While I agree those are big problems, for me, the problem is that I see advertising as a form of mental and emotional manipulation. I don't want to be treated like someone who must be manipulated into purchasing something, even if it is something that I need or would find genuinely useful.
Having said that, I'm not sure how our economic system would look if all advertising (not just online) were banned. Our economic system depends on consumerism, and no advertising would severely damage sellers' ability to get consumers to open their wallets. Not saying that would be a bad thing, but it would certainly cause a huge upheaval, which could be painful for a lot of people, at least for a time.
Targeted advertising isn't all that bad if it provides useful choice in an otherwise crowded market. Where I disagree with the premise is when advertising becomes predatory in a lot of ways is when it preys on psychology and emotion - particularly disgust, anger, distrust in some cases.
> When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency
But this is exactly what we meant when we said that you are the product. Your attention is being sold to advertisers, under the assumption that it will be converted into regular currency in the form of influencing your purchasing decisions.
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I'm not going to jump on the hate wagon, if the author changed their mind, fine. There are more constructive ways to engage than calling them a traitor. But this sentence really confuses me, it's like saying, "you're not the product, your blood is." What did you used to mean when you said that the user was the product, if not that the user's own presence and mental state was being sold?
It's also worth noting (and doesn't get brought up that often) that advertisers only care about consumer attention because it gets converted through roundabout processes into consumer spending. The whole of the advertising model relies on the idea that being able to get people's attention allows advertisers to change what consumers buy. Even the most innocent, ethical forms of advertising where people are genuinely being made aware of a product that they didn't know existed and that solves one of their needs still operates under this premise. What advertising does is it directly sells people's attention, and indirectly sells people's purchasing decisions.
This is exactly why some people like me are so anti-advertising in its current online form. Sites need to maximize attention so that they can siphon some of that attention towards a product. This leads to some bad outcomes in what content gets produced, and I personally believe it leads to bad outcomes overall for society -- I think it leads to a situation where people are constantly having their concentration/focus/awareness drained from them. This is (in my mind) exacerbated by the fact that advertising is often omnipresent rather than the result of a conscious decision to "spend" attention. With money, you get a purchase screen. With ads, they just kind of show up in your regular life. The advertising model often takes the form of ads inserting themselves into other unrelated activities without explicit permission or any explicit contract with the consumer.
Going back to the blood analogy, if a normal monetary model is kind of like getting blood drawn and selling it, advertising is more like mosquitoes. Advertisers show up where you want to be, and while you're doing other things they suck your blood; there's very rarely an explicit transactional step where you decide to give them your blood, and the only way to get rid of them is to either not go into certain places at all or to block them as best as you can.
----
Again, I don't want to just jump on the author and make them feel bad. It's good for someone to write a piece like this and try to think through why they're doing the things they do and to describe how they feel about advertising. It's better for this piece to be written then for the author to just ignore the disconnect. And I'll also push back on some of the blanket criticisms, because ads as micropayments is also a good way of looking at why the advertising industry has thrived online. I think that is a really good insight, I have often complained that one of the things holding back the web is the absence of a good, low-fee, (it feels weird to use word this in relation to ads, but we're talking comparatively here) "private" micropayments system (and no, cryptocurrency is not currently solving this problem).
However, ultimately I find the arguments in this piece really uncompelling, and they don't capture why I oppose advertising in the first place. I'm not necessarily saying that paying via attention is always wrong, nor am I saying that consumers never want to know about new products. However, the way the advertising industry currently operates is (I believe) bad for society on an almost fundamental level, and making those ads less invasive or making them more private doesn't really solve the problem. Even if you look at a browser like Brave, Brave is trying to tackle privacy issues with advertising, but it's not tackling the more fundamental issue that an omnipresent monetization of attention is toxic for society.
This article doesn't offer any strong reasoning as to why I should change my mind about that. I already knew ads monetize attention, that's one of the biggest parts about them that I don't like.
That's a lot of words for 'whose bread I eat, their song I sing'.
Author didn't like ads for good reasons, now likes ads because he's making money of them, followed by mental gymnastics as to why they're good. If you like money, just say so.
I'm no fan of ads either but one undeniable benefit is equality; if Google cost money to use then those in poverty would simply be unable to use it. The service is paid for by the wealthiest (as these are the most valuable eyeballs to advertisers anyway).
What people in the HN bubble don't often think about is that not every user can pay without advertising. Many people in the world cannot afford to pay for a service with money. Donations only go so far in supporting these types of services.
Well, good luck not going down the slippery slope of slowly changing your services to whatever will maximize engagement and deliver the most ads to the most eyeballs, regardless of how healthy this user engagement is, dude.
I'm assuming that he is running an ad-supported business on the Internet, and will be subject to the same temptations that everyone who runs an ad-supported business on the Internet are subject to. Perhaps he will manage to avoid these temptations, especially if his thing makes enough to give him a comfortable profit without courting VC and its demands to pivot into whatever model results in the most unicorns flying through the air on jets of cash expelled out of their buttholes. Perhaps he will not.
In an economic system where generating capital did not lead production ads would not exist, but information would. Information on products. Not emotional manipulation for consumption, but technical knowledge of tools.
Advertising is fundamentally waste -- if everyone spends the same amount of resources on advertising, no gains are made but a lot of resources are spent. How can this be justified?
Nothing wrong with ads if the user opts-in. Most ads online are opt-out (where "opt" usually means installing an ad-blocker). This is terrifyingly invasive.
I remember a healthy internet without ads and I would go on and say that safe for some topics there is less content than there used to be, e.g. 15 years ago.
Flowers blossom to attract insects in exchange for nectar. You might call this good advertisement.
But there are plants who "advertise" like flowers who have nectar, but really don't. So they trick the insects into visiting them to spread their pollen, but they do notngive nectqr in return.
Economy is like the forest. Companies are the trees and advertising they buy are the tree trunks.
If they somehow cooperatively agreed to grow shorter trunks they would save so much nutrients. But since they compete with each other they need to grow as tall as it is physically possible, to avoid being overshadowed by others.
Whole advertising industry should be nationalized and scaled back to non-profit that would mainly keep online and up to date a catalog of goods and services with dry data and test results.
The early internet was preposed to have so called micro-paywalls by Ted Nelson, somehow the pioneers didn't really push for this paradigm. It would have created a generally sanity preserving web.
Well of course once something starts making you money you will stop looking down on it. This dude clearly demonstrated post-hoc rationalization in action.
This is what stood out to me though:
> In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low friction.
It's anything BUT low friction. The attention-based economy is a race to the bottom where every vendor SCREAMS THEIR LUNGS OUT just for a few minutes of your time and even if you indulge only 20 of them you'll still emerge not very informed on the other side, with your time wasted, and with your brain's ability to focus gradually eroded.
That last part is -- and should be officially labeled as -- a criminal act.
I don't mind if this or that website has some unobtrusive ads (Troy Hunt's website is a very good example; StackExchange is also fine). The problem is that EVERYONE wants a piece of the sweet ad money so the users get bombarded with them from all directions.
No, it's not low friction at all. Not for the users / consumers anyway. To them it's a minefield.
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I even want ads in some areas. But the line between being informative / optional and obnoxious / prevalent-and-mandatory has been crossed at least 15 years ago, both in TV and the Internet. Tone them down and even us the techies might start enabling them -- because every now and then they are in fact useful.
The reason I am disabling ads and I'm fighting them is because I know that by default they'll not give me anything I want, will take precious screen estate (25% of the screen ON A PHONE, REALLY?!), will get in the way and will do their absolute best to make me mis-click / mis-tap so they can get their $0.0001 because I "interacted with the ad". You ever tried to open an erotic video posted on Reddit without your content blockers? Good luck with that. Hint: moving elements on the screen. As if we're playing Asteroids and Brick Breaker at the same time.
Of course I'll block ads. Advertisers must become good citizens of the net and we can then re-negotiate. Until then they will be treated like scum -- because they act like such, all the time.
---
Sadly none of that even touches on the outright malware that comes attached with a lot of modern advertising, to the point that Samsung actually issued a warning to not utter certain words IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME because their TV is listening.
<facepalms>
Just let that sink in for a minute.
...So OK, the guy made some money and now his perception is warped. Nothing particularly illuminating about his article however.
One of my main issues with the idea of advertising as the attention economy that pays for the internet is that with the VC structures that fund startups, most services don't demand profitability until they're well into (or past) the scale-up phase. So, the typical growth curve for a "free" online product seems to be:
-free to use at the beginning, no ads, "we are a startup! we do this cool thing that you will love"
-as a critical mass of users is built and the demands for profit begin, it turns into "we are a scale-up. we're sorry to do this, but we need to monetize in some token and nonintrusive way"
-eventually, the tool/service/offering becomes a critical gatekeeper (login with FB/Google/Apple; you need an email address to apply for any professional job today; event organizing gets walled behind FB accounts; can't read twitter/reddit/fb--places where legtimate--though possibly ill-informed or intentionally manipulated--discourse actually takes place), "hey, the shareholders demand growth and dividends. enjoy the ads we sold your eyeballs for."
Who ever asked for their smart TV to show ads as part of the software? No one? Why does the stock weather app on my Samsung phone have ads--it didn't always. I didn't sign up for this.
I signed up for a non-intrusive experience. The service got made into something that should you choose not to participate, you will suffer economically. And the advertising got inserted--accept the EULA and the ads, or suffer the consequences.
BTW: ads don't work nearly as well as the ad publishers want you to think they do. The measurement is manipulated by the companies who do ad measurement (I work for one of these), because if the measurement makes the ads look bad, then Google (or whoever) will just find a different ad measurement company (very 2008 bond-rating-agency dynamic going on here). The publishers, of course don't mind inflated estimates of ad effectiveness, because the more successful advertising is on their platform, the more they can sell ad space for, and the more ad space they can sell. The marketers at the advertiser don't want accurate measurement--they want to look like last year's ad campaign did well because that's how the marketers get their annual bonuses. (We report results to the publishers, and the marketers at the advertisers. We should really be reporting to the CFO, because if you're a shareholder YOU ARE LOSING VALUE BECAUSE OF THE WASTE AND FRAUD IN THE AD ECOYSTEM.
Want to learn more? Freakonomics Radio has a couple good shows on how advertising doesn't really work. Professor Kinshuk Jerath (Columbia University) has written recently about the misalignment of incentives in the advertising ecosystem (i.e., pubs don't care about inflated results; marketers don't either, and it's in the best interest of the ad measurer to look good). Professor Anna Tuchman (Northwestern University), et. al. have recently done a huge analysis of TV advertising, suggesting that its effects are an order of magnitude lower than the ad industry would have you believe.
Indeed. Why do people rationalise this stuff in such an odd way? Attention isn't currency and advertising isn't a foreign exchange. They mention about having a new "mental model" so mental gymnastics is probably an appropriate term in this case.
One of the things traditional Christianity has going for it is that any adherent is supposed to accept, at core, that they are not an inherently good person.
Doesn't mean everything you do is automatically terrible, but in many Christians it does encourage self-reflection and self-awareness, because of the knowledge that any given impulse you have may actually be a selfish one that's terrible for other people.
...granted, it doesn't always work that way in conservative US evangelicalism. Even there it does sometimes, though.
The Inquisition was a truly horrible desecration against many unfortunate human beings.
What I know of the Gospels makes me believe the Inquisitors were in no sense followers of Christ.
(Of course, the Inquisition has nothing to do with the point I was making, but that point was itself a rabbit trail, so I suppose turnabout is fair play.)
I mean the less-cynical take is now that the author actually understands the reality of the business instead of the warped outsider's perception it doesn't seem half as evil as he was made to believe. I can respect that.
The outsider perspective of (especially online) advertising or for those that work with it is overtly rotten and “evil” - it’s doesn’t follow that somehow it’s better on the inside. It isn’t a sausage factory, it’s a sewage treatment plant.
I’ve grown up close to a sewage treatment plant and have been taken on a couple hours’ tour of it in middle school. And what do you know, while there is a faint odour in the air (much weaker than, say, near a barn or a stable, but it’s there), it’s one of the most sparkling-clean, meticulously organized workplaces I’ve seen before or since. I’ve been to chemistry labs with worse plumbing and more clutter than that, let alone industrial facilities.
I mean, it’s not that surprising in hindsight—if it’s clean everything or drown in literal shit, you bet it’s going to be clean. But it’s definitely not what I expected. (Probably helps they didn’t get their funding or wages cut while the surrounding country was falling apart, chemistry labs and all, for the same reason.)
I highly respect the workers of sewage treatment plants, because I could never work there, without having my smell sense removed.
But there are differences to the plants, I think you can make them enclosed and allmost smell less.
But the one in my area does not have that tech and they stink.
A counter-anecdote: I went into the advertising field neutral to the profession, and the more I learned about it the more I disliked it, to the point of disdain. Leaving the industry was the best career choice I've ever made. It's an abusive industry that somehow manages to be very self-congratulatory.
The saddest part of this for me is that there are some incredibly talented people wasting all their energy making ads for oil companies and health insurers. Though, I suppose that happens everywhere... everyone needs to make a buck.
Yup. I consulted for an advertiser for a while. "Never again," said I.
I think of it as a filtering function. Many people go in. But the ones who stay are the ones ok making a living from manipulating folks to do whatever people with money want.
The best kind of businesses are those where the pipeline is distributed and each participant can keep telling themselves they’re definitely the good guys.
He directly acknowledges that his piece doesn't address "more salient concerns with advertising," and I'd go as far as to say it doesn't address any of the biggest concerns. Insert some variation of "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" here.
> In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine… that list gets resorted
A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such guardrails. It recommends things that reflect someone else's economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.
Exactly - there are many ads for products which are unhealthy, dangerous, or just very low quality. All of us have probably bought some in each category and regretted it.
I'm not trying to defend ads in general, but one problem that a recommender engine certainly suffers from is how to deal with a new entity. How do you make a new entrant gets into that list even though, while they may provide value, there's currently no evidence of that are far as the recommender is concerned?
While often ignored, item-to-item similarity recommenders work really well for new items and have been the basis for Amazon's and YouTube's early recommendation algorithms
I think you may be misunderstanding the parent (I may also be misunderstanding though) - they're saying that with a new user (not a new product), you have no information for providing recommendations to them; you have no idea what they're interested in.
I was talking about new products/movies/whatever, not users. Sorry, "new entity" was too vague in retrospect.
My point was around the utility of marketing, at least in theory. If I release a new brand of baked beans, how would a recommender based on past sales (and combinations of sales) know to recommend it to anyone. Marketing allows it to go up the list (unfairly, according to the post I was replying to).
Ah, okay. Then yeah, the original reply is valid. I assumed you meant a new user to a site, since you can't recommend anything then no matter what you've built (without user tracking that can maybe have built up some kind of profile from elsewhere).
One (partial) way of looking at it is that modern advertising is a recommendation engine, but just reworked to be adversarial.
Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that recommendation list because a large portion of them know that the recommendation list is adversarial.
So, modern advertisers are left with two options:
1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside other content).
2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to influence results).
Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it somewhat adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to buy things against your own best interest. But it's not so adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you to stop eating it.
In a perfect market economy, those two lists are equal.
Thats because the company who produces the product you are most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads. Products you aren't very interested in, either because they cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be able to afford to get to the top ad spot.
In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product to spend on advertising widely varies.
"Perfect market" is a technical term meaning one where "buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that monopoly is absent and market prices cannot be manipulated". A perfect market would not help this problem.
The notion that perfect realizations of Econ 101 concepts would produce outcomes everybody likes it both wrong and quasi-religious. It's like saying, "The perfect knife would never cut a human." Nope.
If anything, the whole purpose of advertising is to create market distortions. Look at Coke vs Pepsi, for example. Billions are spent yearly to manipulate consumers to make choices that differ from whatever the natural marketplace outcome would be.
What's more, even in a perfect market as you describe, advertising will only ever represent the subset of the solution space for any given problem that involves spending money. With how powerful a voice advertising has, we end up training people to deal with problems by buying rather than doing/learning/making.
In a perfect market, the top ad would be for the best treadmill. You'd never see an ad for just going outside for a run.
In a totally perfect market, the park charges runners a few cents to go for a run, and spends some of that revenue on advertising the park to runners, and then they would outcompete treadmill ads (for some users).
The reason you don't see this is because free parks are themselves a market distortion.
> my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads.
It doesn't take much to convert him either!
Initially I thought his argument was "I thought using ads doesn't bring any revenue, but now I'm paying for ads and making a net $900" which at least would argue some evidence that using advertising is not useless.
However it seems like he's just getting paid $900/month to run ads... so in this case he could have been correct in the beginning and just changed his mind because he's on the winning end of a scam. Not saying that advertising doesn't work, just that his position provides no evidence for that.
If you ask people pointed enough questions, you'll soon find that their "subconscious" reasoning is just conscious reasoning that they don't attribute to themselves.
Or have chosen to not be aware of. We live in an age of abundant information with many opportunities for pursuing self-awareness. But people are very good at avoiding thinking about things that would make them feel cognitive dissonance.
E.g., look at religion. They can't all be correct. Fully rational people would surely want to get something so important right, so they'd work hard to discover the sources of confusion and sort things out. Instead we see religions and religious factions multiply. Thanks to fMRIs, we can even see that "what god wants" is just people "unconsciously" reading their own preferences: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i...
Not even. If you don't take the roundabout route, they will definitely often use what Wikipedia calls "weasel words" to directly explain their thinking, in "plenty of" other anonymous people's mouths, in the passive voice.
I expect that happens plenty, but there is such a thing as the subconscious, and I don't think everyone who lacks a full understanding of their own mind is operating in bad faith.
Where did he ever say anything about a "sworn principle" against ads? All I see is this:
I believed that in addition to being annoying, it was unnecessary—that if for some reason advertising became infeasible, sure, some companies would go out of business, but they'd be replaced by better companies with other business models, and the rest of us would be better off for it.
So basically "ads are annoying and unnecessary". Changing that opinion is not exactly some dramatic change in fundamental principles.
I'm not engaging in some elaborate research project here. This isn't that important. If the guy has previous statements about a "sworn principle" against advertising then good for him I guess. But it's not in the article we're discussing now.
Advertising is not micropayment with low friction. That’s like saying war is just the other country buying weapons for free.
Advertising is an attempt at making the customer pay for stuff. Attention is free and so you cannot stop or prevent advertisements, they are a form of free speech if you will. However we are talking about the extent you go to profile users and tailor the ads to them. Google personalizes on a per user basis and everything they do is to get that data.
> Advertising is an attempt at making the customer pay for stuff.
Yeah that's who's supposed to be paying for things?
It sounds like you're maybe alluding to a kind of advertising that's unavoidable by just existing in the world, like billboards or bus ads or something, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
Or I guess a product that you don't know is going to have an ad, you use it, then bam an ad. Sure, in some way that's kind of like taking money without your consent.
But once you know a product uses ads, you can just not use it because you don't like the way they charge you for it.
Lots of people talking about how advertising is terrible in the comments here. Unfortunately, much of the internet is dependent on ads for revenue. I am personally working to improve the technology behind the ad ecosystem, so we can not worry so much about privacy and page performance, along with malware and other issues. I’d love to have more people working with us to improve things, rather than just commenting on how they are terrible.
Unfortunately, advertising is never going to go away, unless you want to start paying for every newspaper or service online. So let’s work to make it better.
On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification of well told lies. But that isn't the real problem - the real problem with advertising is that it works.
Why is that a problem ?
Because advertising is manufactured demand.
Last time I looked at the 'Law of Supply and Demand' on Wikipedia some time ago, the word 'advertising' appeared 0 times in there. I've just checked, the word is there 1 time as the 6th item in a list. I think it deserves way more attention (pun intended) in the economic theory.
Just look at that simple chart. A positive shift in demand results in an increase in price and quantity sold of the product.
In other words, you can make people consume considerably more stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.
Given that 'stuff' are nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard, the result of this macroeconomic ideology - destruction of nature and change of climate in half a century.
We all know the names of the big tech companies who are exceedingly efficient at pushing up the global demand curve.
This business model really needs to stop.