I don't see why advertising is any more abusive than any other unsolicited opinion foisted upon me in every day life.
I feel this means you can have ads, but, you really do need a large scale entity intelligently policing them or the tendency will constantly be towards abuse. On the balance, it is probably more efficient to just ban them, but many nations recognize the right to free speech and have arrived at the conclusion that advertising is included under that umbrella.
So, we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive, and legally risky, such that the volume of them decreases dramatically.
i.e. those with lots of money get a lot of ad time and no one else gets any. I can think of a number of ways why this is inadvisable, across multiple axes, social, economic, and political.
Collective industry groups would advertise more and politicians would advertise a lot less.
I'm sure it's not expensive right now, but I was extrapolating the likely outcome from your hypothetical:
>> ... we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive
What society doesn't have is a _fast_ or particularly responsive rudder. It moves slow and hates capricious changes. It frustrates capital which wants to move quickly and change as often as is needed to derive greater profits.
They're not manipulating you for your own good. They're doing it for money.
Scarcity advertising is, for example, "Joe's grocery now has cantaloupes" (back in the day when cantaloupes were not available all year). It's information - something is now available that wasn't available before.
Abundance advertising is, for example, "The Chevrolet SomeHotCar will give you an exciting life like the people in this ad. Don't you want that?" As someone put it (wish I remember who, I would give credit): "[This kind of] advertising attempts to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you."
The first kind of advertising is useful. The second is abusive.
> The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
Most advertising is actually the first type.
Now, it varies widely depending on the medium, search ads lean way more on conversion advertising, with display and especially video ads leaning more on the brand side.
Useful kind preserved, evil kind squashed.
What utility does the first sort of advertising have? At best it seems non-abusive, but it still clogs up our brains with crap we don't need and didn't ask for.
Whilst I'm at the grocery store is the appropriate time to work out that cantaloupe is an option.
Not in the middle of watching a cricket match.
I admit that the line gets very fuzzy at a certain point but i think we can agree that the extremes are different things.
People who were quite happy being subsistence farmers are now aware, or much more aware, of the possibility of higher living standards. Doesn't seem immoral to me. Why would a car ad be immoral then? Perhaps it will improve the average purchasers life? I say it someone who is quite happy with a 15yo Honda Fit :)
How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.
But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.
A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.
Costco Newspaper Ad (1983) - https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...
New Store Opening Mailer Ad (2017) - https://f.dam-img.rfdcontent.com/cms/003/156/029/570x760_sma...
Costco Billboard Ad - https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/C5622AQHWe0NE1JEf3Q/fee...
Costco Cross Promotion Billboard Ad - https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/C5622AQFS_ctNErQKBA/fee...
Costco Delivery Truck Ad - https://www.getmulberry.com/hubfs/shutterstock_1718840200.jp...
What is the monthly magazine they send me, then?
I've got mine jack!
lol
Fake
However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.
(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)
Say I have this stunning webshop with margins smaller than bezos toilet breaks. How do I survive out there in the jungle?
That’s opt in advertising.
But you as the advertiser is not happy with that
People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.
When the metric is "make sales and make as much money as possible", it will be incredibly difficult to avoid bias from people with a vested interest in selling you something. This is why advertising (admittedly, mixed with our current society) is so insidious: it's very hard to find a third party that isn't trying to profit off of you buying something.
Any evidence of this?
Hell, one of our best known lawyers in the entire state is a freaking injury liability one.
But hey, direct evidence of lack of harm never seems to stop all the cockroaches coming out of the woodwork insisting that the world fails if we can't have our eyeballs sold to the highest bidder at every second, and that a different world is just impossible. Gee, I wonder if those people are just ignorant, or maybe have some motivated reasoning, like if most of them were paid entirely by advertising revenue.
In my opinion, it would take quite a lack of imagination to ask such a question.
There's many many ways to reach people who want your product. Industry-relevant news publishers and conferences, professional/personal anecdotes (eg, blogs and recommendations), demonstrations and training offers, etc.
A different question would be: by what other means would businesses force their products on people who don't want them? Hopefully the answer is: none.
Unsolicited advertising is what everyone hates.
If I go onto my grocery store website and see "we have a sale on xyz" I'm not bothered because I went to that website to see what they have. I'm also not bothered by sales displays in the store. All forms of acceptable advertising.
But what I absolutely hate is navigating a webpage unrelated to my store and seeing "Did you know you can buy widgets at your local store!" or watching youtube and seeing an unskippable 30 second ad for my store. Or getting a newspaper that is actually just 90% advertisement with 2 paragraphs of actual news.
My parents are STILL in that mind-set - TV "tells you" about stuff - and TV never lies!!
They're seeing more and more advertising during their "shows". And sadly, becoming more and more susceptible to it as they age - like the thousands of dollars of "apocalypse food buckets" they bought from some televangelist. Most of which they had to leave behind when they moved into the retirement community (ignoring the rationality of buying it in the first place).
Sometimes you could also talk to people in a shop about what you were really trying to accomplish and they'd give you advice on what you might need or how you could do it.
The 'need' end is the perspective that's most useful to society. How can someone who has a need find out to satisfy it?
Make your product able to be found by those who need it. Don't shove it in the faces of everyone.
One problem with the above is the effectiveness of making 'unnecessary' sales by creating fomo by shoving it in the faces of everyone. This effectiveness, however, is evidence of the fact that it's psychological manipulation / abuse.
I think you'd need to more directly and clearly define "need." Do you mean only utilitarian companies and products should exist? What about the things I don't "need" but just "like?" What about music? How do I find new music? How do I know I like something before I've even discovered it? Should music radio, which is just an abstract form of album advertising, not exist at all?
I'm torturing the point, but outside of centralized market control, I'm not sure you can apply this logic across the entire scope of capitalism.
Word of mouth is not advertising. What your friends like is something you might like too.
Catalogue listings and databases are not advertising. You can search those for terms closely associated with what you're looking for.
The internet is more than just ads.
Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.
There definitely wasn't prior art of entire industries building themselves up out of nothing by making something that was self evidently good and selling it to like five turbo nerds who made sure everyone they found wanted it.
That industry is definitely not for example the software services industry before about 2000, and there definitely isn't a huge trove of examples of literally two guys in a garage building software, sometimes mediocre software, and selling it to niche businesses.
That's definitely not the, like, founding narrative of our entire sector of the economy or anything.
There definitely wasn't such a thing like trade magazines where you could browse a vague and generic interest and find all sorts of awesome and expensive and niche products to buy for your hobby, like low production run test equipment or literal scams built by weird guys in a garage, again.
China definitely doesn't have a clear current example of a huge industry that runs basically from a bunch of guys with a box of junk in a stall in a giant physical building that westerners literally go to as a niche tourist destination that drives a bunch of niche product development.
No no, we definitely need to let Google rewrite the very words in front of your face to sell you whatever the highest bidder wants to sell you. How else could you possibly find things?
A cursory search shows that the average person is exposed to ~5000 ads a day in the US. Everyone is screaming for your attention. It's not healthy.
Unacceptable ad: Everything seen everywhere.
Certainly we wouldn't be better off if advertising were beamed 24/7 at full blast into your ears and eyes the second you step out into any public space.
About 5% of its current proliferation would be a nice target to aim for - maybe a maximum of 200 ads a day[1] - but if that still proves to be an issue, we could always go lower.
---
[1] With maybe five rising to the level of notice.
Few things upset me as much as driving around a beautiful place and having billboards plastered up and down the highway. A few states have come to their senses and banned them.
The issue as a whole is that it genuinely is eroding the human experience. Being alive in a world where your eyesight is real estate to be filled with images that are meant to leave you with negative emotions with the intent of taking your money from you is bleak.
Click through users' profiles here and see where they work.
Western society would cease to exist if it didn't continue its diabolical lies, falsehoods and abuse. The lies are not optional.
It is because of pragmatic regard for survival of the status quo that the lies do continue. That word 'pragmatic' is what keeps diabolical people from seeing themselves for what they are.
Where is it better? Russia? Where stating that a war is a war can get you in prison? China, where historical events, like 1989 at tianamen square are wiped out? North Korea where everyone cheers up to the beloved genius leader?
So .. why single out "the west" here like this in the first place?
There are so many opportunities in the next few decades to set good examples for the world over.
Hacker News also has a, largely, American audience, so we ought not to pretend that we're not mostly talking about America and the west when we have these discussions. "But what about China?" I don't care, I don't live in China, most people here don't live in China. I have a laundry list of criticism of China, but something tells me we're not talking about China.
Where is it better? Who treats slaves better than I do, they'd say.
When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold.
TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold.
The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.
But this also applies to a lot of media that people consume on purpose, TikTok, Instagram, TV and magazines about the rich and famous.
It implies a curious understanding of what makes people happy. Why do people follow rich celebrities on instagram rather then homeless people, to feel better by comparison? Is it because they don't know what really makes them happy or is a relative measure of happiness perhaps insufficient?
Most comments are just airing opinions and grievances loosely related to the topic anyway.
it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.
Ironic, as most of the furries I know hate GenAI with a passion.
I don’t recognise this “wait 5 seconds” bit.
OTOH, my (teen) kids get a kick out of watching commercials sometimes, because it's something novel to them and they say it actually helps bring their attention to stuff they had no idea existed..
I have no idea how this is still a viable product. Coasting off Boomer's 50+ year old habits I guess?
Reagan lifted some of those limits because "free market", because apparently a free market requires you to not get the content you pay for? Also so we could directly advertise to children more. Reagan literally removed restrictions to selling your child plastic shit and America loved it.
American consumers are so much more willing to put up with atrocious crap it seems.
It's a viable product because Americans work very hard to not look around and see the way other people have it in other countries, because they can't copy that, because america is "special"
What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization.
Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
Off the cuff-
"Don't get high on bullshit supply"
"Have a therapist handy when writing (copy)"
"Be kind to therapist, learn from TikTok, chunk your (ad-)ideas"
I'm gonna pay more attention to the idea that the _idea economy_ also runs on envy :)
Emo-integrity is not easy but it's _always_ easier with a society (sorry Buddhists/social liberals!)
Oops! Not enough chunking !!
As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.”
His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
IT IS THAT GOOD.
Companies based around advertising would die, yes, but they only exist in the first place because of how lucrative the activity is. Nobody is sitting around dreaming of how they could sell ads better than anyone else while not thinking of the financial compensation. At least I hope they aren't.
If someone was saying "many people have jobs in running offshore internet sports betting companies, if we put regulations on offshore internet sports betting, it would remove jobs" wouldn't the natural question be whether those industries are actually productive to have people employed in, or if it's a harmful industry overall? Generally in my view its somewhat sad that the system as a whole optimizes for advertising work rather than orienting in a way that everyone could be putting their work towards something they see as more fulfilling.
There is certainly more need for product discoverability broadly than something like online gambling, but I think the more relevant conversation is if the current advertising model is more like a local minima preventing progress towards a more economically viable method of handling product discoverability.
You say it as if it was a self evident negative, but isnt that the goal of people who want to ban ads? To dramatically change the economy?
How can you get a reputation for a high-quality well-researched podcast(/youtube channel) when your voice(/face) can be cloned by the advertiser who buys a slot somewhere in your podcast(/video) to sell some snakeoil?
Are those your friends you're seeing on social media enjoying ${brand} or supporting ${politician}? Or did your friends all leave the site years ago, and these are just fakes, legally licenced by the advertisers from the social media firm thanks to a clause in the TOS that's hard for non-lawyers to comprehend the consequences of?
That’s not just advert, it’s fraud - fraud people like Zuck and Musk make a fortune from.
The services I pay for with attention are without exception ones I have a love/hate relationship with, which maybe fulfill some occasional need but just as often I return to out of addictive pattern. It's not hard to imagine better ways to fulfill those needs which are simply not viable as businesses because of the competition from attention-paid services.
It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you.
Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered.
Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong.
Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent.
You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.
It's population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/YouTube/Gmail/article.
It's exploitative, dirty, exposes the bitches (i.e. you and your kids) to risks, and on a population scale it poses a serious safety and national security risk to our country. RTB bidstream surveillance means that all the data used in the pimps' matchmaking services can be used by many nefarious actors to physically track and target people, including spies, politicians, and other politically-exposed persons.
Would you let your kid turn tricks for a pimp to get a Gucci handbag? No? Then why would you let Alphabet pimp your kid out to get a YouTube video?
https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison...
Lower Life Satisfaction Related to Materialism in Children Frequently Exposed to Advertising (2012)
http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opre...
Don Draper from Mad Men had a similar quote about success.
Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect
It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.
By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.
If it does increase spending on things being advertised, the absence leaves us with more money for all those other things that are currently ad-supported.
If it doesn't, it's a scam.
If those things supported by ads would be literally unaffordable by the consumers if not for those ads, because the consumers are so poor they have no money to spend, the fork is still true; it's just that if those ads work then they push those already-poor consumers into debt for things they'd otherwise not buy because they couldn't afford, making them even poorer.
I've never even used free wifi that was ad supported, and I'm not aware of a situation where this is common.
Ad revenue is nowhere near enough to build the facilities necessary to play baseball, so little leagues are getting funding in a lot of other ways which could fill in the gaps if ad revenue were removed.
The simple fact is that we have lots of examples of ads being removed and economies puttering along just fine.
Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.
some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475
not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012
another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/
there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising.
i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes.
instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.
So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators:
* subscriptions/paywalls
* advertising
* micro-transactions
Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff.
Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff.
For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want.
To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined.
And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for.
Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance.
Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.
