Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

voxeu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 537 posts

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#121

Post by cm2012 »

anoncake wrote: post #97
cm2012 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did, there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow because of ads.

I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness. Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist. The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expan…

Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#122

Post by howard941 »

deogeo wrote: post #45
lordnacho wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well like it says there's two kinds. One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock". The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not included." Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective…

> One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock". I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.

Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#123

Post by xg15 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #86
enlyth wrote: post #15

To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit. We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.

Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop. I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this […

But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works.

You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#124

Post by funkymike »

netsharc wrote: post #68
brentm wrote: post #14

Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater dissatisfaction with lack of income?

It seems like it's the gospel of capitalism (or neo-liberalism?) that has fooled of us that we need more money to be more happy. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-... As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a goo…

Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#125

Post by FabHK »

cm2012 wrote: post #3

Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but…

> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.

You are wrong. The paper goes on to say, in the very next sentence, that 3% is "approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed", thus (while smaller), it's the same order of magnitude.

Presumably you do not consider the impact of marriage or unemployment "basically negligible"?

> It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising.

That may be as it may, but that is not what the paper is talking about.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#126

Post by nostrademons »

wk_end wrote: post #79
rwc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can you point to a time in human history where type 2 wasn't the predominant form of advertising? This is not some modern discovery or exploit.

Some historians of advertising - probably most famously, Adam Curtis in "The Century of the Self" - argue that "type 2" directly fell out of World War-era propaganda research redirected towards consumerism.

I don't doubt that WW-propaganda accelerated it, but manipulative ads were a big thing even in 1898, when William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell more papers.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#127

Post by kaybe »

perfunctory wrote: post #33

What can I say "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won…

I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.)

If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#128

Post by rogual »

WalterBright wrote: post #92
jressey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will notice 'being locked in cages' is not in my original list.

My point is that subsistence allocations of food, water, shelter, and clothing is not enough, and such are part of the punishment of prison.

I wouldn't even consider prison to offer "shelter" since you're locked in there with violent people.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#129

Post by cm2012 »

xg15 wrote: post #109
cm2012 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To tell a story. The specific brands paid to be there, but the idea of the glamorous item is always there. This is consistent with extensive literature showing marketing can switch brand preference but is very bad at getting people to change their mind about product categories as a whole (like smoking or drinking) they've already heard of.

Then don't talk about advertising but talk about the big brother, public relations - the inventor of which played an important role in positioning smoking as a pleasant and desirable activity.

Actually, the "inventor" of public relations, Edward Bernays, illustrates my point really well. He claimed credit for getting women to smoke with his PR stunts. The data shows that the trend of women smoking started years before he did anything, and the trendline was completely unaffected when he did his stuff. He, at best, got people already smoking to switch to the brand of cigarettes he promoted.
Post reply on HN