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Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

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

#231

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Nasrudith wrote: post #163
netsharc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luxury goods are status symbols, we buy them because we crave status because deep down we crave recognition from others in society. So I wonder if urbanization/the trend towards more loneliness is the problem. If you have a tightly-knit community, you'd have people who appreciate you because of your character, sense of humor or good company; not because you drive a fancy car. And nowadays we don't really have real co…

Status can't be all of luxury goods - although it may be for say fashion. Material comforts and perception of superiority are reasons - those who have a community and any disposible income have their own market "profiles" based on familarity. Even if it is just say preferred sorts of Whiskey by mennonites.

In a capitalist society status is defined entirely by ownership of capital, and low status is defined by very limited capital.

So of course luxury goods are defined primarily by their capital cost, supported by subsidiary markers like cultural capital and social proof. Actual utility (and quality) come second.

Competitive status display is entirely about the careful curation of success tokens - clothes (+ accessories), car, house, sexual and breeding partner(s), and the amount of autonomy, agency, and political and cultural capital at work.

Ads exist to promote competitive status display through curated consumption of success tokens.

It's a sport no one can ever win, but for some people it's enough to be on the leaderboard for a while.

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

#232

Post by JohnFen »

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 […

> Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

Here's the thing...

I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:

Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

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

#233

Post by mrep »

lwb wrote: post #59

The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch. I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it! It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (p…

> I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu.

What??? You can pay for ad-free hulu! Why are you complaining?

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

#234

Post by JohnFen »

Draiken wrote: post #212
eswat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.

Isn't that impossible? I mean, capitalism is literally profits above everything else. Since evil marketing == profits, it will never change. It will only get worse.

It's not impossible at all. Math tells me that growth capitalism can't be maintained forever. The only question is when, and under what conditions, it will end.

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

#235

Post by JohnFen »

chc wrote: post #71
deogeo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> necessary evil Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.

How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?

Most big content websites aren't of much actual value.

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

#236

Post by jacquesm »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #51
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, halving it would make people 3% more happy. I say halve it 30 times in a row then. These silly stats make no sense at all.

That doesn't follow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

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

#237

Post by mayniac »

erentz wrote: post #156
eswat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.

While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way. We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Thi…

I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything.

One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

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

#238

Post by JohnFen »

TACIXAT wrote: post #133
chc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?

I view this as a major failing of our payments infrastructure. I have no way to send a few cents to a business digitally.

What I find odd about this is that there does exist at least one perfectly fine micropayment system. It's running in my laundromat (the company is Heartland Micropayments), where I can use my credit/debit or laundry payment card. When I wash and dry three loads of laundry, I don't get 6 charges on my card. I get one.

It seems like it wouldn't be a huge amount of work to bring this to the internet, particularly since it's using the internet for its communication in the first place.

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

#239

Post by clairity »

FabHK wrote: post #143

The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value. It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.) [1] h…

i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff).

but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it.

the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products).

in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.

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

#240

Post by la_barba »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #166
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…

I'm not a copywriter in the sense of "person who writes adverts," but I am someone who writes copy for website content. One of the problems is that it isn't even good communication to say (for example) "This device has a 7 inch screen." That's mostly useless information for most people. It's much more genuinely helpful to tell people something like "You can easily read our large screen even in bright sunlight." Most…

That works if there is a single source from where people learn about your product. If you product is popular enough someone else will simply make a nice table comparing your 7" screen with your competitions 8" and 9" screens.
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