It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this finding still hold true?
Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
241–250 of 537 posts
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#242Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#243I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues.
If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#244I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a gam…
It's good advice, but I find it ironic. Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products. To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over. It's getting harder…
On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means.
Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' - an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.
To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads. Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore likely more cheaply.
The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential negative externalities might that have.
It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative ads per se, I think the more important difference for the majority of ads is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both advertiser and customer.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good advice, but I find it ironic. Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products. To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over. It's getting harder…
On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means. Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' - an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, whe…
But if someone needs a painter, they could just use an unbiased search engine, right? There is no need to bother anyone with ads.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to think of a counterargument to this and drew an almost total blank. There have been some great works of art over say the last 20 years or so—"Breaking Bad," "The Sopranos," and the like—but it's almost completely trash. I can't name more than a half-dozen things I'd have missed if I had thrown out my television and deleted Facebook etc.
I've spent most of my self aware life so far online. I don't want to be one of those "phones are bad" people who are scared by technology they don't understand. But I'm starting to change my mind. Recently while waiting to board a plane, I saw a kid browsing instagram. The speed at which they were consuming content actually shocked me. They were rapidfire scrolling through pages and pages of the same kind of junk tha…
Instead of letting the mind wander, it is trapped in a tight loop of looking at one picture after another. Like a book you can't put down, only you never finish it, and it's not at all compelling - just addictive.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curtis must have missed the Victorian periodicals that are full of Type 2 ads. See e.g. http://christinetrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cigs-10... http://christinetrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/pills.j... http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/0... Industrial printed advertising started in the early 19th century with the first stirrings of printed mass media. But flyers and noticeboards…
The first two ads seem pretty Type 1 to me: they mostly consist of text straightforwardly describing what the product supposedly does, except for a smallish image in the first one. The descriptions are incorrect (cigarettes are not safe, and whatever was in those pills was certainly not as efficacious as the ad claims), but that’s basically an orthogonal issue. On the other hand, your third example is definitely Type…
I’m put off by the image of a pretty young lady who reeks of carbolic (phenol).
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#248The 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…
>Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
I live in a metro area. Physical adverts are the worst type in my opinion. There are methods of eliminating every other type of ad: I use adblockers on my phone and computers, my network is pi-holed, I use plex/netflix instead of traditional TV, I pay for spotify instead of listening to the radio etc. But physical adverts? There's no way of blocking them, unless you consider "never going outside" an option. In a way, not having a method of opting out of billboards feels like they are being pushed on you without your consent, which is horrifying to me.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think advertising is to marketing as space travel is to rocket science. An ideal situation for space travel is to be able to teleport anything anywhere, but that's not possible yet, so they build rockets to travel as fast as currently possible. Similarly, an ideal situation for advertising is to read each person's mind, determine exactly what products they are looking for but aren't yet aware of, and make them awar…
> Similarly, an ideal situation for advertising is to read each person's mind, determine exactly what products they are looking for but aren't yet aware of, and make them aware. If marketers had that power, that's not how they'd use it. Instead, what they'd do is deploy a powerful analytic system to determine what your touch points are, in order to learn how to more effectively manipulate you to make you want whateve…
Note: advertising and marketing are not the same thing just like space research and rocket science are not the same thing.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.) If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
What's a war without killing people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor
Even though that was meant tongue in cheek, I fear there will be innumerable deaths before this is over. We can discuss who killed them then.
edit: A war-economy-level effort is needed, with the same dedication of all participants, so there is another similar line of though.