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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

#451

Post by raxxorrax »

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #412
deepakkarki wrote: post #346

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's idea…

Advertising hasn't been about 'persuasion' or psychology for a long, long time. Advertising today is mechanical applications of the central limit theorem / law of large numbers to sociological problems.

Is that for reach and penetration and whom to target? Wouldn't know how I would apply that to ads.

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

#452

Post by QuercusMax »

foldingmoney wrote: post #383
QuercusMax wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to start, corn is highly subsidized. This means corn syrup is cheaper than it should be, making soda and most processed foods cheaper than healthier options.

Low quality ingredients will always be cheaper than high quality ingredients, regardless of subsidies and taxes. That's an unfortunate fact of life, not a government decision. And there's nothing to stop people buying diet soda.

Here's an article backing up my point:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-diet-farm-subsidie...

Why do we need the govt making cheap unhealthy stuff even cheaper?

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

#453

Post by ionised »

chrisseaton wrote: post #450
ionised wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And anyway, value is determined by the buyer. I disagree. You can make anything seem valuable by defining value in the most cynically narrow terms possible like that. By that same logic, heroin has great value in society, and hitmen and we shouldn't be trying to stop these things. However we do, because the popularity of the product is no measure of its contribution to society. Continue on with that logic and liter…

By your logic music and art have no value to society, because there was no need for those until they were invented, someone could assess their value as zero, they consume natural resources which harms all of us, and the people could be doing something more productive (by some unstated metric of yours) instead. You just don't enjoy soda. There's nothing wrong with other people enjoying it. Either in moderation, or irr…

Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?).

So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.

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

#454

Post by chrisseaton »

ionised wrote: post #453
chrisseaton wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your logic music and art have no value to society, because there was no need for those until they were invented, someone could assess their value as zero, they consume natural resources which harms all of us, and the people could be doing something more productive (by some unstated metric of yours) instead. You just don't enjoy soda. There's nothing wrong with other people enjoying it. Either in moderation, or irr…

Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?). So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.

I don't accept that sodas are either. I think they're a honest product. They aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat. They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.

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

#455

Post by Nasrudith »

livueta wrote: post #113
chc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does Wikipedia count as a big content website? n=1 and all that, but I think it's a decent example of how things that are actually useful do just fine[1] without ads. This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist. The 20xx equivalent of checkout aisle gossip mags going quietly into that good night is a feat…

To be fair the clickbait is a matter of incentives and essentially also exists in pure cash transactions and has existed since newsprint - they were called eyecatching headlines and yellow journalism.

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

#456

Post by ionised »

chrisseaton wrote: post #454
ionised wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?). So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.

I don't accept that sodas are either. I think they're a honest product. They aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat. They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.

> hey aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat

Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you.

Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is harmful to their bottom line, because they are selling you what amounts to a mild poison.

People fought to get this labelling required by law. These companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

> They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.

The difference being my health isn't harmed by a pop singer trying to improve their voice. Nor are they creating a need or addiction to music that didn't already exist. There has always been a need for music among humans. Even tribal war drums count as music.

I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit, but really, pop music is such a small part of the entire musical landscape.

Even if it were, what damage to people is pop music causing? What addictions is it fostering?

You could debate about the dumbing down of music that manufactured pop music encourages, but we are talking about actual harm caused by fostering addictions here, which things like sodsa and cigarettes do, as a result of their being addictive as well as damaging to health.

The pop music analogy isn't a very good one, because music doesn't damage your health by encouraging your addiction to substances harmful to your health.

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

#457

Post by chrisseaton »

ionised wrote: post #456
chrisseaton wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't accept that sodas are either. I think they're a honest product. They aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat. They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.

> hey aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you. Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is…

> I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit

Bah I think you're showing yourself to be a cynic and a snob with statements like this. You don't like that music so it's 'lowest-common denominator crap' and you can't see any purpose for it apart from profit, no matter if other people chose to enjoy it.

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

#458

Post by kaybe »

InternetUser wrote: post #396
kaybe wrote: post #127

Earlier 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.

So who's going to be the politician who can step forward and fight for those ideals without being bought out and thoroughly corrupted along the way? I hereby declare my endorsement for YOU, kaybe, to be that candidate! And with this push, I wish you the best of success between now and November of next year! https://i.imgur.com/7hvPycX.jpg

I'm a German scientist, I'm pretty sure I don't qualify.

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

#459

Post by Nasrudith »

anoncake wrote: post #52
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…

Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible if there is no trade-off.

I disagree - especially since optimizing for anything blindly/without constraints can lead to horrific outcomes.

Optimizing for happiness would logically call for denying unpleasant truths because pointing them out would make people unhappy and downright inhumanities - if the depressed commit suicide it would drive up the average happiness. Even if given tighter constraints it would still have disturbing ignorance is bliss promotion.

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

#460

Post by wastedhours »

Mirioron wrote: post #387
JohnFen wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incorrec…

> 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. Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but…

There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0] (although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).

[0] https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-effect

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