Mimetic theory explains why
Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
11–20 of 537 posts
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#12> Germany after 1989,
Convenient. I think they should include DDR which had no advertising at all.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#13Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness. You're basically being negged by advertisers.
I would not say it works that way for me. I see most advertising as a visual noice and/or annoying interruption. I think majority of the time I am not even aware what is being advertised.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#14Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater dissatisfaction with lack of income?
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#15To 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.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#16Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness. You're basically being negged by advertisers.
I would not say it works that way for me. I see most advertising as a visual noice and/or annoying interruption. I think majority of the time I am not even aware what is being advertised.
Probably it's almost impossible to measure one's own reaction to ubiquitous advertising. Ignoring it consciously does not mean you are unaffected.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#17I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused.
Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#18"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That 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." Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect on life satisfaction?
I think they say "absolute size" to mean absolute value. e.g. 3% drop is half the absolute size of a 6% rise.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#19Doubling 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, 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.
Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence
#20I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.