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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

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Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#211

Post by neom »

Const-me wrote: post #204
danaris wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I dislike advertising a lot ... > Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible. ...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising . This is a problem with hyperconsolidation . Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all wi…

> Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled. Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why. Ban ads of carbonated drinks, and pepsi/coca cola will become no different from any other manufacturer of that stuff. They do have economy of scale for their advantage, but I don’t think it will help them much. The price/weight ratio of their produc…

I'm quite curious where you live that you have a low selection of carbonated beverages? Here in Canada I feel like that is the biggest product category for competition these days, used to be frozen meals. Seems every week there is a new soda fridge in my corner store with some new fangled carbonated tea or whatever. We're going through a trade war right now so everyone is buying Canadian, so everyone is buying ad space on the fridges to show their product is Made in Canada.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#213

Post by Ukv »

neom wrote: post #206
Ukv wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising is a PURE competitive move I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading. Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strateg…

Well here, I'll show you the paradox if you're curious. I do this stuff for a living right? I mean this is my world for the last 20 years, I literally teach it. But, I'm speaking out of 3 sides of my mouth? How can I say on one hand: advertising is a tool in the GTM playbook and a useful one. Say: advertising most useful as competitive tool, And also say: competition is for losers. Here is how: You have to admit and…

> Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, [...]

I don't claim that advertising is an illogical move from a business's self-interest perspective, but that it involves a zero-sum game that allows the resources wasted on it to greatly exceed any value it produces for society. It's a way to "compete" without doing useful work, and as a society we'd typically want businesses to compete by doing useful work instead of, for instance, building bigger and bigger Bitcoin-mining rigs.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#214

Post by [deleted] »

silvestrov wrote: post #113
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #63

Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant. Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines. Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public wa…

I think a better wording is to say that "advertising is like bateria". Using cancer is way too one-sided as all cancers are bad. Some bacterias are bad, some are good. Most of the time we talk about bacteria it is the bad ones we think of, mostly because study of the good ones are so underpriotized and we don't understand them well. Humans could absolutely not survive without the good bacteria in the stomach. They pr…

[deleted]

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#215

Post by OtomotO »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #40
OtomotO wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about none of these? Why do I always need to choose the lesser evil and never good?

Show me a large scale society that hasn’t have both. This over commercialization may be needed as a buffer against hyper scarcity

I don't need to show anything.

Anything newly invented wasn't shown before it was, well, invented.

So what stops us humans from not living in crappy dictatorships and not in shitty capitalism?

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#216

Post by neom »

Ukv wrote: post #213
neom wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well here, I'll show you the paradox if you're curious. I do this stuff for a living right? I mean this is my world for the last 20 years, I literally teach it. But, I'm speaking out of 3 sides of my mouth? How can I say on one hand: advertising is a tool in the GTM playbook and a useful one. Say: advertising most useful as competitive tool, And also say: competition is for losers. Here is how: You have to admit and…

> Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, [...] I don't claim that advertising is an illogical move from a business's self-interest perspective, but that it involves a zero-sum game that allows the re…

I use a pretty clinical definition for what I consider a business: a business is simply a collection of systems and processes that work together to create a condition for a fair and safe exchange of value between parties.

I think any real business person would agree that is true. That is to say some things that look like businesses are not, and they go away pretty quickly. Then some societies say "what fits into that bucket but we want to hedge out edge cases" and then you exclude stuff, say healthcare. In a perfect system, the utility would have responded to the bitcoin miners by spinning up a huge solar farm that not only solved the BTC but helps everyone else too, an unfair capitalist will tell you a totally deregulated market will create those conditions over time, I'm skeptical of that aspect of capitalism hence I say it's an unfair point, but I don't firmly take a position because we don't have perfect systems so it's hard to know.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#217

Post by robertlagrant »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #160

Indeed. On my last LSD adventure where I suffered ego death it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism. Advertisers have the audacity to attempt to steal people's attention when they really need it elsewhere. This may include billboards in such times as when their victim is controlling a 1.5MT machine at a velocity of 100km/h on the freeway. The advertisers, in this cas…

> it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism

It's an artifact of humans, not of capitalism. Plenty of people[0] use advertising who aren't capitalists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#218

Post by someothherguyy »

somenameforme wrote: post #210
someothherguyy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is essentially what p-hacking is. By organizing variables in a certain way, you can create statistically significant results to say basically whatever you want them to say. Do you know what statistically significant results means?

Yes, and it doesn't mean "true" as you might think. There's a great demo of p-hacking here. [1] It's based on real data too, which makes it extra fun. Your goal is to prove that one party or another being in power leads to a stronger economy. That statement is almost certainly false as you can quickly see by how awkward it is to "prove" it. But you'll find when you arrange your variables in certain ways you can indee…

This is a survey. There is nothing under test.

Its like saying you are p-hacking an election. I don't understand what you mean.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#219

Post by micromacrofoot »

mopsi wrote: post #68
micromacrofoot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my local food bank has lines every week

Now imagine the entire society standing in such lines, even the best doctors and brightest engineers, for all basic necessities, not knowing if there's anything left by the time it's their turn.

damn "you have to stand in line for food because you're dumb" is rough

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#220

Post by somenameforme »

someothherguyy wrote: post #218
somenameforme wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it doesn't mean "true" as you might think. There's a great demo of p-hacking here. [1] It's based on real data too, which makes it extra fun. Your goal is to prove that one party or another being in power leads to a stronger economy. That statement is almost certainly false as you can quickly see by how awkward it is to "prove" it. But you'll find when you arrange your variables in certain ways you can indee…

This is a survey. There is nothing under test. Its like saying you are p-hacking an election. I don't understand what you mean.

This is the entire point of our dialogue. You claimed my statement that most people [who don't have children] claim they aren't having children because of economic reasons was false. Your evidence was a study that showed a negligible majority of people [who actively don't plan to ever have kids, age 18-49] are simply doings so out of personal choice, and then seemed confused about why this was an inappropriate sampling for what we are actually testing, so to speak.

It'd be akin to if I claimed (as I do) that the party in office has no meaningful effect on the economy, and you responded 'Uh, yeah they do! Democrats have a majorly positive effect on the economy. Look at this study!' [President only, employment only, excluding recessions]. That survey you linked to is not just presenting the survey. It's presenting a rather specific and odd subsampling.

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