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Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

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Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#241

Post by tartoran »

taurath wrote: post #141
tartoran wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally would feel quite ashamed to have the latest IPhone, I'd feel that I'd fallen prey to apple's marketing. I live pretty well with a 5 year old SE. For the same reason I refuse to wear visibly branded clothes and am not ashamed to buy some used items. Living frugally by choice gets you back some freedoms.

Certainly, but you're also a product of an environment which values that sort of self-expression. If every time you went and hung out with your friends they shamed you, saying you look homeless, you might think differently. Its certainly a sign of maturity to not really care about those things, but depending on your life trajectory different values will hit. And clearly, a lot of people value a new iphone. OTOH - its…

Regarding the phone, I am trying to use my phone as little as I can, but I still do use it some. If you're to chase the latest phone, latest car, you're always going to be wowed, but will miss the other parts of life which I are truly essential.

And the shaming part, I literally don't care what other people think about me in terms of these things. I dress with dignity, have good hygiene, etc so there's nothing guilting me about their expectations.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#242

Post by kaybe »

speeder wrote: post #96
nck4222 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question is addressed in the article: "Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own…

I am currently working with marketing. But I am happy I actually DO give information... My job consists of finding what people need (not want, but literally need), and tell them we can provide it. Usually people that call the company where I work, thank us for having the product and the ads, sometimes they say they searched for days and then found our ads. That said... we sell industrial parts, mostly for the mainten…

Thank you, this kind of advertisement is the one kind that is actually useful and needed. Search engines etc are a surprisingly bad way to find these kind of products (if you even realize it exists and can describe it).

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#243

Post by DiffEq »

xtracto wrote: post #8

This reminds me of an anecdote a friend told me: This friend dedicates his time in going to very rural areas/towns here in Mexico to implement government programs. At some point in the past he got to a town were the cantina had just gotten the only TV in town... apparently people in the town were generally happy, and they had everything they needed... so in their view they were not poor. But once they started watchin…

The thing is they should see what they CAN have and they should wonder WHY they can't have it. Then maybe they can do something about it. Because simply one of the main reasons why Mexico does not have a higher standard of living is absolutely not becasue the Mexicans are lazy or dumb. It is because of the immense amount of corruption in their government; I think once they start to learn the source of their state of being they might decide to to try and really change it.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#244

Post by smolder »

ansible wrote: post #236
TheGallopedHigh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said succinctly: Comparison is the thief of joy

I saw this on a television show (don't remember which one), but a father was scolding his child who was complaining about another child having more candy or something. He said: "The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them."

That was on Louie.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#245

Post by taeric »

pascalxus wrote: post #212

I have a hard time relating to these findings. Advertisement almost never works on me. And, the few times it does work on me, I'm actually quite glad and appreciative because I only buy products I really want or really need. If I look at all my credit card, amazon and ebay purchases for the last several years, which i do often, i see it's just the things I need/want: gas, maintenance, groceries a few times going out…

The question would then be if marketing works on you. Do you know the brand of your clothes? Your computer?

Sometimes, brand and make/model are very tied together. As an example, I love cherry blue switches on my keyboards. Often, though, pants are pants.

And don't forget that advertising and marketing is a probabilities game. Nothing about an individual can really help understand the crowd. Even if the crowd is easy to control, at large.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#246

Post by bluntfang »

infogulch wrote: post #140

Advertising is an attack on your psyche. Its very existence is an assumption that you should be dissatisfied with your life, and any advertising 'tricks' (only showing happy, beautiful people using it etc, aka 95% of the content of most advertisements) beyond purely factual statements about the product are explicitly designed to hijack every possible unconscious bias in their target audience to make them want it. Sur…

>you can pretty easily analyze and counteract the effect.

How? From my previous research I've found that it's one of those things that even if you know you're being tricked, it still affects your decision making.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#247

Post by mayniac »

pascalxus wrote: post #230
dibujaron wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Advertising doesn't work on me" is a lie that nearly everyone tells themselves. Advertisers love this. Ads rarely makes anyone rush out to go buy x out of the blue, but if someone is choosing between x product and y product, they're much more likely to pick x if has been advertised to them before. The substance of the ad is almost irrelevant; just because they've heard the name of x repeatedly before, they're much m…

Your might be right about most people. (advertisers love to tell this to their CEO but they've been wrong about this before - just look at the 20 million dollar case study with Ebay and their wasted ad spend on google ads). But, it really doesn't work on me 99.9% of the time. I know because I review all my spending habits and I can clearly see 1/2 of the products I buy don't even advertise. Ever seen an ad for cucumb…

I doubt the only products you buy are cucumbers, tomatoes and gas. You've chosen your phone, laptop, car, and various other branded items. Advertising very likely played a role in your decisions there.

How can you actually be sure that advertising doesn't work on you? Of course, you don't see an ad on TV for a new smart fridge and immediately jump out of your sofa, wallet in hand, to go buy it. But the key thing is that _nobody does_. That's not the point. The idea is that six months down the line when your fridge breaks irreparably and you're deciding between different brands, those ads will have an influence, and you won't realise it.

People who think advertising doesn't work on them _are godsends to advertisers_. This article puts it quite well, although I don't agree with its conclusions[0]:

"If you don’t believe advertising works on you, you are going to be more likely to see good advertising as something else entirely and be more receptive to it and thusly more likely to take the action I want you to take."

There was a study a few months ago which found that people who think they are immune to advertising are more susceptible to it than average, but I can't find a link. It was one of the things that changed my opinion on this: I also used to think I was not susceptible to most advertising, but this is a dangerous mentality. You just don't think you're susceptible. I've come around to thinking Bill Hicks was completely right on this [1]

Also with the Metromile point, that's not bad targeting. Ads are often targeted at existing users of the ads product. The point is to keep brand loyalty and limit buyer's remorse.

[0] https://medium.com/@dahanese/advertising-works-don-t-believe... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#248

Post by uoaei »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #166
uoaei wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "get off my lawn" sort of comment, but: Easy cars are making worse drivers. People rarely check their blind spot now because the little light on their sideview mirror lights up instead. People are less concerned about driving unsafely because their cars are thicker, heavier, and bigger than the other participants on the road. This has been especially troubling to watch develop from the bike lane, as visibil…

People rarely check their blind spot no True, and another facet of the same problem is that blind spots are getting bigger by the model year, as automakers take the cheap way out and raise their belt lines to meet side-impact regulations. We will all be driving around in tanks before long. I guess that's supposed to be a good thing.

> We will all be driving around in tanks before long.

Car doors are close to a foot thick now. The cars are getting huge which means more space is occupied by the streets (increased lane width and space in intersections for larger turning radius), the parking lots (larger parking spots and wider spaces to drive between them), etc. The mental isolation between driver and environment is growing and does not seem to be decelerating. I'm convinced that maybe 10% of all drivers (in my area, suburban SV) pay any attention to what's happening behind them. They don't have to care, so they don't!

Cars are devouring mobility.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#249

Post by banads »

nck4222 wrote: post #129
banads wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just think it's funny that we need scientific studies for blatantly disingenuous claims: "their task is to simply provide information and in that way they raise human well-being." It's like doing a scientific study on the common claim of advertisers that "the internet would not exist without advertising".

The research wasn't done to test a "blatantly disingenuous" claim, it was done to determine the effect of advertising on mood. They're able to quantify how much of an effect it has on happiness as well. "Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That’s about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about o…

You're right, this could be a useful statistic to use in an argument, especially to data driven people, like advertisers themselves.

Re: Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

#250

Post by duderific »

whatshisface wrote: post #16
nkrisc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That stuff exists, it just costs a lot of money. Well, except for a functional family, money can't buy that. Want a house that looks clean and perfectly staged all the time? Hire a full-time cleaner to come every day and sweep, pick up, do the dishes, etc. The lie in those commercials is that their target audience can never afford something like that. So in a sense, you're right, they're showing "you" what you can ne…

You can also keep your house clean and perfectly staged all the time by cleaning it yourself. It's not impossible, or even difficult.

Clearly you don't have little kids in your house.
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