Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Advertising as contrasted to information is deceitful, manipulative This is what is confusing the many meanings of the word. There's no point doing terminology redefinition and then saying "See? Thing bad!" That's not the purpose of this conversation; that's just what you tried to do in an individual comment.
If constraints and precision make you confused, maybe that's a you problem. I'm not a member of the religion which stipulates that states can create people without bodies, if you are, good for you perhaps but I'd prefer you became an apostate temporarily to make it easier to converse on this topic.
Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
261–270 of 286 posts
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#262I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not. From…
You’ve described ads perfectly. I hate people who comes to my house to sell me stuff. As you say, advertisers are annoying scammers.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious how that is true? Advertising is generally a competitive move in a marketing playbook of a GTM motion.
Do you buy products that has quality and you need it or because some advertisement says it?
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#264The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/… It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other…
> not sure how best to address this sort of thing I use two browser addons, uBlock origin and SponsorBlock.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could humans survive without the “good advertising”?
It would be very difficult for many new companies to get the word out about their new product. Innovation would suffer. If you can't advertise for the AirFryer, how do you get people to know about this new product and what it can do? Mouth-to-mouth is too slow and inefficient for most products. How often do you drop by a kitchen store just to check out if there is any new invention?
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a tad reductive. If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? The post does say: > > Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role. Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative an…
> When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way. Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape…
Hopefully from first-hand experience with the product, and not just from ads.
> If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered?
Searching product listings on a website is more common than a phone call, and if you're a reviewer you might want to sign up to industry mailing lists and press releases to get notified of new offerings. Generally speaking I believe this is what reviewers are doing already, opposed to just waiting to randomly get a targeted Facebook ad for products to review.
I wouldn't typically consider cases where you solicit information and receive it to be an ad. You give a broad definition of ad ("just telling people that products exist", which would seemingly include even independent reviews and word of mouth) - and while it's up to you if you want to hold that definition, you should note that nobody's suggesting eliminating all that.
> Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs?
There are online enthusiast groups for, say, DIY, that'll likely have advice on tape and edging stones. Doesn't need to be hyper-specific to one product.
> Do you really think your process is totally objective?
For determining what product to buy? No, it'll never be. But I do think it's better to at least try to get information from sources with well-aligned incentives, and I do think that companies spending billions on manipulation campaigns often makes doing so more difficult, despite increased informedness being the supposed benefit we get in return for the colossal waste of resources and time.
> What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed?
My argument wasn't that there should be "no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed" - my argument was that incentives are largely in the wrong place for ads to work as an effective means to inform consumers, since the company producing the ads has no reason to give unbiased information (and only really has reason to avoid outright lying because of restrictions already placed on advertising). Compare to an independent reviewer, where the incentive is hopefully (albeit not always) to give a relatively unbiased review to attract a readership. There can also be incentive there to review new/niche products that others are not yet reviewing.
> There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing [...] I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level [...]
I'd claim that the problematic practices have not just arisen by coincidence - they stem from misaligned incentives. Also, while it'd certainly be beneficial to stamp out those practices, there'd still be the issue that resources are being wasted on what is largely a zero-sum game, instead of competing through more preoductive work (steal market share back and forth by improving the product, not just by repeatedly convincing people).
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
If constraints and precision make you confused, maybe that's a you problem. I'm not a member of the religion which stipulates that states can create people without bodies, if you are, good for you perhaps but I'd prefer you became an apostate temporarily to make it easier to converse on this topic.
Precision is the thing I'm asking you to adopt when you don't admit all types of advertising in your definition of the word.
See how far you can take it.
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could humans survive without the “good advertising”?
It would be very difficult for many new companies to get the word out about their new product. Innovation would suffer. If you can't advertise for the AirFryer, how do you get people to know about this new product and what it can do? Mouth-to-mouth is too slow and inefficient for most products. How often do you drop by a kitchen store just to check out if there is any new invention?
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#269The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising. The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer). Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA. The intent is for the target/prey/victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.…
One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t…
One choice is simply denial, but I do not like myself when I choose that. Another is not to act because there is never a guarantee that our actions will not be wrong. The stand up choice in my mind is to own up to our mistakes and failures and fix things to the extent we can.
We have developed a business model for the internet that is indeed a cancer on communities, on societies. On the lives of those around us. This was not with evil intent - which would be inexcusable. We just did not know better. But now we do. To ignore this fact, deny it, etc is understandable. But you now know this to be true or that it is possibly true. And in order to be stand up people we need to understand whether this harms others. And we fix it.
And really is the Advertising business model the best we can do?
Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way. Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape…
> Right but where do they get their info? Hopefully from first-hand experience with the product, and not just from ads. > If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? Searching product listings on a website is more common than a phone call, and if you're a reviewer you might want to sign up to industry mailing lists and press releases to get notified of new offerings. Genera…
Some mediums are: banners, paid testimonials, email mailing lists, video spots, catalogs, flyers, packaging, sponsorships, signs, car wraps, phone tree preamble or hold messages, etc. Even something that just displays a brand name or logo can be advertisements. You did not solicit any one of those exposures. They are ALL being put in front of your face by someone that wants to sell you something. Who sees those messages and how (TV spot vs YouTube spot vs Disney+ spot) is more of a marketing concern than advertising itself but it's all related enough for this discussion.
Messages are anything about the product or company, beginning with the name of the model "TACTIKILL XTERMINATOR 4000" or "NatureStop Gentle Reducer Premium" to statistics about the product to product descriptions to claims of efficacy or quality or usage recommendations, or sexy models smiling and enjoying their incredible life thanks to that laundry soap.
Both the medium and the message, independently, can be entirely benign or manipulative. There are laws in most countries that are pretty barebones about what they can't do-- e.g. spam for medium, and making false claims for messaging. A ultra-targeted Facebook Ad or sneaky TikTok influencer sponsorship can include completely unbiased data about the product. A catalog listing or sponsored whitepaper can include absolute bullshit and manipulative plays on emotion.
Ads don't just target end-consumers. Distributors, parts manufacturers, manufacturing machine manufacturers, packaging companies, suppliers of raw materials and intermediaries, transportation and logistics companies, warehouses, etc etc etc all have to explain why their product is worth buying over another. A lot of that is subjective.
For some entities, using an app container on DO or Heroku is a great solution because they don't have to manage some things themselves. Even if it doesn't save them money, it might be a QoL increase that makes sense in the context of the person using it. Their simply stating that their product is easier to use could be construed as biased-- if you need granular control over static files, those solutions are not easier to use by many people's estimation. For a lot of people whether or not they're easier to use depends on how comfortable someone is with deployments. Someone less familiar with coding than deployments probably would find heroku more irritating than useful.
If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. Contact lens solution. Gum. Candles. Wine. Shirts. If Red Kap is saying that their industrial work shirts are extremely durable, I want to know that rather than having a list of materials in the blend, the fabric weight, the composition of the thread, whether or not the armpits are gusseted, etc. Then I can take a look and decide myself if the company has the same idea of durable that I do. My life would be measurably worse if they could not give their subjective take on why those facts matter, and if I need to buy a shirt quickly before a camping trip, I don't want to go looking for a shirt forum and deciding whether or not those people are full of shit. Groupthink is a huge problems in online enthusiast communities as it is. It's just a different source of people trying to push their perspective except now the reward is their feeling like a know-it-all. Is it more objective? Yeah. Is it so much more objective that I want to look
Targeting can be good to a very limited extent, or bad to a great extent. I'm glad I get advertisements for a new local coffee roaster pop up in some social media feed. The chance of me driving down that little side street in that neighborhood is slight, and the same is probably true for my friends. The local newspaper is a shitty clone of USA Today and expensive so I don't subscribe to it, and they probably wouldn't even cover it anyway. The local food reviewer social media accounts, I know for a fact, are essentially hawking places for money without disclosing it. The local food forums/blogs/etc are full of cranks and blowhards and it's impossible to know if anything is really good or bad. I'm glad I see that instead of advertisements for stethoscopes and scrap metal recycling services which also target industries common in my area. I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function. (Even then, communist countries have and always did have advertisements to just let people know that things existed. Even if there was less manipulation involved in them, they still had to show people why something was worth buying instead of just giving them statistics and hoping people's nerdy friends would explain it to them.)
The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying. Trying to address those things by criticizing advertising itself would be like trying to reduce junk mail by banning mail. There are fundamental problems that need to be addressed but saying advertisements can just go away a) completely ignores what advertisements actually do in our society and why they exist, and b) completely ignores the guarantee that greedy people will still use greedy and manipulative business practices to get an unfair advantage because advertisements aren't the source of greed or the only way people can be greedy.