Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

Of course, I also once worked for what was basically a scam. As a teen, I answered an ad in the paper. We did telephone-based charity fundraising. Basically, telemarketing but "for good". Turns out the average amount passed on to charities was in the 10%-15% range. The rest, we kept. Those people also felt good about who they were and what they did.

And there's no bottom to this. Scroll down here to the photo of a bunch of happy women on a day trip and see what their job was. These look like people who were trying their best to do good work. Who feel good about what they do. But what did they do? https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2016/nov/22/nazis-...

My point being that you can't evaluate the morality of of a group of people from inside the frame of that group. Humans can always find a way to justify whatever they're doing. Bad things aren't done mostly by bad people. They're done by good people in bad systems. And the harm is mostly seen as external to the system, perhaps even unrelated to it.

As the study shows, advertising is intrinsically harmful to its viewers. But even if it weren't, it's enormously wasteful. It's mainly an arms race; companies mostly advertise because their competitors advertise. If we just banned it in the US, we'd have circa an extra $500 billion a year. That's free college for everyone, forever. (And that's not counting billions extra people would have from not buying stuff they don't really need or want.)

And in my view, the industry is irredeemably immoral, because manipulating people to fill your pockets is wrong. People in the industry don't think so, of course, because they either change their thinking or don't stay in the industry. You may not see Bernays as your role model, but I think his work was foundational to the modern advertising industry. And as much as I dislike what he did, I'll give him credit for at least being clear-eyed about it. The only advertising people I know who can talk honestly and clearly about what the work means are the ones who've left the industry.

And, low quality isn't always bad. Even the cheapest t-shirt and jeans in the world can last years if not decades: I know because I have them. I don't need to switch to another product because of "low quality".

Maybe I'm just less susceptible, but I've never thought: "am I enjoying my veggies less because I'm doing it wrong?" due to a sign in the grocery store.

As for milk, people talk about the 100s of milk choices. I don't see that at all. I don't drink cows milk. I see there's only 2 types of soy milk to choose from. And both of them contain added calcium sulfate. I have to go to a specialty store just to get unadulterated soy milk.

And, I simply don't let ads tell me what's pleasurable and what's not.

Now, reminder advertising could theoretically work on me. If there was an ad reminding me to buy certain types of veggies (cucumbers, spinach, broccoli, etc) just as I was running out. But my tastes and interests are so far removed from the average person that 99.99% of the ads are for things I would simply never buy and thus they are ineffective (how often do you see ads on the TV for fresh veggies or fruits or beans? ~ I rarely if ever see one).

Almost Everything people know about dairy is false, I've been saying that for years. The list of lies goes on and on: "Great for your bones", "part of a balanced breakfast", "High in calcium" (it is but your body can't absorb most of it), "good for your health (it's actually strongly linked to prostate cancer)", "Vitamin-D" (vitamin-D isn't even a vitamin, it's a hormone your body can produce all on it's own with exposure to sunlight).

So all those messages from the dairy industry are falling on MY deaf ears. Ads don't tell you about their product (at least not honestly most of the time), they tell you more about the people buying the product.

And, on top of all that, for all the talk of ads being everywhere, i don't get many intrusive ads. I don't have cable or any other paid subscriptions. there's almost no billboards where i live. the books i read don't contain any. hackernews has very few ads, etc.

if advertisers knew anything about me at all, they'd avoid targetting me to save money on useless ad spend. lolz maybe that's why I don't get much ads.

Now, if they advertised some nice veggies or fresh fruit that could work but how often do you see ads for that? and how much are those veggies going to cost after all that advertisement? will it be cost effective in comparison to the veggies that didn't advertise? (i'm guessing not, otherwise they'd have done it by now, right?)

Ads are targeted at the masses. If most/all your interests deviate from the norm, ads won't be effective.

That's one part of the issue. A company's product might be the best product for some people's needs, but there might be another product that fits the needs of some market segment better. But the company doesn't care if their product is the best for that segment: a sale is a sale. They'll advertise the strong points of the product, ignoring the properties of the product which might make it unsuitable for some consumers. This doesn't benefit consumers.

This might all seem obvious, but there are people on this thread who think advertising benefits consumers.

> What would a company consider a flaw? The product is released as designed, with no obvious issues.

This is really, really not true, and I am not entirely sure you are making a good faith argument here. I work hard at my job, but I've never released a product that didn't have bugs and tradeoffs.

> Again, the knowledge is them telling you about the product. They don't make you do anything other than provide information. You're entirely in control of your decisions.

Your decisions are only as good as the information you have, and advertising deliberately gives you wrong or incomplete information.

Fair, it does seem like the overall statistics don't show this. I'm having trouble squaring this with the data showing that these technologies are preventing accidents.

> Granted, driver behaviors may be getting worse

I wonder whether the top quartile is getting significantly better (thus resulting in the great "crashes avoided" numbers that these technologies claim) while everyone else is getting more distracted with their cell phones, causing an overall increase in the average number of crashes.

This goes into a bit more detail, suggesting that pedestrian fatalities due to more SUVs could also be driving the increase in fatalities: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/3/17933536/traffic-death-cr...

So it could also be a "safer for me, more dangerous for you" situation too with these new vehicles.