91–100 of 359 posts
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You can also keep your house clean and perfectly staged all the time by cleaning it yourself. It's not impossible, or even difficult.
Yes, but what are you giving up to do that?
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We should strive to take away the option of knowledge from the poor, so they can be happy with their place in society.
We should strive to lie less to the poor about what they need to possess.
I can see a few compelling arguments for it, but personally I'd be very wary of concluding causation from this relationship. The two things are very complicated and have many confounding variables involved. I see it just as likely that the correlation is spurious, and people exposed to advertising have lower life satisfaction for a variety of complex reasons incidental to the ads themselves. Capitalism affords many o…
If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns.
You did at one point say that advertising might not be causing the lower satisfaction, it might just be exacerbating other problems that cause lower satisfaction. While that possibility certainly warrants investigation to see what those other problems are, it doesn't have any implications for how we treat advertising: either way we should be seeking to decrease its influence on our lives.
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If you are talking about one from the 80s probably yes, 2009 not so much.
I don't think this is correct. A lot of the new driver assistance technologies are having a significant effect on safety: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/22/new-report-shows-how-many-ac... These features are new in the last 10 years, some are new in the last couple years, and they are continually improving.
The systems will get better, but for the time being, they mostly serve to let drivers think they can get away with paying even less attention to the road than usual.
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…
Isn't that the primary goal of most advertising? To create a dissatisfaction in people in such a way that they're driven to buy your product in an attempt to fill that void?
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…
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 maintenance of existing machines, so it is easy to not have any ethical trap... But it is not THAT profitable either... (just for comparison: I know a guy that works filming TV ads, and he said politicians pay for 30 second ads to his company, the same income my company has for several months summed...)
I'm gonna take the contrarian viewpoint here. Full disclosure: I'm in advertising. The researcher states that increasing "aspiration" (their term) leads to dissatisfaction and more unhappiness. Sure! But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. I don't disagree that ambition and aspiration can make a person unhappy. But it's also wh…
I think that the aspirations that almost all advertisements give to people are actively harmful in every possible way. - It is the main revenue source of most mentally harmful products like social media. A replacement created for the good of the world paid for by taxes with open data would be much preferred. - Has masked how the world really functions via out-right lies and deception. Coke makes you happy, Happy Cows…
- Ads for charities - Political ads (which are only good or bad if you agree or disagree with their positions) - Ads for schools - Movie trailers (a form of entertainment in it of themselves)
Also: I suspect (but don't have the means to prove) a positive correlation between advertising spending and national GDP.
Look, if your point is that capitalism is evil, I'm not gonna argue it. But in a free market, advertising creates jobs. It builds companies. It builds economies.
When that advertising-free socialist utopia shows up that somehow isn't an evil dictatorship, let me know! Sounds awesome.
I was the first person in my family to do the "cord cutting" thing, where I only had an Amazon Prime and Netflix account, and a bunch of DVDs and Blu-Rays (around 2012). People asked me why, and I said that I think it's dumb to pay money for advertisements, and that I think ads are bad for you. My brother-in-law is overall a smart guy, but he works at Taco Bell full-time, making minimum wage in NYC (~$15/hour). He de…
It’s to get rid of the shame he feels about having an older inferior phone, frequently from peers who’ve been exposed to advertising
I can see a few compelling arguments for it, but personally I'd be very wary of concluding causation from this relationship. The two things are very complicated and have many confounding variables involved. I see it just as likely that the correlation is spurious, and people exposed to advertising have lower life satisfaction for a variety of complex reasons incidental to the ads themselves. Capitalism affords many o…
Do you have an alternative hypothesis for why advertising would be inversely correlated with satisfaction? If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns. You did at one point say that advertising might not be causing the lower satisfaction, it might just be exacerbating other problems that cause lower satisfaction. While that possibility cert…
Nope! We shouldn't. Speculation is precisely what we should do! That's what a critical review of research involves. We should take this as excellent motivation for further research. It could be true, but we haven't done nearly enough work to conclude as much. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's uncertain, and it's strictly unscientific to proceed by assuming something uncertain is the truth just because it's intuitively compelling. Intuitively compelling narratives are very dangerous in science, because they make you believe you have a shortcut to the truth and they're vindicated right up until they aren't. It's not a good habit.
Happiness is incredibly complicated. Contradicting evidence and results abound across studies of life satisfaction. Measuring the impact and success of advertising itself is highly complex; the researchers have shown this correlation under their current methodology. What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with a different conclusion? That's very possible, and we can't dismiss it. The researchers themselves hedge their claims and don't come out and say they've found causation.
I don't really have a dog in the race with advertising. But I really despise this kind of reporting by HBR, because the result is threads like this one where people walk away with unproven "truths" that become part of the popular zeitgeist because they just seem to vindicate obvious beliefs. Today it's advertising, tomorrow it'll be something else. Given the replication crisis we're undergoing, we shouldn't take anything away from studies like this except that further research is required.
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> We could not possible disagree more. I think it is straight-up immoral for anyone to intentionally make another's life worse in order to sell them stuff. I'm not sure we disagree, actually. I think you may be misunderstanding my meaning. When I tell you about a product, a number of things are happening: 1. If I'm successful in getting you to want the product, I've created (or emphasized an existing) dissatisfaction…
Woah now, I would completely disagree, heroin does not make you happy, short term pleasure is not the same thing. New information which helps people is inherently a good thing, but can be obtained through other means than ads, i.e. word of mouth. The fact is that most ads are targeted badly and thus useless for most people, and the targeted ads that do help some are breaches of privacy, the better the ad the more inf…
1. They'd simply undercut their prices, as they do now.
2. Advertising can level the playing field when the smaller competitor understands the game they're playing. There are countless examples of now-major brands that started out as the underdog but put out really creative work. Truly creative work can radically outperform your average ad campaign, but they're risky. Which is why the major brands play it safe and can't produce the outstanding work.
As for the whole privacy/targeting thing, I'm not defending that one. I 100% agree that it's gone way too bloody far. I was perfectly happy with ads that were targeted based purely on the content being presented rather than the creepy profiles that a lot of media companies keep on all of us.