Profound. Thanks for sharing this. That really frames what I’ve been struggling to describe. Advertising isn’t some necessary lifeblood of many industries. It can often be something like the endless trench warfare between Pepsi and Coke, vying for slivers of mindshare.
I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”
Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.
Do good products fail to take off on their own because advertising is an absolute necessity, or is it because advertising allows bad products to saturate the market so thoroughly? In a hypothetical world without advertising, would it still be true that good products couldn't take off on their own merits? Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry?
I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.
While it rings rather hollow at this point, I still find NPR's description of how they differentiate "advertising" from "sponsor messages":
- no qualitative adjectives
That is, you can say "Foo Corp. makes high speed Gizblams that can help you and your family deal with the challenges of flamming" without it being an ad.
BUt if you say "Foo Corp. makes the best anti-flam devices", it's an ad.
I mean sure, it's sort of bullshit, but there's some sort of idea buried in there somewhere.
I really like this. There is a huge difference between,
“We make Foo. Foo helps you Bar the Baz. Check us out at foobarbaz.com”
Vs.
“Look at this scary Baz. Feel emotions about it. We want you feeling anxious and ill-equipped. Okay now here’s Foo. We want you feeling better. Nicer music. Smiles. Good emotions from you. What a relief. If you’re tired of being a dumb idiot who suffers from Baz all the time, we can fix you with Foo.”
HN asks for substantive comments, not memes or internet tropes. HN also asks you not to comment on voting because it's shallow and boring. Written guidelines are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Foo Corp. makes Gizblams." Whether or not they're high speed depends on the other Gizblam manufacturers, whether or not it can help me or my family depends on if I like it or not.
Hey I'd never heard that one before, I like that one a lot. I wouldn't mind ads if they were sponsor messages like that or remember PBS and stuff? Less noise and crap would be great and ads wouldn't be so crap to deal with. If ya want to let me know your product exists just say it does don't try to lie to me then yeah I'd be more okay with ads or "sponsor messages" as you say there.
To NPR's point, I do not find NPR's voices advertising objectionable when they come up once or twice an hour. They're non-offensive and in the same voice, tone, and level as all of the other commentary.
I've been thinking about this comment for a few minutes and do find it interesting. But the extremes of the comments and quotes above make it clear that even displaying your product is an ad; demonstrating how it works to a crowd would be an ad; telling someone that it exists would be an ad; there seems to be no way to tell the market that your product exists without that being defined as an ad.
So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product.
I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even?
You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.
So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
>So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
I spent a number of years doing market research for advertising, and I couldn't agree more. Data analysis is primarily focused on increasing "top of mind" and "unaided" awareness and linking positively-perceived properties and emotions to the product being flogged.
I got out before "social media" convinced everyone to share everything about their lives with advertisers and their enablers, but back in the day, ad agencies and the marketing departments of large consumer product companies each spend millions every year (cf. BSB Global Scan[0] as an example) collecting a tiny subset of that data.
Given the enormous amount of data available today, I imagine that the levels of manipulation have increased exponentially. And more's the pity.
So I suppose where you are coming from is that you're using dirty tricks to convince people who don't need a product to buy it. Which is not ideal. But I've seen a lot of software engineers write code that is unreliable and causes their users a lot of suffering. Most people do a bit of harm on the margins because their job is part of messy reality instead of some imaginary pure world.
On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal.
"I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.
How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.
> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.
> To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves...
Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.
People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.
People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.
Advertisers never push people to do the sensible thing though. There's a reason that "vice" advertising has so much money poured into it.
The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.
Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.
McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.
It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.
I agree that way more advertising is aimed at encouraging poor decisions for profit. There's just more money in it. But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves. Profit is still made, but the exchange is much more equitable (or there's no better option).
iPhone advertising back in 2007-era revolutionised computing and managed to convince a lot of people to pa for quality phones instead of putting up with the usual cheap product that most companies produce. It was a two-for-one.
AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.
I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.
Local news stations are one of the last bastions of investigative journalism, (generally) reliable and actionable information, and platforms for local non-profits. They're a net benefit to a community, and they only maintain that capacity through promotion.
There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.
Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.
It's not so much about any particular ad or product, but the attention that ads steal. Most peoples' heads are FULL of ad jingles they never wanted there.
> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.
That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.
Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.
As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.
I think that the rest of your discussion hinges on this assumption, and I completely disagree with it.
What you need actually is for people to know that your product exist.
People have needs & problem beyond the fake ones created by advertising.
People can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem. And that to me is fundamentally different.
Having a way for consumers to go out and pull information in about what options exist is fundamentally different from having advertising shoved down their throat.
> People need can _ask_ for what options exist to solve their problem.
Where do you propose people ask? Who would fulfill those queries? What formats would you allow the information to be expressed in? Would you filter out any non-objective characterization (“best car in the world”)? Would you constrain packaging (eg color, creativity, etc.) so that it isn’t attention-grabbing? Etc.
I’m not sure how it would all work out. But let’s start where we are now with search engines.
Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.
Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.
Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.
This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:
1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.
2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.
This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.
Google used to (like, fifteen years ago) go to enormous lengths to break or cripple any kind of SEO - unpredictably revising their algorithm, hand-reviewing sites, and other things that they wouldn't even admit to or hint about (for fear of giving the nascent SEO "industry" a moment of ascendency). There was a brief time in the early teens when the received wisdom was that "SEO doesn't work".
Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".
I recently switched to Kagi, and it does most of the things I talk about above. I don’t stumble into SEO crab very often anymore. And when I do, I instantly black hole it.
They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.
I really believe I have a good idea for this question[1]. There is no reason advertising couldn't be nagging me to do things I want to be nagged into doing anyway. But damn, the actual work to disrupt such an entrenched snakepit of self-justification is daunting. I don't think it's at all impossible to build something much better, just really hard to get the necessary mindshare from an industry built on taking mindshare.
This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.
Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.
> This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.
The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.
I actually didn’t require it to stop looking like current advertising. I merely wish for a system in which you come to companies telling them what problem you want and listen to what they have to say.
This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.
It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.
I recently bought a ski touring pack. It's almost certainly the best pack money can buy. The guy who made it has a waiting list and seems to be happy with his life. He doesn't advertise at all. If you find him, you move in the circles that mean that you want a high quality ski touring pack, and word of mouth will eventually reach you. If you really care about this category of product you can find him. The pack is competitive in price with anything else on the market of similar features and quality. It's not really a "luxury" or "boutique" product.
This is an example of how businesses and customers can be perfectly happy without any advertising. It's not the only example, just the first that came to mind.
I know a Polish guy that makes sleeping bags along much the same model. Best sleeping bags that you can find. He's got a waiting list longer than a year now and people don't mind. Never a single ad, just word of mouth. And no, it doesn't scale but he couldn't care less.
One of my clients make really good products. I would say the best you can get (this is a mobility product) It has ergonomic properties that blows away any competition, and build quality is second to none.
However, it’s expensive. It has been a really tough uphill climb to connect to our audience and convince them the money is worth it here. In a market with marked up shitty quality products it has been a journey to position ourselves, especially since our budgets are maybe 1/10th of that of aforementioned shitty producers who outmarket us.
I honestly feel the work I am doing is near to a community service. Although still advertising our ads are honest of what the products can do.
Put up a non-intrusive entry in a directory that people would use to reach out to you. Let them come to you.
Stop hounding people to be the repeatedly ground in impression by repetition. So much time is wasted today... When I think of all the broadcasting/transmission medium throughput that's eaten up by carrying unsolicited advertisements to people that could either A) be left unused, or used to provide better performance for everyone, or B) utilized for, heaven forbid, the public calling out for proposals from service providers!
You know, we could just bin the entire sector/activity under dishonesty like we did before puffery was enshrined as an acceptable behavior for a business.
Advertisement meant to inform is valuable. However, almost all advertising is meant to bewilder.
Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry.
We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept.
Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.
The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.
> I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.
But for most customers, any brand will suit them. Getting rid of advertising wouldn't really have an adverse effect on them, they'll just buy whatever's at the store and it'll be fine. (As long as there are adequate consumer protections.)
You might've never worked in retail I guess... Most people, if someone they trust chose for them, sure they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But also, picking a "reputable brand" is a big criterion. By which most people mean, a brand they've at least heard of, preferably in good ways.
So who advertised the wheel to you? The sextant? The hammer? The abacus? Good inventions stand on their own technical merits and don’t need advertising to get others to see that they are good ideas.
You just listed several items invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, it doesn’t really give you a very strong argument.
If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.
You are supporting my point here. You aren’t selling actual tech, you are selling your website, that goes on to describe tech. No one puts out ads for things like c, bash, python, R, whatever. There aren’t billboards for these languages on the highway. This tech stands on its own, and people are guided to one language or another based on either its own technical merits or their own comfort with the language. You could argue things like white papers describing a technology in a relevant publication might be an ad, but I disagree. Those are more or less factual reports where the authors might even test their technologies shortcomings and limitations compared to existing offerings. Hyperbole is rejected by peer review, yet its the default language of advertising.
Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.
Yeah sure wheels are a good idea. Most people aren't in the market for ideas. If you're in the market for some actual wheels to put on your car, it sure might help if the tires someone's trying to sell you are Goodyear, Michelin, Firestone, or some no-brand piece of rubber.
It's not. Apple advertised massively the iPhone when it came out, and while they did take share away from other phone manufacturers, they almost certainly made the pie bigger for everyone. People weren't routinely buying phones that cost close to $1000 every few years.
The first iPhone was about $600 which wasn’t that high when you consider the price of an iPod + cell phone combined. And people were regularly buying cellphones and that trend would only ever increase.
As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.
>> Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs.
Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)
No, I've built my own computer from parts I've researched that were given by aggregated reviews best ratio of cost/value for me. If I ever saw an ad during that process to any of those components, I would ignore that. If it would be obnoxious enough, I would go for competition instead just because of that.
Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process.
Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead.
I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.
I don't think I have ever seen microsoft ads in my country, not for Windows at least.
They didn't make it by advertising rather that having deals to become the default because shipped in the hardware and the price baked in the price of the hardware.
Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries.
The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.
There is plenty of Microsoft advertising in any country that they're in. But it may be more subtle. There's search advertising. They also subsidize partner advertising (co-marketing).
> The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services.
?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.
>I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise
TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.
> I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise.
Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.
Many established doctors have their habits set after years (or decades) of practice, and aren't particularly interested in new stuff. Many young doctors are unsure of trying something outside of the norm. All are afraid of malpractice. It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
> It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.
That’s only because everyone advertises. Kind of nuclear weapons. You gotta have them even if you believe they shouldn’t even exist. Still, many very good products take off on their own (word of mouth) though they’re not very common.
I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”