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You think all ads are irrelevant to you? Do you not use goods and services to raise your quality of life? Don't tell me "I just google for something if I want

You think all ads are irrelevant to you? Do you not use goods and services to raise your quality of life? Don't tell me "I just google for something if I want to consume it," because truly innovative products and services are outside the realm of general imagination, that's what makes them innovative. And all the great products and services you learned about from word of mouth? Guess how your friends heard about them... Advertising is annoying as hell, but it has value.

hrktb 11y ago
Not speaking for the parent, but I have a similar feeling. Imagine you are thinking about buying a car. You think about your needs, your budget, the different costs involved, the technical choices etc. You are then bombed with very relevant ads for some car X that is suitable for your needs. From that point, if you decide to go on searching for the best car matching your needs, you'll be comparing the models to the X car, and your vision will be tinted every time you see it in the results. Perhaps that X car is actually the one that fits your needs the best. But until you make a choice you'll have to make an effort to discard all the promotion and overselling surrounding X. You'll be spending energy to ignore information thrown at you because you need to think at it independantly to compare with the other choices. In this sense, I also feel relevant ads are pollution
alextgordon 11y ago
The traditional way to buy a consumer good is in a store, then you can see the alternatives and pick the best one...
- billmalarky 11y ago
  It is virtually impossible to get shelf space in _most_ stores without pre-existing consumer demand.
munificent 11y ago
I like "relevant" ads because they're almost always for something I just bought. "Oh, you got a new lens for your camera? How about buying the exact same lens again, from Amazon!" This is great because it makes sure most of the ads I see are not offensive and will have no effect on my life.
easong 11y ago
Actually, yes, all ads are irrelevant to me. I have never purchased an item from an ad, and cut out ads form my life as much as possible. I run multiple layers of software to block advertising on all my devices, refuse to use services/apps that force one to use ads, and will leave a restaurant/airport lounge/other public area if they play content with advertising. I won't read print magazines because they have advertisements. There is nothing an advertiser could do to convince me to listen to, read, or watch their ad. The hidden/in context ads are somewhat unavoidable (eg ads for YC on HN), but I write code to filter out such things when I see patterns. I'm working on releasing an extension that subs out all brand names on the web. And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. If I need something, I'll look for it. In fact, I find that this leads me to higher quality and more innovative products that better fit my needs - if a service spreads through advertising, that's very good evidence that it's both shitty and not targeted at me. If your memory is polluted by advertising, you'll tend to reach for inferior products first. Advertising has negative value for the individual and the ecosystem, because companies compete on marketing and not on product.
- billmalarky 11y ago
  >And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. This lifestyle works for you precisely because the vast majority of the rest of the market does not live this way. Capitalist economies (where the consumers are individuals rather than one large buyer like the state) require products and services to get public awareness. The best way to achieve public awareness is through paid for mass communication.
  - easong 11y ago
    It's the easiest (not the best, IMO) way for companies to reach out to a broad market right now, because consumers as a whole haven't yet figured out that advertising is a negative quality signal and are currently terrible at controlling their information diet. But there are growing segments of the population that are getting better at reading healthy just the same as there's a growing segment concerned about eating healthy. As more information-savvy and time-sensitive (read: higher-income) consumers reject advertising, companies seeking to target them will have to find alternate methods of reaching out to them. If information distribution continues to be disintermediated, then they might find that the only way to do that is by focusing on building things people legitimately want to use and tell their peers about. Traditional advertising will become even more a ghetto than it already is, and will primarily target low-value consumers.
Sir_Substance 11y ago
>You think all ads are irrelevant to you? Do you not use goods and services to raise your quality of life? There is no connection between these two statements, and the former is not the assertion I made.
- billmalarky 11y ago
  Products and services cannot be successful in a market economy without raising public awareness.
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    "Successful" is such a poorly defined qualifier it makes your statement meaningless. I cannot argue against it, it would be like punching jelly. Please define it concisely and accurately, using a quantifiable metric and no examples, so that I may either provide counter-examples to your statement or question the societal relevance of the metric you choose.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That is true, but "raising public awareness" is just a very small part of what modern advertising does. For products and services to be successful, one just has to place information about their availability accessible somewhere where people will look. What it absolutely doesn't require is pushing information. If I need a product or service, I'll look it up. As for potentially useful services I don't even know they exist, I'll discover them when I'm bored and start browsing ad catalogues. Everything that I actually need I'll learn from friends and family anyway (aka. word-of-mouth). Here is where advertisement stops being useful and starts being malicious: the very core principle of "creating a need". The idea that you need to create a need in customer that they didn't have before. This is wrong, manipulative and malicious. I don't need you to hack my life like this and profit off it. I can discover the world on my own.

hrktb 11y ago

Not speaking for the parent, but I have a similar feeling. Imagine you are thinking about buying a car. You think about your needs, your budget, the different costs involved, the technical choices etc. You are then bombed with very relevant ads for some car X that is suitable for your needs. From that point, if you decide to go on searching for the best car matching your needs, you'll be comparing the models to the X car, and your vision will be tinted every time you see it in the results. Perhaps that X car is actually the one that fits your needs the best. But until you make a choice you'll have to make an effort to discard all the promotion and overselling surrounding X. You'll be spending energy to ignore information thrown at you because you need to think at it independantly to compare with the other choices. In this sense, I also feel relevant ads are pollution

alextgordon 11y ago

The traditional way to buy a consumer good is in a store, then you can see the alternatives and pick the best one...

billmalarky 11y ago
It is virtually impossible to get shelf space in _most_ stores without pre-existing consumer demand.

munificent 11y ago

I like "relevant" ads because they're almost always for something I just bought. "Oh, you got a new lens for your camera? How about buying the exact same lens again, from Amazon!" This is great because it makes sure most of the ads I see are not offensive and will have no effect on my life.

easong 11y ago

Actually, yes, all ads are irrelevant to me. I have never purchased an item from an ad, and cut out ads form my life as much as possible. I run multiple layers of software to block advertising on all my devices, refuse to use services/apps that force one to use ads, and will leave a restaurant/airport lounge/other public area if they play content with advertising. I won't read print magazines because they have advertisements. There is nothing an advertiser could do to convince me to listen to, read, or watch their ad. The hidden/in context ads are somewhat unavoidable (eg ads for YC on HN), but I write code to filter out such things when I see patterns. I'm working on releasing an extension that subs out all brand names on the web. And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. If I need something, I'll look for it. In fact, I find that this leads me to higher quality and more innovative products that better fit my needs - if a service spreads through advertising, that's very good evidence that it's both shitty and not targeted at me. If your memory is polluted by advertising, you'll tend to reach for inferior products first. Advertising has negative value for the individual and the ecosystem, because companies compete on marketing and not on product.

billmalarky 11y ago
>And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. This lifestyle works for you precisely because the vast majority of the rest of the market does not live this way. Capitalist economies (where the consumers are individuals rather than one large buyer like the state) require products and services to get public awareness. The best way to achieve public awareness is through paid for mass communication.
- easong 11y ago
  It's the easiest (not the best, IMO) way for companies to reach out to a broad market right now, because consumers as a whole haven't yet figured out that advertising is a negative quality signal and are currently terrible at controlling their information diet. But there are growing segments of the population that are getting better at reading healthy just the same as there's a growing segment concerned about eating healthy. As more information-savvy and time-sensitive (read: higher-income) consumers reject advertising, companies seeking to target them will have to find alternate methods of reaching out to them. If information distribution continues to be disintermediated, then they might find that the only way to do that is by focusing on building things people legitimately want to use and tell their peers about. Traditional advertising will become even more a ghetto than it already is, and will primarily target low-value consumers.

Sir_Substance 11y ago

>You think all ads are irrelevant to you? Do you not use goods and services to raise your quality of life? There is no connection between these two statements, and the former is not the assertion I made.

billmalarky 11y ago
Products and services cannot be successful in a market economy without raising public awareness.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  "Successful" is such a poorly defined qualifier it makes your statement meaningless. I cannot argue against it, it would be like punching jelly. Please define it concisely and accurately, using a quantifiable metric and no examples, so that I may either provide counter-examples to your statement or question the societal relevance of the metric you choose.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That is true, but "raising public awareness" is just a very small part of what modern advertising does. For products and services to be successful, one just has to place information about their availability accessible somewhere where people will look. What it absolutely doesn't require is pushing information. If I need a product or service, I'll look it up. As for potentially useful services I don't even know they exist, I'll discover them when I'm bored and start browsing ad catalogues. Everything that I actually need I'll learn from friends and family anyway (aka. word-of-mouth). Here is where advertisement stops being useful and starts being malicious: the very core principle of "creating a need". The idea that you need to create a need in customer that they didn't have before. This is wrong, manipulative and malicious. I don't need you to hack my life like this and profit off it. I can discover the world on my own.