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Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my nei

Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public aware of the existence of my very good product which nonetheless fills a niche that is well-occupied and not a very important part of people's lives (and therefore unlikely to be discussed unless immediately sought)? How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? This idea that advertising has no use and exists sort of parasitically is baffling to me. Even more baffling is that it's a meme which routinely nets all the upvotes on a place like HN -- where presumably the commenters are more likely to have actually created and sold valuable things, and therefore, one assumes, would have more than an academic appreciation for how business is done. It's been said many times before, but the level of discourse around here is retreating rapidly into equal parts academic idealism and Reddit-esque karma-driven populism.

wott 11y ago
> Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? In each, all and every possible sense.
scrollaway 11y ago
You're conflating the idea of broadcasting and advertising. One is the other, but the other is not the one. Of course advertising has a use, but without advertising it's not like you would "have to research the 85 sushi restaurants" in your neighbourhood. Put it this way: I use adblock, I do not watch TV nor go to places which actively advertise. My life is fine, and I don't have to "actively research" anything unless I specifically want to. In fact, compared to people who don't avoid ads, I tend to spend my money a lot better... something to think about.
- zanny 11y ago
  On the topic of Sushi Restaurants, you have two fantastic resources available to you anyway - technology (Google Maps, for example) lets you find the closest restaurants and ratings for those restaurants polled from various resources. If you do not trust Google, use another mapping or restaurant critique service. Alternatively, you can use the ancient-as-human-civilization method of social web information about quality. The vast majority of purchasing decisions are still made through the influence of peers, rather than by advertising, because you trust your peers recommendations way more than what you see on TV - for good reason. In either case, they provide broadcasting as well, and in all cases, they are inherent to either the Internet Age or human organization, and do the job better than emotional splurge-purchase decision TV ads ever could.
lsc 11y ago
> How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? the problem is that there's a conflict of interest between the seller of a good and the buyer of a good. Every seller wants to claim that their product is better, regardless of actual reality, while every buyer would like to actually know which product is better As you rightly point out, the buyer doesn't want to do a lot of research to find this out, but.. the problem with advertising is that advertising does not give the consumer a good idea of what is actually best because of the aforementioned conflict of interest. I think if we are talking about reality, we mostly rely on the law here; E.g. if I go to the corner store and grab a gallon of milk, it probably won't poison me, because there are 'minimum milk' standards (my area has yet to legalize unpasteurized milk for human consumption) So I can buy the cheapest milk in the store, or the milk advertised to target my demographic, and either way, little harm is done. Worst case I spend a little more money than I'd need to. The right answer to the research problem is something like consumer reports (though really, I think it'd work better if it integrated with cooperative retail... e.g. I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there.)
- petra 11y ago
  > . I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there. Aren't you by limiting selection - limiting innovation, the ability of each one buying according to the price and other characteristics he he sees fit?
  - lsc 11y ago
    Yes, if you hand over the choice of "limit all possibilities down to a few I can choose from" to another party, then yes, you are handing them a lot of power over you. However, you are probably going to hand that power to someone - there are just too many products to research them all. I am arguing that you are probably better off if you hand that power off to an entity who's only revenue source is you and people like you, than if you hand that choice off to conventional advertising agencies.
petra 11y ago
We don't need brand advertising to achieve any of those functions.It has negative value for consumers. So maybe some form of advertising is useful, but it would look totally different if what drove it was consumer benefit and not producer benefit.
- zanny 11y ago
  The subset of advertising the superposter is referring to is informational and educational promotion of products rather than advertising. There is also the conflation that there is some lost potential when advertising can actually sway you into buying something - but the secret is, if you do not already have the necessary economic pressure upon yourself to seek out goods and services in your interest already, that advertising is actually detrimental because it subverts your internal alignment of values through conditioning causing you to make purchases against your base intentions. The only aspect of advertising of worth is learning products exist, but I would quite easily argue that - especially in the age of social media - word of mouth informance about goods and services that can benefit your life are much more valuable and reasonable and much less detrimental to personal economics than advertising. How many people bought smartphones because of a TV ad vs their peers telling and showing them how useful they are? Since we are getting on this topic, I imagine in the case of the downfall of advertising - however that may happen - people would become sociable again amongst each other about what products are good and useful and which have quality. A thousand years ago you would not have known of the quality of rice from a country away but you would know who is the best and worst blacksmith in town and where to get the best ale. We could easily have that again, enhanced with technology to make it a truly global information market. The private finance of product placement to cause emotional purchases rather than rational ones, by comparison, is dramatically more inefficient.
matheweis 11y ago
I (mostly) agree that advertising is a good thing. I also think that there are many different kinds of advertising; some of the more blatant and intrusive perhaps being the kind that people are getting fed up with. To run with your milk example, my wife and I recently learned of Danzeisen Dairy (http://www.danzeisendairy.com); http://www.danzeisendairy.com); a state-local dairy producer who recently started selling their milk in at our local grocer. We didn't learn of them through an ad in the local paper, or a TV spot, or display ads on the web. The bottles were just there, in the local grocer. But before anyone thinks they aren't advertising... the milk was in cutsey little glass bottles, adorned with their logo, the words "Local" - "delivered farm fresh" in retro script, and they "just happened" to be located at eye level on the milk shelf. Not advertising? Ha! ... but it wasn't blatant and obtrusive.
bendbro 11y ago
Most people realize that when you have 200 competing brands of Almond Milk, 199/200 times they are not telling the truth. There is no value in believing what advertising says.
jlarocco 11y ago
Advertising doesn't solve any of those problems, but makes them all worse. Now instead of 200 brands of almond milk and 85 sushi restaurants to try or ask your friends about, you have 285 companies shoving ads in your face, all insisting they're the "best", when obviously they all can't be. In fact, having to sort through 285 ads is worse than actually trying 285 products, because the advertisements are completely disconnected from the quality of the actual products. Offer a good product and people will come back and tell their friends. That's the alternative to advertising, because it's what people will do anyway.
stegosaurus 11y ago
>> I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood Neither do I. I'll just pick one arbitrarily. It's almond milk. I might even just skip it entirely. I don't even really need milk, if giving up advertising meant I had to drink water that's fine. I think the issue here is that you're approaching this from a consumerist viewpoint to begin with - it's difficult to explain exactly what's wrong because it's a completely foreign approach.
taneq 11y ago
It baffles me that your (imho) perfectly valid and well thought out post is getting downvoted in this of all places, where advertising revenue (as the most straightforward way to monetise a web service) must underpin the employment of a significant proportion of posters.
hugozap 11y ago
Advertising has little relation to quality or wellbeing. It's dangerous to be lazy about researching what products to consume. Junk food has great advertising. Other (not well known) brands have great quality but do not have big advertising budgets. Maybe we (as society) should start to be less lazy about researching the products we consume instead of letting huge brands with different interests decide for us.

wott 11y ago

> Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? In each, all and every possible sense.

scrollaway 11y ago

You're conflating the idea of broadcasting and advertising. One is the other, but the other is not the one. Of course advertising has a use, but without advertising it's not like you would "have to research the 85 sushi restaurants" in your neighbourhood. Put it this way: I use adblock, I do not watch TV nor go to places which actively advertise. My life is fine, and I don't have to "actively research" anything unless I specifically want to. In fact, compared to people who don't avoid ads, I tend to spend my money a lot better... something to think about.

zanny 11y ago
On the topic of Sushi Restaurants, you have two fantastic resources available to you anyway - technology (Google Maps, for example) lets you find the closest restaurants and ratings for those restaurants polled from various resources. If you do not trust Google, use another mapping or restaurant critique service. Alternatively, you can use the ancient-as-human-civilization method of social web information about quality. The vast majority of purchasing decisions are still made through the influence of peers, rather than by advertising, because you trust your peers recommendations way more than what you see on TV - for good reason. In either case, they provide broadcasting as well, and in all cases, they are inherent to either the Internet Age or human organization, and do the job better than emotional splurge-purchase decision TV ads ever could.

lsc 11y ago

> How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? the problem is that there's a conflict of interest between the seller of a good and the buyer of a good. Every seller wants to claim that their product is better, regardless of actual reality, while every buyer would like to actually know which product is better As you rightly point out, the buyer doesn't want to do a lot of research to find this out, but.. the problem with advertising is that advertising does not give the consumer a good idea of what is actually best because of the aforementioned conflict of interest. I think if we are talking about reality, we mostly rely on the law here; E.g. if I go to the corner store and grab a gallon of milk, it probably won't poison me, because there are 'minimum milk' standards (my area has yet to legalize unpasteurized milk for human consumption) So I can buy the cheapest milk in the store, or the milk advertised to target my demographic, and either way, little harm is done. Worst case I spend a little more money than I'd need to. The right answer to the research problem is something like consumer reports (though really, I think it'd work better if it integrated with cooperative retail... e.g. I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there.)

petra 11y ago
> . I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there. Aren't you by limiting selection - limiting innovation, the ability of each one buying according to the price and other characteristics he he sees fit?
- lsc 11y ago
  Yes, if you hand over the choice of "limit all possibilities down to a few I can choose from" to another party, then yes, you are handing them a lot of power over you. However, you are probably going to hand that power to someone - there are just too many products to research them all. I am arguing that you are probably better off if you hand that power off to an entity who's only revenue source is you and people like you, than if you hand that choice off to conventional advertising agencies.

petra 11y ago

We don't need brand advertising to achieve any of those functions.It has negative value for consumers. So maybe some form of advertising is useful, but it would look totally different if what drove it was consumer benefit and not producer benefit.

zanny 11y ago
The subset of advertising the superposter is referring to is informational and educational promotion of products rather than advertising. There is also the conflation that there is some lost potential when advertising can actually sway you into buying something - but the secret is, if you do not already have the necessary economic pressure upon yourself to seek out goods and services in your interest already, that advertising is actually detrimental because it subverts your internal alignment of values through conditioning causing you to make purchases against your base intentions. The only aspect of advertising of worth is learning products exist, but I would quite easily argue that - especially in the age of social media - word of mouth informance about goods and services that can benefit your life are much more valuable and reasonable and much less detrimental to personal economics than advertising. How many people bought smartphones because of a TV ad vs their peers telling and showing them how useful they are? Since we are getting on this topic, I imagine in the case of the downfall of advertising - however that may happen - people would become sociable again amongst each other about what products are good and useful and which have quality. A thousand years ago you would not have known of the quality of rice from a country away but you would know who is the best and worst blacksmith in town and where to get the best ale. We could easily have that again, enhanced with technology to make it a truly global information market. The private finance of product placement to cause emotional purchases rather than rational ones, by comparison, is dramatically more inefficient.

matheweis 11y ago

I (mostly) agree that advertising is a good thing. I also think that there are many different kinds of advertising; some of the more blatant and intrusive perhaps being the kind that people are getting fed up with. To run with your milk example, my wife and I recently learned of Danzeisen Dairy (http://www.danzeisendairy.com); http://www.danzeisendairy.com); a state-local dairy producer who recently started selling their milk in at our local grocer. We didn't learn of them through an ad in the local paper, or a TV spot, or display ads on the web. The bottles were just there, in the local grocer. But before anyone thinks they aren't advertising... the milk was in cutsey little glass bottles, adorned with their logo, the words "Local" - "delivered farm fresh" in retro script, and they "just happened" to be located at eye level on the milk shelf. Not advertising? Ha! ... but it wasn't blatant and obtrusive.

bendbro 11y ago

Most people realize that when you have 200 competing brands of Almond Milk, 199/200 times they are not telling the truth. There is no value in believing what advertising says.

jlarocco 11y ago

Advertising doesn't solve any of those problems, but makes them all worse. Now instead of 200 brands of almond milk and 85 sushi restaurants to try or ask your friends about, you have 285 companies shoving ads in your face, all insisting they're the "best", when obviously they all can't be. In fact, having to sort through 285 ads is worse than actually trying 285 products, because the advertisements are completely disconnected from the quality of the actual products. Offer a good product and people will come back and tell their friends. That's the alternative to advertising, because it's what people will do anyway.

stegosaurus 11y ago

>> I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood Neither do I. I'll just pick one arbitrarily. It's almond milk. I might even just skip it entirely. I don't even really need milk, if giving up advertising meant I had to drink water that's fine. I think the issue here is that you're approaching this from a consumerist viewpoint to begin with - it's difficult to explain exactly what's wrong because it's a completely foreign approach.

taneq 11y ago

It baffles me that your (imho) perfectly valid and well thought out post is getting downvoted in this of all places, where advertising revenue (as the most straightforward way to monetise a web service) must underpin the employment of a significant proportion of posters.

hugozap 11y ago

Advertising has little relation to quality or wellbeing. It's dangerous to be lazy about researching what products to consume. Junk food has great advertising. Other (not well known) brands have great quality but do not have big advertising budgets. Maybe we (as society) should start to be less lazy about researching the products we consume instead of letting huge brands with different interests decide for us.