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Advertising is mind pollution — if you have a mind. If everyone was like us there would be no advertising. Personally, maybe once a year I give at least some t

• petercooper 17y ago
  because usually I already know what I'm looking for, if I'm looking for something. How? Let's say you want to buy a computer and you go direct to, say, Dell. How would you have heard of Dell if not for advertising? Seen a Dell at someone else's house? How did they hear about Dell? It has to start somewhere.
  • pg 17y ago
    Facebook grew without advertising.
    • petercooper 17y ago
      Facebook is an inherently social business that users only find useful if they promote it - so they do. An edge case. Bringing Facebook-like user promotion to a company selling everyday products would probably require users becoming affiliates and getting kickbacks. That can work (e.g. Avon) but having my friends potentially being shills seems more sinister than regular advertising. Thinking about this, though, did bring another option to mind that many startups use: press mentions. Branson and his Virgin companies are masters at this. So are Apple, but they're still massive on the advertising.
    • jacoblyles 17y ago
      Many new and superior entrants into a market used advertising to gain a foothold. Think Sears. The economics of the web are different and have lowered the value of advertising compared to the value of word of mouth. But there is still some value left in advertising, especially in markets for more traditional goods that don't spread as easily through viral means.
    • philwelch 17y ago
      Facebook's advertising is the friend invites. Once Mark Zuckerberg invited all his friends at Harvard, the users themselves handled the advertising. It was ingeniously targeted, too--the only people who got ads for Facebook were people whose friends were already using Facebook, which is the exact group of people Facebook wants as customers.
  • nevinera 17y ago
    >How? Let's say you want to buy a computer and you go direct to, say, Dell. How would you have heard of Dell if not for advertising? Seen a Dell at someone else's house? How did they hear about Dell? It has to start somewhere. You wouldn't go to Dell. You'd go to a forum where people discuss the relative qualities of their machines. You'd ask a friend who knows more than you, or you'd find a site that has a reputation for rating computers in a balanced way (e.g. Consumer Reports.) Dell's advertising conveys no information about Dell, except that it has a high advertising budget, and that it exists. A person who wants to buy a computer would have zero difficulty realizing that Dell exists from any number of sources (for example the top result from the search "buy a computer"), and the advertising budget of a company has no direct relationship with the quality of it's product.
  • yason 17y ago
    I guess most people here, including me, are conditionalized to regard anything advertised as categorically unverified and possibly false. I didn't say advertising would work for nobody, however. The advertised data filtered through a number of acquaintances and backed up by empiric knowledge slowly evolves into actual information. A new product basically flows through a pipeline where only some people need to buy something "blindfolded" and the rest can then enjoy the product if it turns out to be any good. Yeah, Dell has to initially tell "we're Dell, we make these computers, please try out a few of them". That's pretty much the only piece of information to which all advertising reduces to. The rest of the advertising mumbojumbo is only there to cut people off the said word-of-mouth pipeline and encourage them to buy it now, i.e. blindfolded with no prior experiences.