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An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were
by cft 9y ago
An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps 20 IBM System X servers (rock solid and beautifully engineered). Cost per that ad impression was perhaps $75,000.
- oiboabfljasbfo 9y agoI won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement. Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it. Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with. The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information. Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU
- mozumder 9y agoYah your argument against adverting is bullshit. Even consumers love ads. Did you know that they even pay money because they want ads? Those 900 pages of Vogue that they buy every September, do you think they're filled with articles? Because they're about 870 pages of fashion ads. People specifically buy them because of the advertising. And did you know Sunday papers are a thing, filled with coupons, that are basically ads? Sorry, but advertising serves a purpose that consumers actually pay money for.
- crummy 9y agoI think people buy Vogue (and all other advertising-sodden media) despite the ads, not because of it.
- zimpenfish 9y agoIt would be an interesting experiment to put out a non-ad-subsidised version of Vogue and see how many people bought it. I would guess at "not that many".
- LeoNatan25 9y agoIf it’s “900” pages of pure content, rather than ads, hell, even I’d buy it.
- zimpenfish 9y agoIt's 900 pages of pure content ... but costs $95.
- Kiro 9y agoYou're probably in minority though. It's like a catalogue. The "pure content" is just fluff.
- utexaspunk 9y agoEven if that "content" is boilerplate drivel like "25 Ways to Drive Him Wild in Bed!"?
- MrMid 9y agoWouldn't that be called a "book"?
- elkos 9y agoIt is my understanding that a similar publication nowadays, Cosmopolitan, used to be mostly a literary publication in it's early days. I wonder how the contents vs advertising ratio was balanced at the time.
- unkown-unknowns 9y agoYou and I might dislike ads but don't you think there's a pretty big chance that a lot of the products you are hearing about from your friends were only brought to their attention thanks to ads? So without ads your friends would not have known about the products that they do now.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThose ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.
- strken 9y agoThere must be a point between "advertisement for useless junk" and "useful advice + an affiliate link" where the two cross over, and as far as I can tell the only differences are relevance and directness. One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me. Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?
- builditand 9y agoAds are bad. I'm not shopping not stop. I just want to read my article or whatever I am doing at that moment. When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain. I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".
- jalk 9y agoSo perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc
- icebraining 9y agoMaybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems. For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoI think you're being uncharitable, advertising led the company to have a higher degree of competence and understanding.
- icebraining 9y agoFine, but it seems like a terrible tradeoff for the drawbacks mentioned by oasfboasbfos.
- mattmanser 9y agoCrikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary. I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.
- tinus_hn 9y agoYour mother was a hamster and your father smelt like elderberries!
- beefield 9y agoMy gut feeling is that for every advertisement induced purchase you actually want and enjoy, there are several orders of magnitude more marketing/advertisement (directly or indirectly) induced purchases that are unnecessary or harmful.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- petra 9y agoElectronic engineers face a similar problem, everyday:finding the optimal components to build stuff with. And at least in the case of standard components, they do that via parametric search tools(poring over many details), combined with vendors exposing a lot of details about products. And it works very well. I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with the right incentives(banning advertising ?), we could do it. The other source of info for EE's is education and PR, some of it probably pretty unbiased(at distributors sites), due to incentives. As for ads ? they exist, but they seem to play a relatively small role, and probably nothing major will change if they stopped existing.
- beagle3 9y agoCan you point at such a search engine for EEs?
- petra 9y agoDigikey.com for example, for microcontrollers: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?k=&pkeyword=&FV=ffe002ad&mnonly=0&ColumnSort=0&page=1&quantity=0&ptm=0&fid=0&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoParametric search tools are great for Digikey, but they're very hard to implement elsewhere. They're much less useful when you only have a small number of options. They're bad at quantifying qualitative properties like fit and finish or ease-of-use. And you can only compare closely related parts, because until you drill down to the level of, say, a parametric search for exclusively PMIC-Voltage Regulators-DC-DC-Switching controllers, it doesn't make sense to ask what the topology or output configuration is. Plus, it's extremely tedious to collate and filter all of the properties needed to make them work. Ebay and Amazon barely do it at all. Newegg and McMaster Carr do OK. Only EE components seem to be demonstrate the ideal parametric filter systems that negate the need for advertising. But I'm still a sucker for buying Linear Tech or TI components before, say, Maxim or Toshiba because even if the parametric search say that both options fit my requirements, the former seem to be better documented and more user-friendly than the latter. That's the kind of advertising you only get through years of writing expensive and high-quality technical papers and producing high-quality parts, and I suppose there will always be value in advertising that fact (or suggesting that fact, regardless of whether it's true for other advertisers) to less experienced engineers.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’s why we need independent testing, and you should always check the independent tests before buying something. For example, whenever I need a new product, be it anything from a spoon to a car seat for a child, I’ll check Stiftung Warentest for full tests of that category. I’ll take the top 2 or 3, enter them on idealo or preispiraten or günstiger.de or hardwareschotte, and then I’ll take the cheapest of those. At no point in this purchasing process come ads into play, and I get the best results.