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You are competing for attention with others, possibly a lot less scrupulous than you. Advertising is like prisoner's dilemma: Companies are like prisoners and

You are competing for attention with others, possibly a lot less scrupulous than you. Advertising is like prisoner's dilemma: Companies are like prisoners and if they go overboard with advertising they are like defecting. If all companies had an agreement to rein themselves in, then there will be a rogue company sucking the attention away. Then bottom feeders are going to target children.

zanny 8y ago
The worst part about the industry is its a zero sum game. All you are trying to do is redirect dollars that would go somewhere else to your thing. You don't add value in that process, you simply redirect it. And because its an arms race it drives businesses to have ludicrous overhead in the form of marketing to reach the audience of whatever actual thing of value they want to sell. Its one of the laundry list of things I can imagine a far future enlightened species looking back at us and thinking "wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars just trying to manipulate each other into spending their money differently". Its absolutely necessary to participate on the individual level, but on the macroeconomic level it should look to anyone as being completely absurd and a huge waste of potential. Its a lot like overspending on the military - the primary function for advertising is zero sum while for the military it is a negative value, while you hope for circumstantial value to emerge and try to use it as an excuse to justify the whole when advertisers make entertaining ads (see the Superbowl Commercials or Flex Tape) or when the military produces scientific innovation.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  > wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars […] Well, not money, because the money spent just ends up in someone else's pocket. It doesn't disappear or get consumed in the process. What we are wasting is potential value for society as a whole (the hours you rightly mention).
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Hours... and natural resources, including fuels used to generate electricity and provide transportation for ads themselves and all the supporting industries. For instance, meatspace ads involve graphics designers, printing shops, producing and moving paints and paper, and moving the final ads to their destination (and then moving them to landfills).
  - _nalply 8y ago
    Advertising is wasting opportunities of people by distracting and misleading them.
scotty79 8y ago
Advertising is like a forest. All trees have to invest in tall trunks because if they didn't they'd have no chance against other trees. So they all get as tall trunks as physically possible. Unfortunately society has almost no use for "advertising trunks" so we should impose intelligent limits on advertising so that the mechanism of informing people what they can buy could be less like forest and more like orchard.
ameister14 8y ago
I'm going to venture a guess that you've never run an ad campaign before. If you had, at least a mainstream digital one, you'd find that deceptive tactics don't work all that well. People using them do it to get access to the most vulnerable set of people, who aren't usually people companies are competing to advertise to. If I make an ad that implies you'll get something free, for example, and you click on it to find no free offer, you bounce. That makes my ad unsuccessful, more expensive, and less likely to win auctions.

zanny 8y ago

The worst part about the industry is its a zero sum game. All you are trying to do is redirect dollars that would go somewhere else to your thing. You don't add value in that process, you simply redirect it. And because its an arms race it drives businesses to have ludicrous overhead in the form of marketing to reach the audience of whatever actual thing of value they want to sell. Its one of the laundry list of things I can imagine a far future enlightened species looking back at us and thinking "wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars just trying to manipulate each other into spending their money differently". Its absolutely necessary to participate on the individual level, but on the macroeconomic level it should look to anyone as being completely absurd and a huge waste of potential. Its a lot like overspending on the military - the primary function for advertising is zero sum while for the military it is a negative value, while you hope for circumstantial value to emerge and try to use it as an excuse to justify the whole when advertisers make entertaining ads (see the Superbowl Commercials or Flex Tape) or when the military produces scientific innovation.

Freak_NL 8y ago
> wow, they sure wasted trillions of hours and dollars […] Well, not money, because the money spent just ends up in someone else's pocket. It doesn't disappear or get consumed in the process. What we are wasting is potential value for society as a whole (the hours you rightly mention).
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Hours... and natural resources, including fuels used to generate electricity and provide transportation for ads themselves and all the supporting industries. For instance, meatspace ads involve graphics designers, printing shops, producing and moving paints and paper, and moving the final ads to their destination (and then moving them to landfills).
- _nalply 8y ago
  Advertising is wasting opportunities of people by distracting and misleading them.

scotty79 8y ago

Advertising is like a forest. All trees have to invest in tall trunks because if they didn't they'd have no chance against other trees. So they all get as tall trunks as physically possible. Unfortunately society has almost no use for "advertising trunks" so we should impose intelligent limits on advertising so that the mechanism of informing people what they can buy could be less like forest and more like orchard.

ameister14 8y ago

I'm going to venture a guess that you've never run an ad campaign before. If you had, at least a mainstream digital one, you'd find that deceptive tactics don't work all that well. People using them do it to get access to the most vulnerable set of people, who aren't usually people companies are competing to advertise to. If I make an ad that implies you'll get something free, for example, and you click on it to find no free offer, you bounce. That makes my ad unsuccessful, more expensive, and less likely to win auctions.