14 ms·

Ads just work, no matter what you think

184 points by awad 8y ago

esotericn 8y ago
Headline should reflect the original article ("Ads just work"). Some thoughts... Humans, in general, seek to improve their environment. One might paint their home, put out plant pots, tidy up, whatever else. In private spaces this all works out. Advertising goes against all of that. It effectively states 'I can put this ugly thing here, and it'll increase my local happiness (because I don't have to see it), so screw the global happiness'. I stated a similar form of this argument in another thread. There's a huge banner ad (larger than a person) close to my home, on a bus stop. The last I saw it was some sort of advert for supplements of dubious medical value. My nice walk to the post office or whatever gets interrupted by this nonsense every time I go outside, big colourful unnatural full-face things reminding me that people are being duped into buying crap they don't need by other people that don't care about them. I think, and hope, that one day we'll realise that many forms of advertising are effectively mental abuse.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine have banned billboards altogether, and I hope more follow their lead.
  - SnowingXIV 8y ago
    Having worked with a number of attorneys, this would be fantastic to disrupt the status quo. Plenty of competitors acquire clients almost solely by having a huge budget for putting these all around the city. I'd prefer a more research driven approach. Seems unlikely now that I looked it up, most recent state was Alaska (by state referendum) in 1998.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    City of Sao Paulo did as well, it is possible.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    I agree. I think that advertising is on dubious grounds when it exists as a substitute for payment (dubious because of the extremely low payout compared to the inconvenience / damage caused). In public spaces, on transport systems and so on, things that can't be avoided and are either already paid for or aren't even being used (e.g. walking past an ad on the pavement which pays for nothing other than the land it sits on) it's completely inexcusable. We're trying to encourage people to use public transport. We need to do _everything we can_ to make it a better environment, more comfortable, more homely, etc. Knocking out advertising would be an easy win. (Killing off the OTT announcements would be another one... but I digress...)
    - rahimnathwani 8y ago
      "on transport systems" I was going to refute your claim about these things just paying for the space they use, by stating figures that show advertising provides a significant subsidy for Transport for London (which operates the tubes and buses in London). But I was wrong: annual advertising revenue is just 142MM GBP, or about 16 GBP per London resident. This seems low given how much time people spend looking at ads on the tube.
      - esotericn 8y ago
        Yep. I actually discussed this in a similar thread on HN a few days ago. Fare revenue is approximately 3bn GBP. A 1:20 ratio. In the worst case assuming no-one additional travels due to it being more pleasant, fares would have to increase ~5%. My bus fare would go from 1.50 to 1.57. This is a distraction, though. It's not relevant, because we shouldn't allow damaging activity to occur regardless of whether it might look marginally better economically if we zoom in far enough. If the tube system funded itself by stealing wallets from random passengers, it would still be right to stop that program, even if fares went up, because it wouldn't be right or good. A related concern I hear often is that if something becomes n% more expensive, then some people will be priced out. The correct answer to 'poor people can't afford the bus' is not 'perform strange indirect forms of abuse on slightly less poor people'. The answer is 'fix the fact that people are poor'. Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships.
  - sbhn 8y ago
    Did they ban church spires and church bells ringing on Sunday. They are advertising also.
    - epicide 8y ago
      If they put really gaudy church spires on a lot of buildings that aren't churches or play the bells at deafening volumes all day every day, I would sure hope they'd get banned, too. They are advertising, but the point isn't that all advertising is inherently bad. The point is that we've normalized a really unhealthy amount of daily exposure to it and it turns out we are way more susceptible to it than we like to admit.
      - sbhn 8y ago
        A church spire can be seen for many miles, and from almost any location in every city, it’s ringing bells can be heard for many miles and in every city. They’ve been doing this for hundreds of years and it’s normalised to the point where your conscious doesn’t notice it, but if Mac Donald’s or coke did this, then you’d notice and lobby to have it banned.
        esotericn 8y ago
        If a church were to put something in my eyes, they'd put a sculpture, a nice building, a gargoyle on a wall, whatever. (That's what they actually do). If your examples did it - it'd be flashy, colourful, gauche, impolite, nonsense. Scammer grade low class bullshit. No-one likes having evangelists knock at their door, because they're annoying and interruptive.
        canhascodez 8y ago
        Normal businesses don't have similar weekly events, but no, people don't really mind the sound of bells once a week. Business owners are free to build spires if they want: it's rarely considered a good idea. Similarly, every city and town with a church has had the option to ban spires and bells. When you find me the town that has done that, I will believe that more persons than yourself find these things to be detrimental.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    If you were going to rank the 50 states by natural beauty, those 4 would easily be in the top 5 or 8. That probably makes it an easier sell to ban billboards.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  > one day we'll realise that many forms of advertising are effectively mental abuse. I've often hoped that skepticism and recognition of manipulation techniques such as propaganda and advertising were formally taught in schools. Social media is a more recent scourge on the gullible.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    I don't think skepticism is sufficient unless it actually results in wide-scale action, though. The point of this article is that it _does work_, no matter how skeptical you are. Which is completely unsurprising. Consider a human as a biological computer. We have bugs, glitches, buffer overflows. Eventually someone will work out that if you show a human a certain series of images, they'll do something in response. (This might be a limiting example and a bit absurd, but reduce it a bit and I think my point is clear). Even if everyone is maximally skeptical, the industry still works. Whether people are affected by it or not, we shouldn't have to tolerate vulgar nonsense on our streets, in our buses, trains, movies, etc.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      The point of this article is that it _does work_, no matter how skeptical you are. I think that's putting it too strongly. It's more like an epidemiology problem, where we know that it is not possible for everyone to be maximally skeptical, so change from the status quo will not be achieved at the individual consumer level. A few habitual cigarette smokers quit abruptly, with no apparent difficulty or later relapses. A few smokers never quit yet outlive their non-smoking peers. Some people try cigarettes once or twice and never develop the habit. However, despite the existence of individuals who can overcome, endure, or resist the common effects of cigarettes, epidemiological evidence shows that it takes regulation to reduce smoking and its ill effects at an aggregate population level. It's similar with advertising. Advertising targets populations. It works on populations. It is neither necessary nor proven that it is possible to craft an advertisement so powerful that anyone who sees it will eventually buy the advertised product. Analogizing human brains to unpatched computers, rife with exploitable buffer overflows, confuses more than it clarifies. (As an example, I saw my first Coors beer ad more than 30 years ago. I have yet to buy Coors beer. I don't drink beer. Nor do I drink sodas, so no Coke or Pepsi in my house either.)
- awad 8y ago
  Thanks, updated headline to reflect the original article
- kcorbitt 8y ago
  Agreed. Open-air advertising has negative externalities (the annoyance it causes to everyone walking past, which isn't compensated in any way), and as such we should expect that in an unregulated environment it will be overproduced. This is a simple case of a tragedy of the commons. This is an argument for regulation.
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  Speak softly and carry a can of spray-paint.
- amatecha 8y ago
  The interruptive nature of ads has had me swearing at them since I was old enough to speak. Advertising has been compromising things I enjoy for literally my entire life. It's unnatural and serves no valid purpose, but somehow "we" as a society accept it. I wonder about the broad-scale psychological expense to humans to continuously endure the cognitive load of advertisement inundation. I feel like it's like a psychological tax on humanity, literally dampening our potential. If you consider that people like Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day to have "one less decision to make", you can easily gather how important every "clock cycle" of your brain is valuable when you're operating at a high level of functionality. People close their eyes to concentrate further, or turn down the radio during difficult driving conditions -- these are all efforts to reduce sensory input. Meanwhile, advertising is a persistent sensory load. Along these lines, in the study "The Economic and Cognitive Costs of Annoying Display Advertisements"[0], which was focused around website advertising, one conclusion was: "in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate on questions pertaining to what they had read". This was just something I quickly found and I imagine there are many other studies which have similar conclusions. [0] http://dangoldstein.com/papers/goldstein_suri_mcafee_ekstrand-abueg_diaz_economic_cognitive_annoying_ads_JMR_2014.pdf http://dangoldstein.com/papers/goldstein_suri_mcafee_ekstran...
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Indeed. I get so, so angry when I think about this for very long. It's frustrating to even have to explain it - it's just so _obvious_ that it's a bad thing. No-one would find it acceptable if they were arbitrarily kicked lightly in the shins, constantly, as they walked down the street. Even if it were monetized. Even if there were no scars, no obvious "permanent damage". Somehow, the mental assault of advertising is seen differently.
  - jbob2000 8y ago
    To highlight just how cognitively dissonant society is with ads - we ban smartphones while driving because it's distracting, but the giant TV screen billboard flashing things at me on the highway is totally OK. Not only are "we" OK with advertising stealing your mental bandwidth, we're also OK with you endangering the lives of everyone around you while it gets stolen!
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I agree, with one exception. In certain ultra-urban locations, excessive advertising begins to take on its own sort of aesthetic that can become paradoxically pleasant. Some streets in e.g. Hong Kong [1] look like something out of Bladerunner. It has this sort of peculiar, and difficult to explain, dystopic appeal. Dystopic appeal should be an oxymoron. What can I say? I like it. Blame William Gibson. [1] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertising-signs-hong-kong-AA7W4X.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertis...
- cwkoss 8y ago
  I want to print up a bunch of bumper stickers to deface ads with like "Worst Movie Ever" "This perfume literally smells like shit", "This car looks dumb af". Would be kind of fun to carry a stack around.
fhood 8y ago
Huh, the only ads I really notice these days are the ones were amazon tries desperately to sell me a something 15 minutes after I purchase that thing.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  cf. the article: "There is increasing experimental evidence for the effectiveness of advertising in influencing people’s choices without their conscious awareness."
- amatecha 8y ago
  The virulent nature of advertising becomes so consciously clear when you notice _how many places_ you see ads for that product, right? It's kind of disconcerting.
- whoopdedo 8y ago
  I'm befuddled why Amazon, who has been in this game the (second?) longest and has had the most opportunity to take advantage of deep learning can be so bad at delivering relevant advertising. I suspect there's some institutional inertia that prevents them from deploying better technology. Another example is that Amazon is incapable of recognizing the difference between something bought as a gift versus something for yourself. Thanks to one Christmas present 10 years ago I still get recommended Playstation games.
  - fhood 8y ago
    That I can almost understand. What I can't understand is why after buying a Dremel, Amazon wastes so much of its resources advertising me another Dremel. This is so clearly a losing game for them. The conversion rate for that type of ad is going to be exactly 0!
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The answer always is, "metrics show it works". I can't stop but wonder if those metrics aren't made of bovine excrement, of if this is a parallel reality leaking to the one we inhabit.
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bigpicture 8y ago
Advertising in general may work, but any particular ad may or may not work.
- karrotwaltz 8y ago
  I'd rather say that ads "work" in the sense that you don't have to intently watch or listen to an ad for it to affect your brain, just seeing or hearing it is enough. Now, if "working" means you actually buy something, then yes I have to agree, most ads are not very effective.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you...." -- Banksy
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "Advertising tries to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it tries to steal your happiness, and then offers to sell it back to you." I don't remember who said it. I wish I did, and then I'd give credit where due...
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > "... You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Speaking of advertising, the power of words, and the power of laughter: > Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. > In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need. -- Alan Moore
LitFan 8y ago
>The most famous illustration of that is the Pepsi paradox: in blind tastings, Pepsi is quasi-systematically preferred, but Coke continues to be the absolute bestseller. It’s the triumph of branding over taste, as the mere presence of brand labels leads people to switch their opinion. This isn't entirely due to branding. Pepsi is preferred during sip tests but Coke is preferred when drinking a whole can[0]. [0]https://www.wideopeneats.com/difference-coke-pepsi/ https://www.wideopeneats.com/difference-coke-pepsi/ *This article does refer to the branding "New coke" and "Coca Cola Classic", but the branding was to ensure adoption for an actual change to the drink they had already made.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  That's fascinating, thanks for sharing, had never heard about the whole can test.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  I'm honestly baffled that people can't tell the difference between coke and pepsi in a double blind test. this was a common science fair experiment at my middle school, and whenever i participated I could easily tell the difference. often restaurants will serve Pepsi when you order coke if that's all they have. I consistently notice this as well (as confirmed by the branding on the soda fountain). Pepsi has a different flavor and has significantly more sugar than coke, so I'm not sure what people are missing.
  - i_am_proteus 8y ago
    Perhaps you consistently notice this because you drink one (or the other, or both) regularly and your sense of taste is calibrated. Anecdotally, I drink soda very infrequently, and can't tell the difference; both just taste "extremely sweet."
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Coke has a much greater acidic, carbonated "bite." Should be obvious after a few moment's instruction.
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rossdavidh 8y ago
"Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work?" ...yes.
- reubeniv 8y ago
  Possibly projecting here, but I think adverts work, but by giving people a push towards something they already wanted/thought, more taking advantage of our lack of impulse control and a tendency to lean towards confirmation bias, I don't think they change minds or brainwash people like it's sometimes implied.
  - whoopdedo 8y ago
    Another way advertising works is by tickling the "TIL" part of our brains. Beginning in infancy humans react to experiences that are unique or peculiar. If we see something new or not normal we immediately want to know more about it. It's why I think targeted advertising is a bit of a scam. Yes, it's neat that we can do that now and the conversion is outstanding. But what's the real value in advertising for Widgets to people already actively shopping for Widgets? I show 50k ads and get sales off 40% of them, that's good compared to another strategy that only works 10% of the time that I'd have to buy 200k for the same result. Except, how many of that 50k were going to buy my Widget anyway had I not advertised? Whereas 150k of the second set had no idea I sold Widgets or even what a Widget was until I told them. Looks like there's more value in increasing my customer base by spreading a wider net with a lower conversion.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  The ad industry is very good at selling itself
  - jancsika 8y ago
    So the ad industry has developed a set of techniques that work to persuade potential customers to buy ads, but those same techniques don't work to sell products/services which aren't ads? How does that work?
rossdavidh 8y ago
A good example of how the increasingly data-driven use of advertising, is in large part responsible for the decline of media that rely on advertising: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."
Bantros 8y ago
They don't work if you can't see them.
- michaelt 8y ago
  You can block ads online, sure. But good luck travelling across a major city without seeing an IRL advert.
  - whoopdedo 8y ago
    Those are passive billboards. And very few people would mind if the advertising on the web was just as inobtrusive. Initially, it was and generally we accepted it as normal. But ad brokers began making more aggressive ads, with animation, sound, and pop-ups. Thus the demand for ad blockers. Physical advertising has to obey sign ordinances and in some places laws regulating the content of advertising. (In the US this is loosely enforced and mostly just for food and drugs.) You wouldn't be able to get away with constructing a billboard directly in the right-of-way of a road in an octagonal shape colored red with the word "STOP" on it. But that's the equivalent of what internet advertisers do with their fake virus warnings and the big green "Download" button.
  - Arubis 8y ago
    An IRL advert won't follow you home, rifle through your drawers, and sell what it finds to the highest bidder.
    - Skrillex 8y ago
      Pervasive tracking and unwarranted surveillance via ads are a significant component of the problems that online ads have, but that does not make them worse than the ones you see elsewhere. The ones you see in real life have the distinction of being unavoidable except by going to live in either the wilderness or a country that is not yet developed enough to have them everywhere.
- jkchu 8y ago
  They are technically working if people you know talk to you about something they were exposed to via ads.
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nine_k 8y ago
The scoop: * Ads are everywhere, not just online; physical ads are harder to filter off. * Ads work (mostly) on unconscious level. * Conscious resistance takes effort, and has a limited effect. > advertising should be considered a public issue as it constrains our ability to solve social and environmental problems. BTW I can't help but compare this to the recent outrage about social networks and games engineered to produce unconscious impulses to want more, and suggestions to regulate them, the way gambling and liquor are regulated. I wonder how much of the unconscious-affecting stuff may get regulated. Perfumes affect the sense of scent which is ancient and bypasses consciousness well. Spices, salt, sugar — they all affect the unconscious sense of taste. Certain kinds of attire produce unconsciously recognized images of strength, authority, sexuality, etc. To say nothing of facial expressions. If followed down properly, this rabbit hole of a logic leads pretty deep.
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  > To say nothing of facial expressions. If followed down properly, this rabbit hole of a logic leads pretty deep. I'm not sure why you're having such a difficult time drawing the line between billboards and facial expressions. How about this: "People should be able to express opinions and propaganda however they'd like. Inanimate objects in public spaces should be constrained by something similar to the Fairness Doctrine[0], where factual information is allowed but blatant propaganda is not". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
  - nine_k 8y ago
    You see, certain cultures already put this line much closer to facial expressions, and find it appropriate to wear veils of some kinds to conceal them. I'm not only talking about e.g. Muslim cultures; veils were pretty normal in 19th century's Europe (though not as thick as in 16th-century Europe). So my question is where the line will be drawn, because removing the unconscious form humans seems infeasible, no matter how cultures try.
    - canhascodez 8y ago
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
This is why Basic Attention Token is going to be such a game changer in my opinion. It's the first new idea I've heard about advertising in a really long while. People should at least be paid for their attention. We pay now by losing our privacy and being manipulated, and receive no benefits. All the benefits go to the puppeteers behind the scenes.
- dwild 8y ago
  The benefits are the free online service. You seriously can't say that Youtube doesn't have give us huge benefits, it fill so much of my entertainment nowadays, it give me so much knowledge and all theses peoples that produce theses videos are getting paid to made them. Gmail allowed me to have an email when I was too young to pay for it. MSN and then Facebook allowed me to connect to my friends and make communication so much easier. Ads pay for theses services and not only does it pay for it, it allow people that literally can't pay for it (either by being minor (no access to credit cards) or simply not having the means). That meant that service that depends on a big market to survive can survive.
jimjansen 8y ago
ITT: People attacking ads while likely working for the most pernicious advertising companies in history. If you really think Google or Facebook or Twitter et al's missions are to connect people or organize information you are deluded. Their missions are to be the most effective marketers ever.
- megaman8 8y ago
  that's true of every business: they need to make money.
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    they _could_ try to make money in some way that is more productive to society than spreading mind-viruses
- Arubis 8y ago
  I posit that the overwhelming majority of HN'ers do not work for FAANG (though a fairly large chunk may well aspire to). Edit: in fairness, that would exclude Twitter. What I'm really getting at is that, for all the companies that get a _ton_ of chatter on here, tech is a lot larger than just BigCo's, and I'd expect the overall population here to reflect that.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
One thing that rarely gets mentioned in relation to ads is the value of priming (the article almost touches on it with evaluative conditioning but misses the mark). Advertisements don't just influence your brand choices, they can hack your brain and change your experiences. Ads can prime you to actually increase your enjoyment of using a certain product more than you would without ads, they can increase the value of that thing for its users. Think about how this sort of thing works without ads. Everyone has things like comfort foods, favorite shirts or socks or what-have-you, maybe a favorite comfy chair, favorite music, etc. Stuff that has become associated with certain ways of feeling through experiences. Foods that remind you of the comfort of home, for example, that sort of thing. Ads can tap into the same associative system and boost their perceived value in a similar way. And just as with all of the "organic" associations they become deeper over time. When you become primed to, say, enjoy coke just a little bit more than some discount supermarket cola then you build up the anticipation of drinking coke, and when you drink it you deepen the association of drinking coke with all of the positive experiences you've imbued into that moment (feelings of refreshment, maybe family amity, maybe it's associated with the holidays, maybe it feels like you're giving yourself a treat, etc, etc.) People don't like to talk about this stuff because it's somewhat disturbing and a bit manipulative on the part of brands but it's absolutely real. Think of all of the history of ceremony, ritual, and artifacts that has developed around religions over the centuries, a lot of that stuff is based on precisely the same associative pathways that brands make use of. This is why so many branded products don't just have simple, no nonsense, nondescript packaging and instead have very distinctive or even iconic forms and distinctive labels. It's powerful stuff.
- davidjnelson 8y ago
  I like how Seinfeld explains it on his Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee show. He says something to the effect of “I like ads because I get excited about the product, buy it, then feel great! Then it totally sucks and I don’t use it, but it felt great so who cares?” It’s tongue in cheek but I like how he explains the phenomenon you’re talking about with some humor.
amelius 8y ago
They work now. But AI will change that.
- epicide 8y ago
  Yeah, they'll work better.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Now that DL has reached its current level, detecting an ad will always be easier than making it go undetected. The reason is that humans have to detect the ad at a conscious or unconscious level (otherwise it makes no sense to place the ad). Additionally, in many places, an ad has to be clearly marked as such (e.g. the word "advertisement" above an ad in newspapers).
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Ads work, but they are generally extremely inefficient. And as we get used to avoiding them, they become less efficient, meaning they need to jam more of them in our face. If we could somehow make it so that every ad was A) very relevant and B) we actually paid attention to it ... The entire digital ad economy could subsist on you and I seeing maybe 1 or 2 ads a day. That's it: imagine a world where you only had to see 1 or 2 ads a day! It's economically possible. But the worst and most cynical part of it all ... if ads were this efficient, short-sighted advertisers wouldn't stop at 1 or 2 - they would still jam more ads in our faces, thereby ratcheting up short term profit, wondering why his 'per view' metrics continues to all, as we pay less attention! It's a very pernicious race to the bottom and the only way it would work well is of a benevolent entity with long term foresight and proper incentives basically dictated the terms.
- deleted 8y ago
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ggregoire 8y ago
Web traffic increases just after an ad aires on TV, so I guess it works. (Source: my job)
megaman8 8y ago
> Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work? Look at all the top advertisers on the internet, in almost every case it's all big brand advertisers that can't prove results, like Nike for instance. I know someone at Nike who held a marketing position there: she said, basically they just throw the money out there and hope that it works. There's very little validation that any of it works. And, I've heard on an NPR show how a lot of big brand advertisers are just continuing to do what they've always done because they've been doing it so long. Now, the economist of course would say that companies who squander money on advertisements would loose market share. That's the way it should work. But our capitalist markets aren't nearly as efficient as people commonly believe. On a personal note: I can tell you 99.99% or more of the advertisements don't work on me at all. How do i know this? I keep close account of everything I spend money on. I once did an audit on everything I've spend money on in the last 3 years and found that almost everything I spent money on is not due to ads (with the exception of SEO ~ I do occasionally find products through search engines but this usually isn't considered a direct advertisement expense). It's not that I'm against ads. If an Ad promised a product I actually wanted (say a home at an affordable price, or a faster way to get to work), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem is, everything that's being advertised is more stuff I don't want.
- Konnstann 8y ago
  As much as I can agree that my purchases are also not tied to advertising, other than "Sale on apples, 50% off", I don't think you can extrapolate based on the people who frequent Hacker News.
  - davidfischer 8y ago
    While I can't speak for Hacker News as a whole and I'm going to talk about clicks and not purchases strictly, I am willing to talk about developers more generally who frequently say things like "advertising doesn't work on me". Collectively, they are mistaken and it does work on them. I work on advertising at Read the Docs and when we were first added to the main ad blocker lists our revenue went down. We were 100% pay per click at that time and our revenue went down by the same percentage as the number of ad impressions went down. Looking at it statistically, developers who run ad blockers still click on ads at the same rate as those that don't as long as they actually see the ad.
dekken_ 8y ago
go watch "century of the self" by Adam Curtis then tell me what you think
diego_moita 8y ago
Typical selection bias: ads work if you choose as evidence the ads that work. For every successful Nike, Coke or Samsung campaign you see there are hundreds of other campaigns that didn't work. The correct title is: "it is very, very hard to make ads work, but it can be done".
- gcbw2 8y ago
  that's like saying bullets are ineffective because most of them miss the target.
  - diego_moita 8y ago
    I believe "but it can be done" and "ineffective" don't mean the same.
robertsd247 8y ago
All advertising has at least a 1% ROI. I don't think ads are a issue to be discussed.
davemp 8y ago
The ethics of ads, in my opinion, is a question of whether the ends justify the means. Persuasive ad campaigns are an attack on individual choice. The goal is to convince someone to do something: to buy, to vote, to labor, to behave, etc. If the attack results in an individual choosing something that benefits them, it may not seem evil. However, the difficulty arises in how one gauges benefit. Can advertising bodies be trusted to or even capable of measuring the outcomes individuals' of choices? Can governments? I will assert that only individuals can be trusted or even capable of measuring choice outcomes. (Democracy is based on this assertion, otherwise voter's choice wouldn't matter). If this assertions holds, any attack on the individual's capability of gauging choice is an attack on democracy and their liberty. Democracy is designed to be resilient. Essentially the democratic process is a boosting method for classifying the best choices for a population. [1] (Our forefathers weren't dumb). The citizen's choices just have to be slightly better than random to collectively form a single more reliable choice. If citizens' collective choice accuracy falls below 50% the process begins to fail. Therefore any advertisement that subverts individual, rational choice is evil. How would one determine if an advert is subverting rational choice? I don't know, but I wouldn't mind them being purged with impunity. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosting_(machine_learning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosting_(machine_learning)
- soared 8y ago
  attack > take aggressive action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force, typically in a battle or war. >(of a person or animal) act against (someone or something) aggressively in an attempt to injure or kill. >(of a disease, chemical substance, or insect) act harmfully on. >criticize or oppose fiercely and publicly. >begin to deal with (a problem or task) in a determined and vigorous way. >make an aggressive or forceful attempt to score a goal or point, or gain or exploit an advantage in a game against an opposing team or player. >an aggressive and violent action against a person or place. >to set upon or work against forcefully >to assail with unfriendly or bitter words >a belligerent or antagonistic action I'm unable to find a definition of "attack" that fits your use.
  - canhascodez 8y ago
jjuhl 8y ago
I know that I probably fail at this, but I try to actively not buy brands I notice ads for and instead always go for the brands that are unknown (or less known) to me. The advertisers probably still trick me, but I try. I don't care one iota about what my choice of brand/product signals to other people (why would I? I don't care about anyone elses opinion about me in the first place).
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Anyone know how to fight "naming rights" on historic publicly-owned stadiums? Another modern advertising development I don't care for.
daxterspeed 8y ago
Posts like these feed my belief that advertising should be criminalized. In physical form it litters the world in more and more ways in order to grab our attention. I don't think there's many deaths associated with billboards along roads - but these billboards have been getting new "features", such as animations, in their battle for drivers' attention. In digital form ads get even more malicious - trying to reverse-engineer people's thoughts in order to place the most "actionable" ad in front of right person at the right time. I don't really expect any government to begin to take action against ads at large - but I wish more people would take a good look at all the bad things advertising does to us all.
- danbruc 8y ago
  You might be interested in Sao Paulo's clean city law [1]. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
  - slig 8y ago
    Nowadays we have bus' stops and clocks with ads all over the city.
    - gcbw2 8y ago
      not to mention an investigation on bribes to have your billboards allowed.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  I think instead of broadly criminalizing, imposing steep fines for various hostile-to-the-individual advertising tactics would be more fair and effective: Like, make impose a $1/impression fee on every ad that uses: - Claims the product will cause an emotion in the user - Use of superlatives or exaggeration - Sex to sell - ...
  - shiburizu 8y ago
irrational 8y ago
I feel very fortunate. I don't see many/any ads on the internet because I run multiple ad blockers. I don't see any ads on the way to work because I work just 2 miles from my house and it's almost all forest between my house and my work, so no ads. I don't watch much if any video content (I prefer to read). I don't listen to radio stations (I prefer audio books). I rarely drive anywhere where there might be ads since I mostly just have things delivered from Amazon.
FiatLuxDave 8y ago
What is the tax rate on advertisements? We tax cigarettes and alcohol because of negative externalities. We don't need to get rid of ads, we just need less of them.
byron_fast 8y ago
Ads are flowers. We can hate on them, and they are annoying, but sometimes they offer something you need.
- Abutere 8y ago
  Sounds like something Don Draper would say.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Ads are weeds. They ruin your garden, are painful to touch and sometimes can even hurt you. Some look nice, most look bad. They add lots of extra work. But every now and then, you can use some in a soup as a backup ingredient.
cwkoss 8y ago
I would expect that the emotion of disgust is much more powerful in advertising, but hard to use to make positive emotions. Could disgust be used to counteract the brainwashing effects of advertising? How many 'normal' impressions of McDonalds ads would be negated from a single viewing of an image of a person projectile vomiting with McDonalds branding next to it? Could buying 1% marketshare counteract the effects of the other 99% of the market?
RealityVoid 8y ago
I find it interesting that companies are willing to spend this much on advertising. If you think about it, the competition for eyeballs is also a race to the bottom. The more advertising is the norm, the more advertising you have to do in order to get the same result. Of course, if you do not keep up... you loose market.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It is. In a competitive enough market sector, most ads cancel out with the competition. But if you stop playing the game, you lose. The sad thing is just how much waste this creates. Waste of manpower and waste of energy, including fuels used to make and transport physical ads.
firecall 8y ago
>"Here’s another example: “please, don’t think of a basketball game”. There you go: instantly and without perceivable effort, you thought about tall black players, an orange spherical ball with black ribs, a red hoop with a net, big foam hands, a transparent backboard, a rectangular floor made of wood, the “Kiss cam”, sneakers with high tops, Lebron James, etc." I actually thought of a baseball game.... But then I have ADHD and not american..
chopin 8y ago
What would be a good start: Every person, no exception allowed, shown in an ad must be older than 18. Drawn ads must only show adult persons. Offenders are barred from advertizing for a fixed amount of time.
ksec 8y ago
I think I may be the minority on HN, I like Ads, or at least certain type of ads. I hate Crappy ads though. Ads in the form of news, New Promotion, New Product Launch, New Drama Series etc. New Recipe from McDonald/ KFC / Foods you like ( Which fall under Product launch ), Airline Discount, New Restaurant opening in my area, Promotion from local supermarket. New Game coming out, New Concert, New Cars. A Services Company launching a new form insurance... etc etc I don't even mind having online Ads, most of the problem is somehow these Ads, A/B Scripts decides to make my laptop fans spinning, which I hate. And when they are way over the top, Like having 5 ads just on the front page. It is not ads that I have problem with, it is the implementation and UX problem they cause. Now whether Ads generate enough revenue or its effectiveness is an entirely different question.

184 points by awad 8y ago

Headline should reflect the original article ("Ads just work"). Some thoughts... Humans, in general, seek to improve their environment. One might paint their home, put out plant pots, tidy up, whatever else. In private spaces this all works out. Advertising goes against all of that. It effectively states 'I can put this ugly thing here, and it'll increase my local happiness (because I don't have to see it), so screw the global happiness'. I stated a similar form of this argument in another thread. There's a huge banner ad (larger than a person) close to my home, on a bus stop. The last I saw it was some sort of advert for supplements of dubious medical value. My nice walk to the post office or whatever gets interrupted by this nonsense every time I go outside, big colourful unnatural full-face things reminding me that people are being duped into buying crap they don't need by other people that don't care about them. I think, and hope, that one day we'll realise that many forms of advertising are effectively mental abuse.

RankingMember 8y ago
Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine have banned billboards altogether, and I hope more follow their lead.
- SnowingXIV 8y ago
  Having worked with a number of attorneys, this would be fantastic to disrupt the status quo. Plenty of competitors acquire clients almost solely by having a huge budget for putting these all around the city. I'd prefer a more research driven approach. Seems unlikely now that I looked it up, most recent state was Alaska (by state referendum) in 1998.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  City of Sao Paulo did as well, it is possible.
- esotericn 8y ago
  I agree. I think that advertising is on dubious grounds when it exists as a substitute for payment (dubious because of the extremely low payout compared to the inconvenience / damage caused). In public spaces, on transport systems and so on, things that can't be avoided and are either already paid for or aren't even being used (e.g. walking past an ad on the pavement which pays for nothing other than the land it sits on) it's completely inexcusable. We're trying to encourage people to use public transport. We need to do _everything we can_ to make it a better environment, more comfortable, more homely, etc. Knocking out advertising would be an easy win. (Killing off the OTT announcements would be another one... but I digress...)
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    "on transport systems" I was going to refute your claim about these things just paying for the space they use, by stating figures that show advertising provides a significant subsidy for Transport for London (which operates the tubes and buses in London). But I was wrong: annual advertising revenue is just 142MM GBP, or about 16 GBP per London resident. This seems low given how much time people spend looking at ads on the tube.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Yep. I actually discussed this in a similar thread on HN a few days ago. Fare revenue is approximately 3bn GBP. A 1:20 ratio. In the worst case assuming no-one additional travels due to it being more pleasant, fares would have to increase ~5%. My bus fare would go from 1.50 to 1.57. This is a distraction, though. It's not relevant, because we shouldn't allow damaging activity to occur regardless of whether it might look marginally better economically if we zoom in far enough. If the tube system funded itself by stealing wallets from random passengers, it would still be right to stop that program, even if fares went up, because it wouldn't be right or good. A related concern I hear often is that if something becomes n% more expensive, then some people will be priced out. The correct answer to 'poor people can't afford the bus' is not 'perform strange indirect forms of abuse on slightly less poor people'. The answer is 'fix the fact that people are poor'. Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships.
- sbhn 8y ago
  Did they ban church spires and church bells ringing on Sunday. They are advertising also.
  - epicide 8y ago
    If they put really gaudy church spires on a lot of buildings that aren't churches or play the bells at deafening volumes all day every day, I would sure hope they'd get banned, too. They are advertising, but the point isn't that all advertising is inherently bad. The point is that we've normalized a really unhealthy amount of daily exposure to it and it turns out we are way more susceptible to it than we like to admit.
    - sbhn 8y ago
      A church spire can be seen for many miles, and from almost any location in every city, it’s ringing bells can be heard for many miles and in every city. They’ve been doing this for hundreds of years and it’s normalised to the point where your conscious doesn’t notice it, but if Mac Donald’s or coke did this, then you’d notice and lobby to have it banned.
      - esotericn 8y ago
        If a church were to put something in my eyes, they'd put a sculpture, a nice building, a gargoyle on a wall, whatever. (That's what they actually do). If your examples did it - it'd be flashy, colourful, gauche, impolite, nonsense. Scammer grade low class bullshit. No-one likes having evangelists knock at their door, because they're annoying and interruptive.
      - canhascodez 8y ago
        Normal businesses don't have similar weekly events, but no, people don't really mind the sound of bells once a week. Business owners are free to build spires if they want: it's rarely considered a good idea. Similarly, every city and town with a church has had the option to ban spires and bells. When you find me the town that has done that, I will believe that more persons than yourself find these things to be detrimental.
- philwelch 8y ago
  If you were going to rank the 50 states by natural beauty, those 4 would easily be in the top 5 or 8. That probably makes it an easier sell to ban billboards.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
> one day we'll realise that many forms of advertising are effectively mental abuse. I've often hoped that skepticism and recognition of manipulation techniques such as propaganda and advertising were formally taught in schools. Social media is a more recent scourge on the gullible.
- esotericn 8y ago
  I don't think skepticism is sufficient unless it actually results in wide-scale action, though. The point of this article is that it _does work_, no matter how skeptical you are. Which is completely unsurprising. Consider a human as a biological computer. We have bugs, glitches, buffer overflows. Eventually someone will work out that if you show a human a certain series of images, they'll do something in response. (This might be a limiting example and a bit absurd, but reduce it a bit and I think my point is clear). Even if everyone is maximally skeptical, the industry still works. Whether people are affected by it or not, we shouldn't have to tolerate vulgar nonsense on our streets, in our buses, trains, movies, etc.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    The point of this article is that it _does work_, no matter how skeptical you are. I think that's putting it too strongly. It's more like an epidemiology problem, where we know that it is not possible for everyone to be maximally skeptical, so change from the status quo will not be achieved at the individual consumer level. A few habitual cigarette smokers quit abruptly, with no apparent difficulty or later relapses. A few smokers never quit yet outlive their non-smoking peers. Some people try cigarettes once or twice and never develop the habit. However, despite the existence of individuals who can overcome, endure, or resist the common effects of cigarettes, epidemiological evidence shows that it takes regulation to reduce smoking and its ill effects at an aggregate population level. It's similar with advertising. Advertising targets populations. It works on populations. It is neither necessary nor proven that it is possible to craft an advertisement so powerful that anyone who sees it will eventually buy the advertised product. Analogizing human brains to unpatched computers, rife with exploitable buffer overflows, confuses more than it clarifies. (As an example, I saw my first Coors beer ad more than 30 years ago. I have yet to buy Coors beer. I don't drink beer. Nor do I drink sodas, so no Coke or Pepsi in my house either.)
awad 8y ago
Thanks, updated headline to reflect the original article
kcorbitt 8y ago
Agreed. Open-air advertising has negative externalities (the annoyance it causes to everyone walking past, which isn't compensated in any way), and as such we should expect that in an unregulated environment it will be overproduced. This is a simple case of a tragedy of the commons. This is an argument for regulation.
mikro2nd 8y ago
Speak softly and carry a can of spray-paint.
amatecha 8y ago
The interruptive nature of ads has had me swearing at them since I was old enough to speak. Advertising has been compromising things I enjoy for literally my entire life. It's unnatural and serves no valid purpose, but somehow "we" as a society accept it. I wonder about the broad-scale psychological expense to humans to continuously endure the cognitive load of advertisement inundation. I feel like it's like a psychological tax on humanity, literally dampening our potential. If you consider that people like Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day to have "one less decision to make", you can easily gather how important every "clock cycle" of your brain is valuable when you're operating at a high level of functionality. People close their eyes to concentrate further, or turn down the radio during difficult driving conditions -- these are all efforts to reduce sensory input. Meanwhile, advertising is a persistent sensory load. Along these lines, in the study "The Economic and Cognitive Costs of Annoying Display Advertisements"[0], which was focused around website advertising, one conclusion was: "in the presence of annoying ads, people were less accurate on questions pertaining to what they had read". This was just something I quickly found and I imagine there are many other studies which have similar conclusions. [0] http://dangoldstein.com/papers/goldstein_suri_mcafee_ekstrand-abueg_diaz_economic_cognitive_annoying_ads_JMR_2014.pdf http://dangoldstein.com/papers/goldstein_suri_mcafee_ekstran...
- esotericn 8y ago
  Indeed. I get so, so angry when I think about this for very long. It's frustrating to even have to explain it - it's just so _obvious_ that it's a bad thing. No-one would find it acceptable if they were arbitrarily kicked lightly in the shins, constantly, as they walked down the street. Even if it were monetized. Even if there were no scars, no obvious "permanent damage". Somehow, the mental assault of advertising is seen differently.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  To highlight just how cognitively dissonant society is with ads - we ban smartphones while driving because it's distracting, but the giant TV screen billboard flashing things at me on the highway is totally OK. Not only are "we" OK with advertising stealing your mental bandwidth, we're also OK with you endangering the lives of everyone around you while it gets stolen!
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I agree, with one exception. In certain ultra-urban locations, excessive advertising begins to take on its own sort of aesthetic that can become paradoxically pleasant. Some streets in e.g. Hong Kong [1] look like something out of Bladerunner. It has this sort of peculiar, and difficult to explain, dystopic appeal. Dystopic appeal should be an oxymoron. What can I say? I like it. Blame William Gibson. [1] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertising-signs-hong-kong-AA7W4X.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertis...
cwkoss 8y ago
I want to print up a bunch of bumper stickers to deface ads with like "Worst Movie Ever" "This perfume literally smells like shit", "This car looks dumb af". Would be kind of fun to carry a stack around.

fhood 8y ago

Huh, the only ads I really notice these days are the ones were amazon tries desperately to sell me a something 15 minutes after I purchase that thing.

i_am_proteus 8y ago
cf. the article: "There is increasing experimental evidence for the effectiveness of advertising in influencing people’s choices without their conscious awareness."
amatecha 8y ago
The virulent nature of advertising becomes so consciously clear when you notice _how many places_ you see ads for that product, right? It's kind of disconcerting.
whoopdedo 8y ago
I'm befuddled why Amazon, who has been in this game the (second?) longest and has had the most opportunity to take advantage of deep learning can be so bad at delivering relevant advertising. I suspect there's some institutional inertia that prevents them from deploying better technology. Another example is that Amazon is incapable of recognizing the difference between something bought as a gift versus something for yourself. Thanks to one Christmas present 10 years ago I still get recommended Playstation games.
- fhood 8y ago
  That I can almost understand. What I can't understand is why after buying a Dremel, Amazon wastes so much of its resources advertising me another Dremel. This is so clearly a losing game for them. The conversion rate for that type of ad is going to be exactly 0!
TeMPOraL 8y ago
The answer always is, "metrics show it works". I can't stop but wonder if those metrics aren't made of bovine excrement, of if this is a parallel reality leaking to the one we inhabit.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bigpicture 8y ago

Advertising in general may work, but any particular ad may or may not work.

karrotwaltz 8y ago
I'd rather say that ads "work" in the sense that you don't have to intently watch or listen to an ad for it to affect your brain, just seeing or hearing it is enough. Now, if "working" means you actually buy something, then yes I have to agree, most ads are not very effective.

alexandercrohde 8y ago

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you...." -- Banksy

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
"Advertising tries to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it tries to steal your happiness, and then offers to sell it back to you." I don't remember who said it. I wish I did, and then I'd give credit where due...
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> "... You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
PavlovsCat 8y ago
Speaking of advertising, the power of words, and the power of laughter: > Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. > In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need. -- Alan Moore

LitFan 8y ago

>The most famous illustration of that is the Pepsi paradox: in blind tastings, Pepsi is quasi-systematically preferred, but Coke continues to be the absolute bestseller. It’s the triumph of branding over taste, as the mere presence of brand labels leads people to switch their opinion. This isn't entirely due to branding. Pepsi is preferred during sip tests but Coke is preferred when drinking a whole can[0]. [0]https://www.wideopeneats.com/difference-coke-pepsi/ https://www.wideopeneats.com/difference-coke-pepsi/ *This article does refer to the branding "New coke" and "Coca Cola Classic", but the branding was to ensure adoption for an actual change to the drink they had already made.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
That's fascinating, thanks for sharing, had never heard about the whole can test.
leetcrew 8y ago
I'm honestly baffled that people can't tell the difference between coke and pepsi in a double blind test. this was a common science fair experiment at my middle school, and whenever i participated I could easily tell the difference. often restaurants will serve Pepsi when you order coke if that's all they have. I consistently notice this as well (as confirmed by the branding on the soda fountain). Pepsi has a different flavor and has significantly more sugar than coke, so I'm not sure what people are missing.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  Perhaps you consistently notice this because you drink one (or the other, or both) regularly and your sense of taste is calibrated. Anecdotally, I drink soda very infrequently, and can't tell the difference; both just taste "extremely sweet."
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Coke has a much greater acidic, carbonated "bite." Should be obvious after a few moment's instruction.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rossdavidh 8y ago

"Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work?" ...yes.

reubeniv 8y ago
Possibly projecting here, but I think adverts work, but by giving people a push towards something they already wanted/thought, more taking advantage of our lack of impulse control and a tendency to lean towards confirmation bias, I don't think they change minds or brainwash people like it's sometimes implied.
- whoopdedo 8y ago
  Another way advertising works is by tickling the "TIL" part of our brains. Beginning in infancy humans react to experiences that are unique or peculiar. If we see something new or not normal we immediately want to know more about it. It's why I think targeted advertising is a bit of a scam. Yes, it's neat that we can do that now and the conversion is outstanding. But what's the real value in advertising for Widgets to people already actively shopping for Widgets? I show 50k ads and get sales off 40% of them, that's good compared to another strategy that only works 10% of the time that I'd have to buy 200k for the same result. Except, how many of that 50k were going to buy my Widget anyway had I not advertised? Whereas 150k of the second set had no idea I sold Widgets or even what a Widget was until I told them. Looks like there's more value in increasing my customer base by spreading a wider net with a lower conversion.
TremendousJudge 8y ago
The ad industry is very good at selling itself
- jancsika 8y ago
  So the ad industry has developed a set of techniques that work to persuade potential customers to buy ads, but those same techniques don't work to sell products/services which aren't ads? How does that work?

rossdavidh 8y ago

A good example of how the increasingly data-driven use of advertising, is in large part responsible for the decline of media that rely on advertising: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."

Bantros 8y ago

They don't work if you can't see them.

michaelt 8y ago
You can block ads online, sure. But good luck travelling across a major city without seeing an IRL advert.
- whoopdedo 8y ago
  Those are passive billboards. And very few people would mind if the advertising on the web was just as inobtrusive. Initially, it was and generally we accepted it as normal. But ad brokers began making more aggressive ads, with animation, sound, and pop-ups. Thus the demand for ad blockers. Physical advertising has to obey sign ordinances and in some places laws regulating the content of advertising. (In the US this is loosely enforced and mostly just for food and drugs.) You wouldn't be able to get away with constructing a billboard directly in the right-of-way of a road in an octagonal shape colored red with the word "STOP" on it. But that's the equivalent of what internet advertisers do with their fake virus warnings and the big green "Download" button.
- Arubis 8y ago
  An IRL advert won't follow you home, rifle through your drawers, and sell what it finds to the highest bidder.
  - Skrillex 8y ago
    Pervasive tracking and unwarranted surveillance via ads are a significant component of the problems that online ads have, but that does not make them worse than the ones you see elsewhere. The ones you see in real life have the distinction of being unavoidable except by going to live in either the wilderness or a country that is not yet developed enough to have them everywhere.
jkchu 8y ago
They are technically working if people you know talk to you about something they were exposed to via ads.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nine_k 8y ago

The scoop: * Ads are everywhere, not just online; physical ads are harder to filter off. * Ads work (mostly) on unconscious level. * Conscious resistance takes effort, and has a limited effect. > advertising should be considered a public issue as it constrains our ability to solve social and environmental problems. BTW I can't help but compare this to the recent outrage about social networks and games engineered to produce unconscious impulses to want more, and suggestions to regulate them, the way gambling and liquor are regulated. I wonder how much of the unconscious-affecting stuff may get regulated. Perfumes affect the sense of scent which is ancient and bypasses consciousness well. Spices, salt, sugar — they all affect the unconscious sense of taste. Certain kinds of attire produce unconsciously recognized images of strength, authority, sexuality, etc. To say nothing of facial expressions. If followed down properly, this rabbit hole of a logic leads pretty deep.

ChristianBundy 8y ago
> To say nothing of facial expressions. If followed down properly, this rabbit hole of a logic leads pretty deep. I'm not sure why you're having such a difficult time drawing the line between billboards and facial expressions. How about this: "People should be able to express opinions and propaganda however they'd like. Inanimate objects in public spaces should be constrained by something similar to the Fairness Doctrine[0], where factual information is allowed but blatant propaganda is not". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
- nine_k 8y ago
  You see, certain cultures already put this line much closer to facial expressions, and find it appropriate to wear veils of some kinds to conceal them. I'm not only talking about e.g. Muslim cultures; veils were pretty normal in 19th century's Europe (though not as thick as in 16th-century Europe). So my question is where the line will be drawn, because removing the unconscious form humans seems infeasible, no matter how cultures try.
  - canhascodez 8y ago

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

This is why Basic Attention Token is going to be such a game changer in my opinion. It's the first new idea I've heard about advertising in a really long while. People should at least be paid for their attention. We pay now by losing our privacy and being manipulated, and receive no benefits. All the benefits go to the puppeteers behind the scenes.

dwild 8y ago
The benefits are the free online service. You seriously can't say that Youtube doesn't have give us huge benefits, it fill so much of my entertainment nowadays, it give me so much knowledge and all theses peoples that produce theses videos are getting paid to made them. Gmail allowed me to have an email when I was too young to pay for it. MSN and then Facebook allowed me to connect to my friends and make communication so much easier. Ads pay for theses services and not only does it pay for it, it allow people that literally can't pay for it (either by being minor (no access to credit cards) or simply not having the means). That meant that service that depends on a big market to survive can survive.

jimjansen 8y ago

ITT: People attacking ads while likely working for the most pernicious advertising companies in history. If you really think Google or Facebook or Twitter et al's missions are to connect people or organize information you are deluded. Their missions are to be the most effective marketers ever.

megaman8 8y ago
that's true of every business: they need to make money.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  they _could_ try to make money in some way that is more productive to society than spreading mind-viruses
Arubis 8y ago
I posit that the overwhelming majority of HN'ers do not work for FAANG (though a fairly large chunk may well aspire to). Edit: in fairness, that would exclude Twitter. What I'm really getting at is that, for all the companies that get a _ton_ of chatter on here, tech is a lot larger than just BigCo's, and I'd expect the overall population here to reflect that.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

One thing that rarely gets mentioned in relation to ads is the value of priming (the article almost touches on it with evaluative conditioning but misses the mark). Advertisements don't just influence your brand choices, they can hack your brain and change your experiences. Ads can prime you to actually increase your enjoyment of using a certain product more than you would without ads, they can increase the value of that thing for its users. Think about how this sort of thing works without ads. Everyone has things like comfort foods, favorite shirts or socks or what-have-you, maybe a favorite comfy chair, favorite music, etc. Stuff that has become associated with certain ways of feeling through experiences. Foods that remind you of the comfort of home, for example, that sort of thing. Ads can tap into the same associative system and boost their perceived value in a similar way. And just as with all of the "organic" associations they become deeper over time. When you become primed to, say, enjoy coke just a little bit more than some discount supermarket cola then you build up the anticipation of drinking coke, and when you drink it you deepen the association of drinking coke with all of the positive experiences you've imbued into that moment (feelings of refreshment, maybe family amity, maybe it's associated with the holidays, maybe it feels like you're giving yourself a treat, etc, etc.) People don't like to talk about this stuff because it's somewhat disturbing and a bit manipulative on the part of brands but it's absolutely real. Think of all of the history of ceremony, ritual, and artifacts that has developed around religions over the centuries, a lot of that stuff is based on precisely the same associative pathways that brands make use of. This is why so many branded products don't just have simple, no nonsense, nondescript packaging and instead have very distinctive or even iconic forms and distinctive labels. It's powerful stuff.

davidjnelson 8y ago
I like how Seinfeld explains it on his Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee show. He says something to the effect of “I like ads because I get excited about the product, buy it, then feel great! Then it totally sucks and I don’t use it, but it felt great so who cares?” It’s tongue in cheek but I like how he explains the phenomenon you’re talking about with some humor.

amelius 8y ago

They work now. But AI will change that.

epicide 8y ago
Yeah, they'll work better.
- amelius 8y ago
  Now that DL has reached its current level, detecting an ad will always be easier than making it go undetected. The reason is that humans have to detect the ad at a conscious or unconscious level (otherwise it makes no sense to place the ad). Additionally, in many places, an ad has to be clearly marked as such (e.g. the word "advertisement" above an ad in newspapers).

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Ads work, but they are generally extremely inefficient. And as we get used to avoiding them, they become less efficient, meaning they need to jam more of them in our face. If we could somehow make it so that every ad was A) very relevant and B) we actually paid attention to it ... The entire digital ad economy could subsist on you and I seeing maybe 1 or 2 ads a day. That's it: imagine a world where you only had to see 1 or 2 ads a day! It's economically possible. But the worst and most cynical part of it all ... if ads were this efficient, short-sighted advertisers wouldn't stop at 1 or 2 - they would still jam more ads in our faces, thereby ratcheting up short term profit, wondering why his 'per view' metrics continues to all, as we pay less attention! It's a very pernicious race to the bottom and the only way it would work well is of a benevolent entity with long term foresight and proper incentives basically dictated the terms.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ggregoire 8y ago

Web traffic increases just after an ad aires on TV, so I guess it works. (Source: my job)

megaman8 8y ago

> Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work? Look at all the top advertisers on the internet, in almost every case it's all big brand advertisers that can't prove results, like Nike for instance. I know someone at Nike who held a marketing position there: she said, basically they just throw the money out there and hope that it works. There's very little validation that any of it works. And, I've heard on an NPR show how a lot of big brand advertisers are just continuing to do what they've always done because they've been doing it so long. Now, the economist of course would say that companies who squander money on advertisements would loose market share. That's the way it should work. But our capitalist markets aren't nearly as efficient as people commonly believe. On a personal note: I can tell you 99.99% or more of the advertisements don't work on me at all. How do i know this? I keep close account of everything I spend money on. I once did an audit on everything I've spend money on in the last 3 years and found that almost everything I spent money on is not due to ads (with the exception of SEO ~ I do occasionally find products through search engines but this usually isn't considered a direct advertisement expense). It's not that I'm against ads. If an Ad promised a product I actually wanted (say a home at an affordable price, or a faster way to get to work), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem is, everything that's being advertised is more stuff I don't want.

Konnstann 8y ago
As much as I can agree that my purchases are also not tied to advertising, other than "Sale on apples, 50% off", I don't think you can extrapolate based on the people who frequent Hacker News.
- davidfischer 8y ago
  While I can't speak for Hacker News as a whole and I'm going to talk about clicks and not purchases strictly, I am willing to talk about developers more generally who frequently say things like "advertising doesn't work on me". Collectively, they are mistaken and it does work on them. I work on advertising at Read the Docs and when we were first added to the main ad blocker lists our revenue went down. We were 100% pay per click at that time and our revenue went down by the same percentage as the number of ad impressions went down. Looking at it statistically, developers who run ad blockers still click on ads at the same rate as those that don't as long as they actually see the ad.

dekken_ 8y ago

go watch "century of the self" by Adam Curtis then tell me what you think

diego_moita 8y ago

Typical selection bias: ads work if you choose as evidence the ads that work. For every successful Nike, Coke or Samsung campaign you see there are hundreds of other campaigns that didn't work. The correct title is: "it is very, very hard to make ads work, but it can be done".

gcbw2 8y ago
that's like saying bullets are ineffective because most of them miss the target.
- diego_moita 8y ago
  I believe "but it can be done" and "ineffective" don't mean the same.

robertsd247 8y ago

All advertising has at least a 1% ROI. I don't think ads are a issue to be discussed.

davemp 8y ago

The ethics of ads, in my opinion, is a question of whether the ends justify the means. Persuasive ad campaigns are an attack on individual choice. The goal is to convince someone to do something: to buy, to vote, to labor, to behave, etc. If the attack results in an individual choosing something that benefits them, it may not seem evil. However, the difficulty arises in how one gauges benefit. Can advertising bodies be trusted to or even capable of measuring the outcomes individuals' of choices? Can governments? I will assert that only individuals can be trusted or even capable of measuring choice outcomes. (Democracy is based on this assertion, otherwise voter's choice wouldn't matter). If this assertions holds, any attack on the individual's capability of gauging choice is an attack on democracy and their liberty. Democracy is designed to be resilient. Essentially the democratic process is a boosting method for classifying the best choices for a population. [1] (Our forefathers weren't dumb). The citizen's choices just have to be slightly better than random to collectively form a single more reliable choice. If citizens' collective choice accuracy falls below 50% the process begins to fail. Therefore any advertisement that subverts individual, rational choice is evil. How would one determine if an advert is subverting rational choice? I don't know, but I wouldn't mind them being purged with impunity. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosting_(machine_learning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosting_(machine_learning)

soared 8y ago
attack > take aggressive action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force, typically in a battle or war. >(of a person or animal) act against (someone or something) aggressively in an attempt to injure or kill. >(of a disease, chemical substance, or insect) act harmfully on. >criticize or oppose fiercely and publicly. >begin to deal with (a problem or task) in a determined and vigorous way. >make an aggressive or forceful attempt to score a goal or point, or gain or exploit an advantage in a game against an opposing team or player. >an aggressive and violent action against a person or place. >to set upon or work against forcefully >to assail with unfriendly or bitter words >a belligerent or antagonistic action I'm unable to find a definition of "attack" that fits your use.
- canhascodez 8y ago

jjuhl 8y ago

I know that I probably fail at this, but I try to actively not buy brands I notice ads for and instead always go for the brands that are unknown (or less known) to me. The advertisers probably still trick me, but I try. I don't care one iota about what my choice of brand/product signals to other people (why would I? I don't care about anyone elses opinion about me in the first place).

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Anyone know how to fight "naming rights" on historic publicly-owned stadiums? Another modern advertising development I don't care for.

daxterspeed 8y ago

Posts like these feed my belief that advertising should be criminalized. In physical form it litters the world in more and more ways in order to grab our attention. I don't think there's many deaths associated with billboards along roads - but these billboards have been getting new "features", such as animations, in their battle for drivers' attention. In digital form ads get even more malicious - trying to reverse-engineer people's thoughts in order to place the most "actionable" ad in front of right person at the right time. I don't really expect any government to begin to take action against ads at large - but I wish more people would take a good look at all the bad things advertising does to us all.

danbruc 8y ago
You might be interested in Sao Paulo's clean city law [1]. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
- slig 8y ago
  Nowadays we have bus' stops and clocks with ads all over the city.
  - gcbw2 8y ago
    not to mention an investigation on bribes to have your billboards allowed.
cwkoss 8y ago
I think instead of broadly criminalizing, imposing steep fines for various hostile-to-the-individual advertising tactics would be more fair and effective: Like, make impose a $1/impression fee on every ad that uses: - Claims the product will cause an emotion in the user - Use of superlatives or exaggeration - Sex to sell - ...
- shiburizu 8y ago

irrational 8y ago

I feel very fortunate. I don't see many/any ads on the internet because I run multiple ad blockers. I don't see any ads on the way to work because I work just 2 miles from my house and it's almost all forest between my house and my work, so no ads. I don't watch much if any video content (I prefer to read). I don't listen to radio stations (I prefer audio books). I rarely drive anywhere where there might be ads since I mostly just have things delivered from Amazon.

FiatLuxDave 8y ago

What is the tax rate on advertisements? We tax cigarettes and alcohol because of negative externalities. We don't need to get rid of ads, we just need less of them.

byron_fast 8y ago

Ads are flowers. We can hate on them, and they are annoying, but sometimes they offer something you need.

Abutere 8y ago
Sounds like something Don Draper would say.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Ads are weeds. They ruin your garden, are painful to touch and sometimes can even hurt you. Some look nice, most look bad. They add lots of extra work. But every now and then, you can use some in a soup as a backup ingredient.

cwkoss 8y ago

I would expect that the emotion of disgust is much more powerful in advertising, but hard to use to make positive emotions. Could disgust be used to counteract the brainwashing effects of advertising? How many 'normal' impressions of McDonalds ads would be negated from a single viewing of an image of a person projectile vomiting with McDonalds branding next to it? Could buying 1% marketshare counteract the effects of the other 99% of the market?

RealityVoid 8y ago

I find it interesting that companies are willing to spend this much on advertising. If you think about it, the competition for eyeballs is also a race to the bottom. The more advertising is the norm, the more advertising you have to do in order to get the same result. Of course, if you do not keep up... you loose market.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
It is. In a competitive enough market sector, most ads cancel out with the competition. But if you stop playing the game, you lose. The sad thing is just how much waste this creates. Waste of manpower and waste of energy, including fuels used to make and transport physical ads.

firecall 8y ago

>"Here’s another example: “please, don’t think of a basketball game”. There you go: instantly and without perceivable effort, you thought about tall black players, an orange spherical ball with black ribs, a red hoop with a net, big foam hands, a transparent backboard, a rectangular floor made of wood, the “Kiss cam”, sneakers with high tops, Lebron James, etc." I actually thought of a baseball game.... But then I have ADHD and not american..

chopin 8y ago

What would be a good start: Every person, no exception allowed, shown in an ad must be older than 18. Drawn ads must only show adult persons. Offenders are barred from advertizing for a fixed amount of time.

ksec 8y ago

I think I may be the minority on HN, I like Ads, or at least certain type of ads. I hate Crappy ads though. Ads in the form of news, New Promotion, New Product Launch, New Drama Series etc. New Recipe from McDonald/ KFC / Foods you like ( Which fall under Product launch ), Airline Discount, New Restaurant opening in my area, Promotion from local supermarket. New Game coming out, New Concert, New Cars. A Services Company launching a new form insurance... etc etc I don't even mind having online Ads, most of the problem is somehow these Ads, A/B Scripts decides to make my laptop fans spinning, which I hate. And when they are way over the top, Like having 5 ads just on the front page. It is not ads that I have problem with, it is the implementation and UX problem they cause. Now whether Ads generate enough revenue or its effectiveness is an entirely different question.