6 ms·

Headline should reflect the original article ("Ads just work"). Some thoughts... Humans, in general, seek to improve their environment. One might paint their

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.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        > Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships. 25% of TFL funding comes from government grants anyway, increasing that to 27% from local property taxation in London seems the most sensible thing, but in the age where people only care about the bottom line and don't factor in externalities I can't see that as an option. The Met are now selling themselves because people won't pay taxes to fund them (London's police budget is 20% lower today than it was in 2012/2013)
        8y ago
- 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.

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.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      > Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships. 25% of TFL funding comes from government grants anyway, increasing that to 27% from local property taxation in London seems the most sensible thing, but in the age where people only care about the bottom line and don't factor in externalities I can't see that as an option. The Met are now selling themselves because people won't pay taxes to fund them (London's police budget is 20% lower today than it was in 2012/2013)
      - 8y ago
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.