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Advertising is a scourge upon society.
by AngryData 8y ago
Advertising is a scourge upon society.
- kbenson 8y ago> Advertising is a scourge upon society. I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow. I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.
- baybal2 8y agoI am more on the position that advertising as a function of product promotion is dying, in all, but the most extreme overkill forms.
- scrollaway 8y agoIs it possible you just don't notice the non-extreme forms anymore, given how extreme the rest is?
- baybal2 8y agoMay well be, but that still means that non-extreme-ads are on the way out...
- scrollaway 8y agoPeople used to really notice when a movie, TV programme or video game was violent. Blood, graphic death, etc. As those things became more common and more extreme, people stopped noticing. Now we don't really talk about it at all anymore. Does that mean non-violent movies and video games are on their way out? (No it does not.)
- baybal2 8y agoYour line of thought here has its own merit
- vermilingua 8y agoAnd yet, the raison d'etre of movies and video games is not to be noticed. For advertising, it is. If the non-extreme forms of advertising are not being noticed, it means they are indeed dying out.
- kd5bjo 8y agoThe purpose of advertising isn’t to be noticed, it’s to make people give you their money. It’s an open question whether being consciously noticed is a prerequisite for this or not; can ubiquitous but ignored Coca-Cola logos successfully change someone’s answer to “What would you like to drink?”
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoIt is in a way, but that's because advertising has become underhanded and is inadvertently being done by the people at large. This is particularly prevalent in the media industry (TV and movies), where things like posters or TV commercials are not nearly as effective as the buzz a movie creates online. When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.
- hopler 8y agoYou are the first person who has said they prefer politics over TV shows on Facebook. I definitely prefer TV shows.
- darkpuma 8y agoHave you tried not seeking out movie trailers and seeing how your life changes as a result? Between my television avoidance, adblocking, and theater avoidance, I've not seen a movie trailer in many years. Instead of deliberately blasting your brain with fast paced A/V propaganda for a minute or two, try learning about movies through word of mouth with people who share your general interests.
- simonh 8y agoYes, but then I miss stuff I would have wanted to watch, or more accurately miss it longer than I would have wanted to. If a show or movie is genuinely engaging or thought provoking then I want to know, because material like that has value to me.
- darkpuma 8y agoThere are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.
- shawnz 8y agoTelevision commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoNo, we should regulate advertising strongly enough to remove most of the coercion. In all mediums. When what's left is overwhelmingly truthful and simply informative, the balance and magnitude of punishment and fines are about right.
- deleted 8y ago
- dkersten 8y agoA’s Banksy said: > ...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... > ...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. Full quote here: https://trickygirl.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/quote-of-the-day-banksy-on-advertising/ https://trickygirl.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/quote-of-the-day...
- easytiger 8y agoSo no different than leering self interested political posturing masquerading as altruistic innocuity
- Tsubasachan 8y agoThis is fair. Both sides of the debate have made this ideological. The pro advertising side make it sound like it is your capitalist duty to suffer ads. No. Fuck that, I block annoyances in my life if I can. And I still buy crap don't worry.
- hopler 8y agoThere's a difference between consuming products that are funded by ads, where you can just it out of the product, and add that pollute public space.
- pluma 8y agoYou're right. Advertising is just a symptom of the root problem, capitalism. "Attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas" as they say. If everyone is supposed to vote with their dollar, you need to make them vote for you. The easiest way to do that is by fighting for your attention.
- shawnz 8y agoMore like, capitalism is just a symptom of the root "problem" that humans are fundamentally self-interested
- hutzlibu 8y agoThey are, but they are also also very social beings who sacrifice themself for others. Also, culture matters.
- shawnz 8y agoAnd capitalism enables occasional charity, if you want. So I'd say it's a pretty good parallel for our nature. Certainly though it's not the "root of the problem" when it comes to self-serving behaviour.
- pluma 8y agoCapitalism "enables" charity in the same way capitalism "creates" products. It doesn't. Wealth enables charity, labor creates products. Capitalism does however spread inequality, which in turn creates an opportunity for charity that wouldn't otherwise be necessary.
- shawnz 8y agoRight, capitalism enables personal ownership which creates an opportunity for charity. Which parallels how humans and other animals behave in general. They seek out personal possessions but also sometimes understand the value of sharing them.
- snarfy 8y agoI'm not against advertising, but I am against branding. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where a hot piece of metal scars the cattle with a logo of the owner. Branding in advertising is meant to scar your brain. I consider it a form of assault.
- marcosdumay 8y agoYou mean those laws that allows companies to get a reputation with their clients without a scammer being able to legally exploit it and confuse everybody?
- hutzlibu 8y agoBranding is ok. What I think is not OK but totally normal, is branding combined with advertisement. The name of the brand combined with all the perfect, beautiful and fun things of the world, so your name associates the brand with all the nice things. That is lying to me and I hate that it is the norm.
- marcosdumay 8y agoOh, ok. You dislike brand advertising, that's reasonable. I don't know if it's viable to separate good brand advertise (our soda tastes good, our bags last forever) from the bad kind (use our product and get all the pretty woman). Some regulation over emotional tone (and, of course, false info) may be much more successful than focusing on brands vs. unitary products.
- hutzlibu 8y agoI would not regulate it at all. I hope for more people to understand what is happening with their brains. Once you do understand it does not affect (as much). But with kids these days entrenched in their smartphone virtual reality consuming custom tailored ads .. the trend is unfortunately downwards.
- kbenson 8y ago
- masonic 8y agoI would rephrase as "fake advertising is a scourge on society" with "fake" specific to artificially generated "impressions" that, by design, no user ever actually selects or sees.
- Qwertious 8y agoYes, I'd be interested to see what would happen if misleading/mis-impressioning ads were made illegal.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoNah, that's actually slightly positive in so far that it hurts the advertising industry. The problem is with actual ads. The ones that distract, cajole and coerce people to do things against their best interest.
- product50 8y agoAdvertising is what makes the web accessible to billions of people in the world for free. Most apps offer the option to make an in app purchase and turn off ads. Why don't you do that vs. giving your unqualified opinions on what is good and bad for society?
- honestoHeminway 8y agoHere be postin all the little göbbels there made up stories on why they do good.
- roenxi 8y agoVoters are also usually not responsible enough to handle democracy either, and yet here we are. 1) If you don't tell people about your product, they won't know about it and probably won't use it. Word of mouth is ok, but it is surprising how many people are left uncertain and in the dark about what their options are if they aren't directly told what their options are. 2) Without advertising, the internet collapses. Google, in particular, collapses. And takes a lot of unprofitable-without-advertising services with it. Facebook probably goes as well. Most media companies too. Once you lose all those companies I'm not sure how many normal people would agree that the internet still existed.
- ndnxhs 8y agoThe internet existed before advertising and it could continue to exist without it. People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist. A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.
- TomMarius 8y agoI don't agree. The internet definitely did not exist in any form that would be today seen as sufficient ever before. The sheer scale makes it impossible, advertising is the only way poor people could afford it and pay for it without paying money at the same time (so the developer now has a new option too). The options these companies that exist thanks to ads gave to all businesses in my country are enormous and have definitely helped greatly to grow our GDP (I live in the country with the greatest number of online stores per citizen). I love Facebook and Google for the options their advertising platforms have created for people (however not being ethical is not cool at all).
- Moru 8y agoThere is other ways to see ads. The companies don't pay money for advertising, they pay to make poor people buy things they don't need. If they would pay the site owner directly, maybe they would not be as poor?
- Razengan 8y agoWhat if people were directly paid to view adverts? Introduce ad viewing apps where people voluntarily sign up, provide information about themselves, and use attention-tracking etc. to reward them with some money based on how many adverts they watch or surveys they answer. Maybe go further and ban all other forms of advertisement that takes up space anywhere, classifying them as vandalism. Everybody wins (unless this idea is fundamentally flawed): • People only see ads they want to see, when they want to see them. • Companies know exactly who is watching and what they’re interested in, instead of going through third-parties and overly roundabout, sometimes illegal, ways to acquire that information. • And the world becomes less uglier and noisier.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agolol, no. I think you just invented the black mirror 15 million merits episode.
- dwighttk 8y agowhy not? https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-farm-in-china-with-hundreds-of-smartphone-bots/ https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-far...
- jerf 8y ago"What if people were directly paid to view adverts?" One of the "problems" with that it is that it would reveal just how little money these things make. A page full of busy ads that annoy the heck out of you may still make well under a penny, only breaking a penny if you actually click on something and possibly even then only if you buy something. Facebook's approximate revenue in 2018 is about 34 billion, it seems [1]. Facebook's user count in 2018 [2], call it two billion for math convenience and a fudge factor for fake & dead accounts. Simple math shows that even if 100% of their revenues are from ads, they're making $17 dollars a year from their average user. Revenue, not profit. And they're one of the big money makers in the ad industry! Converted to daily terms, that's about 4.7 cents per day. That's what they're trashing your feed for, rearranging it so you see more ads and less of your family, rearranging it to drive "engagement" by putting more rage- and stress-inducing controversial content into your feed, and carefully managing your experience for. 5 cents a day, average. Advertisers aren't just crashing our society, driving our news industries into death spirals, invading our privacy at scales that would make the Stasi blush, and annoying the hell out of us on almost every web page we visit, they're doing it for almost no money. They can't afford to pay you to view advertising. Even someone making minimum wage would find the offer they could make laughable, because your offer would be coming out of their profits, not revenue, so if Facebook wanted to pay you to view ads they'd be slicing up something like a $1/year with you. (This is why I've proposed as one solution something like a 1cent/impression advertising tax. It would annihilate everything but the absolutely most profitable portions of the industry. Even a 0.01cent/impression tax would probably kill 90% of it. And I think there's a perfectly justifiable case to be made that such a tax would simply be internalizing externalities and perfectly justified under both left and right wing theories of economics.) [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-adverti... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- elagost 8y agoThe new technologies behind ads are really terrible, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a full-page Rolex ad in the WSJ. Dude in a fancy suit wearing a watch that looks great, and a quick description - that's a very simple, easy to understand model. If I like that watch, I can save up for it. Rolex doesn't know I saw it and doesn't care. New technologies behind ads, tracking users wherever they go and hounding them relentlessly and using their personal communications to harvest more data - that's the scourge. I'm fine with ads, but I block them on every website because I'm not fine with tracking.
- Nextgrid 8y agoAdvertising is like cancer. It starts small but eventually consumes the entire product/company. Seems like there is no "safe" amount of advertising, it becomes bigger and bigger and ends up swaying the entire company into doing unethical and anti-user things (like optimising for "engagement").
- askafriend 8y agoStripping the conversation of all nuance isn’t the intellectually honest way to have this conversation.
- dang 8y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.