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This is why I left work in advertising. I could see the levels of psychological manipulation 30 years ago and knew with the future of data mining it was only go

This is why I left work in advertising. I could see the levels of psychological manipulation 30 years ago and knew with the future of data mining it was only going to get worse. There is nothing ethical about advertising. It's all about what you can get away with. Look at the history of subliminal advertising, though it never got so bad as to have laws enacted when the public became interested in it they realized the game was up and abandoned it. The industry is full of tiny little battering rams like subliminal advertising. Each attempt yields success or failure, rinse and repeat. The refinement at this point is unfathomable.

busymom0 7y ago
I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation. I think generally, people know that when they are watching an ad, they are being tricked a bit. I think as long as it’s obvious to the user that they are being advertised to, there shouldn’t be an issue. Cambridge Analytica data was used to manipulate people by them not being aware that they were basically watching an advertisement. Except in this case, the ad was a real time political movie in the same theatre as someone else but both people somehow came out watching a different version of the movie because of filtered and targeted manipulative ads. They did not know that the posts they were seeing on social media were supposed to be manipulative ads.
- sgift 7y ago
  > I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation. That line runs between "let's think about this as an interesting thought experiment" and "let's do this!" - People can and are manipulated even when they know they are being advertised. That has been shown time and time again. Advertising is psychological manipulation with another name.
  - busymom0 7y ago
    Sure. My following question would be how do we then differentiate between healthy advertising an unhealthy one? We can't abandon and block ads completely. If we did that, we wouldn't even get to be aware of products which might really make our lives better. How do we figure out the healthy balance out? I would argue that the current laws around advertising are pretty decent but they could be made better and adapted for social media platforms.
wpietri 7y ago
Yeah, advertising is a field I also will no longer work in. Manipulating people for money is ethically suspect. And the whole industry is an arms race: people spend money on advertising mainly because their competitors do. If we banned all advertising tomorrow, consumers would still get about the same outcomes, especially now that the Internet makes it easy to find products and product information. Well, the same outcomes except they'd have circa an extra $1k/year in their pockets, and would spend a lot less time watching ads.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  I think it's dangerous to lump it all in together. What if you're advertising the historical equivalent of a vacuum cleaner over a brush? A dishwasher over washing up liquid, a car over a carriage, a savings fund that invests ethically over one that doesn't, a cheaper, faster municipal broadband over a monopolistic inferior broadband, the examples are innumerable. A progressive political party over a corrupt incumbent? I agree in general that advertising should be curtailed from the present level, but I don't agree that it's fundamentally unethical. If you've got to rely on word of mouth, even with the internet, it will take a lot longer for good, useful products/ideas to spread.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Your notion that there is only advertising and word of mouth is obviously wrong. There already exist other channels. Journalism, for one. Experts blogging, for another. Conferences are a third. These are popular and useful today, and they would only become more so in a world without advertising. Likely new things would emerge as well. If advertising were vital for learning about new products, nobody would use open source software. Nobody would use Hacker News for that matter. They do, which should tell you there's something wrong with your theory.
    - kristianc 7y ago

busymom0 7y ago

I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation. I think generally, people know that when they are watching an ad, they are being tricked a bit. I think as long as it’s obvious to the user that they are being advertised to, there shouldn’t be an issue. Cambridge Analytica data was used to manipulate people by them not being aware that they were basically watching an advertisement. Except in this case, the ad was a real time political movie in the same theatre as someone else but both people somehow came out watching a different version of the movie because of filtered and targeted manipulative ads. They did not know that the posts they were seeing on social media were supposed to be manipulative ads.

sgift 7y ago
> I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation. That line runs between "let's think about this as an interesting thought experiment" and "let's do this!" - People can and are manipulated even when they know they are being advertised. That has been shown time and time again. Advertising is psychological manipulation with another name.
- busymom0 7y ago
  Sure. My following question would be how do we then differentiate between healthy advertising an unhealthy one? We can't abandon and block ads completely. If we did that, we wouldn't even get to be aware of products which might really make our lives better. How do we figure out the healthy balance out? I would argue that the current laws around advertising are pretty decent but they could be made better and adapted for social media platforms.

wpietri 7y ago

Yeah, advertising is a field I also will no longer work in. Manipulating people for money is ethically suspect. And the whole industry is an arms race: people spend money on advertising mainly because their competitors do. If we banned all advertising tomorrow, consumers would still get about the same outcomes, especially now that the Internet makes it easy to find products and product information. Well, the same outcomes except they'd have circa an extra $1k/year in their pockets, and would spend a lot less time watching ads.

mattmanser 7y ago
I think it's dangerous to lump it all in together. What if you're advertising the historical equivalent of a vacuum cleaner over a brush? A dishwasher over washing up liquid, a car over a carriage, a savings fund that invests ethically over one that doesn't, a cheaper, faster municipal broadband over a monopolistic inferior broadband, the examples are innumerable. A progressive political party over a corrupt incumbent? I agree in general that advertising should be curtailed from the present level, but I don't agree that it's fundamentally unethical. If you've got to rely on word of mouth, even with the internet, it will take a lot longer for good, useful products/ideas to spread.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 7y ago
  Your notion that there is only advertising and word of mouth is obviously wrong. There already exist other channels. Journalism, for one. Experts blogging, for another. Conferences are a third. These are popular and useful today, and they would only become more so in a world without advertising. Likely new things would emerge as well. If advertising were vital for learning about new products, nobody would use open source software. Nobody would use Hacker News for that matter. They do, which should tell you there's something wrong with your theory.
  - kristianc 7y ago