26 ms·

Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

581 points by howard941 7y ago

bigbadgoose 7y ago
"Advertising exists to make you feel bad about yourself, then inserts product as solution"
chronogram 7y ago
This URL was blocked by a content blocker. Hm! https://outline.com/KrV9Pw https://outline.com/KrV9Pw
cm2012 7y ago
Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc. It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Uneasy-Persuasion-Dubious-American/dp/0465000800&ved=2ahUKEwihqqSaj7_iAhXyRd8KHY3YCIYQFjAAegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw0KfSud7yAwUmzwvRqc9Jye https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  So, halving it would make people 3% more happy. I say halve it 30 times in a row then. These silly stats make no sense at all.
  - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
    That doesn't follow.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
      - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
        Not really, though -- it was empirical, and the fact that an estimate of the first halving does X doesn't imply that further halving will have the same effect, so a reductio doesn't work here.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Percentages don't work that way. Don't blame the stats for your own misunderstanding.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Yes, that was sort of the point.
      - dTal 7y ago
        Sorry.
- kazinator 7y ago
  The spending on advertizing likely has diminishing returns. The marginal decrease in satisfaction that would come from doubling the spending is possibly smaller than the baseline decrease caused by the initial expenditure.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    There's nothing in their data to support this, and if the effect was there they would have seen it (since they have yearly happiness data). They describe a linear correlation.
    - macleginn 7y ago
      They describe a linear correlation because they fitted linear correlation. All kinds of interesting effects could be hidden in the residuals, but they don't show them.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible if there is no trade-off.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did, there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow because of ads.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness. Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist. The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expand but advertising isn't free either. In any case, an independent press is much more suitable to actually inform people than the ad industry which at best informs people by accident while trying to convince people to buy $PRODUCT. Ads are like military: It's mostly necessary because it exists.
      - cm2012 7y ago
        Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it. There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better. How do you get plumbers to hear about your product? 1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale. 2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable. 3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential. 4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts. See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them. This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. Not to those 3%, and since advertising provides very little benefit to anyone who isn't in the ad business, I would be happy to that 3%.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    I don't think that correlation is accurate. But even if it is, there is a trade-off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034507
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      I understand. I'm not saying that I accept that the correlation is accurate. I'm just saying that if it is, the tradeoff to stop making 3% of people less happy is totally worthwhile. But of course, still in the hypothetical, it wouldn't be necessary for ads to disappear to accomplish this. All that would be necessary is for advertising to adhere to the ideals the ad industry itself says it holds: rather than manipulating people, ads could just inform people what the product is, what it does, and what its strengths (and, as long as I'm dreaming, weaknesses) are. But the vast majority of ads do none of that. Instead, they engage in psychological manipulation.
      - cm2012 7y ago
        I'd take issue with that. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Gap&view_all_page_id=14856729724 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... and look up some random brands you've heard of. The vast majority of ads are on the level. The ones that aren't are when the product itself is a scam most of the time.
        JohnFen 7y ago
        I don't do Facebook, and have no clue what FB ads look like. I'm talking about advertising generally, online and off. I very rarely see ads that are like that.
- FabHK 7y ago
  > So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. You are wrong. The paper goes on to say, in the very next sentence, that 3% is "approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed", thus (while smaller), it's the same order of magnitude. Presumably you do not consider the impact of marriage or unemployment "basically negligible"? > It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. That may be as it may, but that is not what the paper is talking about.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    I saw that. I still think it's small. 3% is 3%, even if their measure shows marriage being 6%. Changing peoples minds about their self worth is still changing their mind.
- scottrogowski 7y ago
  This. I am surprised to see hacker news jump on this as proof that advertising causes reduced happiness when this article can only conclude that they are correlated. The common statistical maxim is that correlation does not imply causation. A far more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that greater development is associated with both increased advertising and a reduction in happiness. And yes, the summary does state that they were able to show that it is uncorrelated with GDP but what's telling is that the prominent bar graph is "uncorrected". So, after correcting, the advertising effect may be so minor that they chose not to graph it at all. I do my best to limit advertising in my own life because I myself believe that I am a happier person without it. This study, however, is misleading and doesn't give us evidence of much of anything.
- countavdhesh 7y ago
  GDP measures activity involving money, but makes no distinction between useful, useless and harmful activity. the cost of cleaning up pollution is added to the GDP.
jandrese 7y ago
Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness. You're basically being negged by advertisers.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I guess that’s the current form of advertising. It tries to create demand where there has been none before. You could also imagine advertising that tries to address your actual needs. Unfortunately that probably would make a much smaller market.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Current? A German philosopher wrote in 1844: > every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      I was thinking about people Edward Bernays who took things to the next level.
    - smogcutter 7y ago
      > A German philosopher Subtle, I like it.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- rimliu 7y ago
  I would not say it works that way for me. I see most advertising as a visual noice and/or annoying interruption. I think majority of the time I am not even aware what is being advertised.
throwayEngineer 7y ago
I can't help but imagine there are worse companies than others for this. Between Apple and Samsung, these are companies that advertise Average products but charge luxury pricing. I find this incredibly unethical. But my non Engineering counterparts believe that Sales are necessary.
plg 7y ago
my kids only watch netflix and shows/movies we buy on iTunes so basically they see virtually no ads, SO unlike my experience growing up watching network TV where every 12 minutes there was a series of 5 or 6 30-second ads
- burntoutcase 7y ago
  They might not see explicit advertisements, but they're getting exposed to a metric assload of product placement.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative? If I open someone's fridge, I don't see a bunch of stuff with the labels conveniently turned backwards or removed, I see Coca-Cola and Sunny-D and Hellman's Mayo and Heinz ketchup. If I walk through a college classroom I don't see a bunch of laptops with featureless lids, I see Apple logos and Dell logos and HP logos. If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos. Is it really detracting from a movie to have a bottle of Pepsi sitting on the table at dinner while they're eating their Pizza Hut pizza? Isn't that how the real world actually exists? Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - burntoutcase 7y ago
      > Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative? If a product placement can't be justified on plot or characterization grounds, then I find it an obnoxious distraction and a sign of spinelessness on the part of the director and editors. > If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos. Do it really matter what kind of car James Bond drives? Not really. All that matters is that it's something only rich pigs can afford and was customized by Q with all kinds of non-standard and outrageously illegal features, like artfully concealed machine guns. > Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway? If I want reality, I know where to find it. If I go to the movies, it's to get a reprieve from reality. I'm paying good money for the convenience of a ready-made waking dream, and the presence of gratuitous product placement cheapens the fantasy. If product placement doesn't bother you, that's fine. It annoys the fuck out of me, so I prefer to read novels or play video games when I want to relax. (Besides, the prevalence of CG makes most mass-market movies nothing but defective video games anyway. Who needs MCU when you can watch a let's play of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Libertines?)
bayouborne 7y ago
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed." Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect on life satisfaction?
- djtriptych 7y ago
  I think they say "absolute size" to mean absolute value. e.g. 3% drop is half the absolute size of a 6% rise.
  - bayouborne 7y ago
    ah, thank you.
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  Higher, assuming that it came from this reference at the bottom of the article: https://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11176 https://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11176
- theonlyklas 7y ago
  Examining 87 countries (N = 292,525) covering a period of 29 years, marriage will increase life satisfaction. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280308599_The_Life_Satisfaction_Advantage_of_Being_Married_and_Gender_Specialization https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280308599_The_Life_...
burntoutcase 7y ago
I'm not surprised. Advertising is nothing but private-sector psyops.
Toine 7y ago
Mimetic theory explains why
return1 7y ago
> Germany after 1989, Convenient. I think they should include DDR which had no advertising at all.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That is not correct. Over the highways there were all kinds of signs back in the day, mostly insurance.
brentm 7y ago
Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater dissatisfaction with lack of income?
- bediger4000 7y ago
  I've asked academic economists about this, albeit indirectly. I've asked if any studies of the effect of advertising have ever been made, if they've been replicated, etc etc. I tried to vary phrasing, and use the jargon. I got a lot of "I don't know" and variants. It seems difficult to google up references, because the key words are common words.
- oregontechninja 7y ago
  The jobs are abstract time waisters anyhow. Let me surf and hike my days away while the machines toil in the fields.
- netsharc 7y ago
  It seems like it's the gospel of capitalism (or neo-liberalism?) that has fooled of us that we need more money to be more happy. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-... As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a good group of friends improves your health so much as you grow older. Admiteddly we were sitting in a restaurant, where the food and drink cost money.
  - funkymike 7y ago
    Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.
- FabHK 7y ago
enlyth 7y ago
To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit. We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
- locknumber110 7y ago
  As a wise philosopher once said regarding advertising, "Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little."
- maerF0x0 7y ago
  Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop. I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
  - worble 7y ago
    You realise the reason why it's so effective is that it's psychological manipulation right? Telling people to just "stop rewarding" it is almost the same as telling abused partners to "just leave the relationship"; it's not that simple, and trying to reduce it as such is at best unhelpful, and at worst actively harmful.
  - xg15 7y ago
    But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works. You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
  - 7y ago
nullandvoid 7y ago
I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused. Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about
- deogeo 7y ago
  > necessary evil Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.
  - chc 7y ago
    How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?
    - deogeo 7y ago
      How many are necessary, or even desirable, and not a net drain on human happiness by optimizing for endless engagement? I don't like the direction in which the ad-supported model is pushing content. Internet pre-advertising had plenty of useful and interesting sites. And Wikipedia is ad-free as well. And without the competition of zero-cost ad-supported commercial sites, other business models would rise to take their place.
      - drstewart 7y ago
        And what makes you think these other business models will have only net positive contributions on human happiness?
        deogeo 7y ago
        They probably won't - but it dispels the myth that advertising is necessary.
    - 7y ago
seasoup 7y ago
I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.
- eswat 7y ago
  It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.
  - erentz 7y ago
    While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way. We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.
    - mayniac 7y ago
      I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything. One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
oregontechninja 7y ago
I view any and all non-obiective advertising as literally evil. There is absolutely no good reason for advertising to exist it's current state. Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? I've heard some governments outlaw advertising to children.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  well there's lots. in my country (Aus), there's regulations on tobacco, alcohol, gambling: each of varied levels of deliberate and actual effectiveness. A lot of places limit billboards. And then there's even cultural aspects: Melbourne culture says that the level of a places' 'coolness' is inversely related to its amount of external signage...
- bediger4000 7y ago
  I could not agree more. I have gone out of my way to teach my children that advertising is lies. Literally. That's what I told them, and demonstrated to them. I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript in browsers I control, plus my own DNS-based advertising domain blocklist.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    If only lies were illegal
- FabHK 7y ago
  > Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? Well, in North Korea the only billboards I saw were of Kim Il-Song and Kim Jong-Il. The two restaurants in the hotel for foreigners on the island in the middle of Pyongyang were imaginatively called "Restaurant 1" and "Restaurant 2". So, not too much marketing there. I do hope that there is some more sensible middle ground.
- asdff 7y ago
  Sao Paulo banned advertising, removing 15k billboards in the process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
perfunctory 7y ago
What can I say "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)
- kaybe 7y ago
  I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.) If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
  - fourthark 7y ago
    What's a war without killing people?
    - kaybe 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor Even though that was meant tongue in cheek, I fear there will be innumerable deaths before this is over. We can discuss who killed them then. edit: A war-economy-level effort is needed, with the same dedication of all participants, so there is another similar line of though.
      - fwn 7y ago
        Here's another take on the war metaphor in international relations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(international_relations) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(internationa... > an extreme version of politicization that enables extraordinary means to be used in the name of security
adamwong246 7y ago
Real luxury is being able to pay for the content you want, to watch how and when you want, without subsidizing the experience with attention-sucking ads. I refuse to hook up our cable box for this reason.
deogeo 7y ago
Advertising is necessary to stave off the greatest threat against Western civilization: https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsizerender.jpg https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsi...
RickJWagner 7y ago
This has been a problem since Mick Jagger sang about it, last century. https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-lyrics https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfac...
lwb 7y ago
The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch. I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it! It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games). I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television Yes, I agree with this. I gave up on television about 20 years ago, and it was the ads that pushed me that way. Every so often I'll see a TV program, and it's still intolerable -- things are so much worse than they were 20 years ago.
- contingencies 7y ago
  Two more media stories from the last 18 hours. I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired". This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car. I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
- mrep 7y ago
  > I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. What??? You can pay for ad-free hulu! Why are you complaining?
anoncake 7y ago
> Easterlin (1974) found early evidence suggesting that society does not become happier as it grows richer. This is why equality is important. A society becoming less equal is a problem, even if everyone gets richer.
sesteel 7y ago
I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  It's good advice, but I find it ironic. Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products. To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over. It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    The content of targeted advertising is usually way less spammy than untarged advertising. More or less the only people who can make money on completely blind online ads are scammers (whiten your teeth! etc)
  - MichaelDickens 7y ago
    An index fund invests in lots of companies. The ones that are driven by ad revenue only make up a fairly small percent of the fund.
vertline3 7y ago
There is a documentary from BBC about the history of philosophy of happiness that was on YouTube, in the documentary it is mentioned that the Greek Philosphers had discussed advertising as lowering our happiness in order to replace the hole with their product. I think it was epicurus but I am not certain. the narrator is Alain de Botton
hristov 7y ago
There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.
codeulike 7y ago
When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by children.
- inetknght 7y ago
  That actually sounds like a pretty damn awesome suggestion.
- asdff 7y ago
  Print some out and put them up on top!
return1 7y ago
Ironically, advertising your position against advertising is also a form of advertising. I dont think it's right to view advertising as inherently unethical. Communication and signaling are parts of human nature
- FabHK 7y ago
  Rape and murder are parts of human nature, too. Still inherently unethical.
  - return1 7y ago
    you think communicating with you is unethical?
    - FabHK 7y ago
      I'm objecting to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, good (the "appeal to nature" fallacy).
      - return1 7y ago
        "not inherently evil" != "good"
        FabHK 7y ago
        I'm objecting furthermore to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, not inherently evil.
jasonhansel 7y ago
I really want a study to show what percentage of online ads are downright deceptive (or at least highly misleading). I suspect it's well over 60-70%.
noir_lord 7y ago
One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts. I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web. So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work). I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  The perfect VR app would be a visual ad blocker. IEMs have taken care of my ears (at least until iTunes or audible have ads).
  - asdff 7y ago
    Plenty of people are probably chomping at the bit to get AR ads rolling . I can't wait for the youtube ads to pause and wait for my eyes to re center on them before they continue.
okr 7y ago
I remember developing an App. And then we have talked about, how can we be seen. And then all my grudges on advertising disappeared. Thank god, that it exists.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
  Probably your app is not that special then. You know: build it, and they’ll come.* * If it’s worth it.
  - okr 7y ago
    Maybe. Or the market is big.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    Definitely not. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730.
50656E6973 7y ago
Big Advertising is a root cause not only for mass mental dissatisfaction, but also mass health epidemics (i.e. obesity in the US), and ecological destruction/climate change.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Advertising is a cancer on our society. Every time you see an ad, make an effort to to make that impression net-negative ROI. Tweet about how the brand causes horrible health problems, makes customers look like idiots, has disgusting business practices etc. Who care's if it's true, most ads (or tweets for that matter) are not either!
Nursie 7y ago
I think there's (at least) another factor not investigated here - advertising as a stress inducing, unnecessary noise in life. People are trying to bombard you, through every possible avenue, with advertising. They want your eyes and your mind and they won't waste a second or a flat surface when trying to get at them. I find it abusive and exhausting.
xfitm3 7y ago
Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.
- bediger4000 7y ago
  That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    Youtube proves otherwise.
40acres 7y ago
I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung here. "Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."
FabHK 7y ago
The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value. It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.) [1] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-economy-26428.html https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-econom...
- clairity 7y ago
  i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff). but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it. the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products). in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.
amelius 7y ago
I suspect the root of the problem is with the way we view our economy. Instead of measuring happiness we use e.g. GDP as a metric, but I wouldn't be surprised if a high GDP correlates with and causes unhappiness and on top of that it certainly also negatively impacts the environment. Also, capitalism/the free market seems like a very unfair system (no need to provide examples I hope), and unfairness is also a known cause of unhappiness. But meanwhile, instead of addressing these problems, our brightest minds are trying to make people click more ads ...
- tim333 7y ago
  Well there are some people trying to measure happiness now eg https://worldhappiness.report/ https://worldhappiness.report/ and there seems a trend in that direction, may it continue.
mlinksva 7y ago
I don't see a link or reference to it, but I guess this is a slightly condensed version of https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019Easte... Tax ads! Added: actually it's in the reference list as: > Michel C, M Sovinsky, E Proto, A J Oswald (forthcoming), "Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One Million Europeans", to be published in 2019 in a volume in honor of Richard Easterlin.
makecheck 7y ago
Imagine having a person constantly walking too-close next to you, picking just the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before every little thing you try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for everything! It isn’t exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for pretty much everyone.
cfarm 7y ago
It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this finding still hold true?
l33tbro 7y ago
I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues. If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.
phkahler 7y ago
"They Live" should be classic shown in every 5th grade classroom.
clevep 7y ago
This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper. That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well. There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead. Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider. That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  > What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. There’s a reason services refuse to offer paid plans: people would realize how much the functionality of these services are destroyed in service of showing ads—you can see a tiny fraction of this reaction with the hulu anecdote. It’s also at the core of our “screen addiction”: imagine the savings in mental health care alone if ads disappeared....
  - clevep 7y ago
    Perhaps there would be a massive public health benefit! I could legitimately see that. We just need to properly weigh all of the negative outcomes alongside the positive ones when discussing a change, otherwise it's an exercise in mental masturbation. And on your first point, I don't think most ad driven services refuse to offer paid plans because they are afraid to show their products without ads. Most would diversify their revenue stream if given a reasonable opportunity.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
  this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service. in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base. In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising. while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.
User23 7y ago
Advertising is inherently predatory. I'm well aware of the arguments like "we're providing customers with useful information about things they might like to buy," but that's a lie. It's using propaganda and persuasion techniques that were discovered in the early 20th century and have been increasingly perfected. And that's just the first order effect. The higher order effects of advertising are even more pernicious. Advertising has destroyed far more lives than guns ever have. That's not hyperbole, the opioid epidemic is the result of predatory advertising and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma.
walrus01 7y ago
I wish that there were some easy way to integrate the general philosophical concept of ublock origin into the rest of my life, outside a web browser.
lars512 7y ago
If there's big negative externalities to advertising, wouldn't you ideally tax it and use the funds for initiatives to improve subjective well-being?
andrei_says_ 7y ago
Why would people buy anything if they are content? Combine this with the need for constant growth encoded in management incentives and the push to remove content from everyone is pretty powerful.
deepakkarki 7y ago
Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph his father)
  - anewhnaccount2 7y ago
    Wow. And I suppose they managed to eroticise Netflix itself via "Netflix and chill". Pretty brazen stuff when you think about it.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Netflix content mostly feels empty and shallow, so it seems to not be working correctly. Or maybe they were aiming for this cheap TV ambiance. Or it is working perfectly, since I have a subscription (for now).
- analog31 7y ago
bcherny 7y ago
I read over the page twice, and didn’t see an actual study linked. Does someone have a link to the PDF? And was this actually published in a peer reviewed journal?
ehmish 7y ago
I've wondered if the reason governments haven't passed legislation taxing or otherwise outlawing advertising is that they rely on advertising companies to get elected (election advertising)
hi41 7y ago
Our economy is dependent on advertising so that revenue increases every quarter. Any curtailing of advertising would also have a impact on revenue and then result in job loses. We need to arrive at solutions that is able to reduce such impact on individuals and families.
wow425 7y ago
Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue. Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don’t smoke

581 points by howard941 7y ago

bigbadgoose 7y ago

"Advertising exists to make you feel bad about yourself, then inserts product as solution"

chronogram 7y ago

This URL was blocked by a content blocker. Hm! https://outline.com/KrV9Pw https://outline.com/KrV9Pw

cm2012 7y ago

Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc. It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Uneasy-Persuasion-Dubious-American/dp/0465000800&ved=2ahUKEwihqqSaj7_iAhXyRd8KHY3YCIYQFjAAegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw0KfSud7yAwUmzwvRqc9Jye https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

jacquesm 7y ago
So, halving it would make people 3% more happy. I say halve it 30 times in a row then. These silly stats make no sense at all.
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  That doesn't follow.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
    - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
      Not really, though -- it was empirical, and the fact that an estimate of the first halving does X doesn't imply that further halving will have the same effect, so a reductio doesn't work here.
- dTal 7y ago
  Percentages don't work that way. Don't blame the stats for your own misunderstanding.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Yes, that was sort of the point.
    - dTal 7y ago
      Sorry.
kazinator 7y ago
The spending on advertizing likely has diminishing returns. The marginal decrease in satisfaction that would come from doubling the spending is possibly smaller than the baseline decrease caused by the initial expenditure.
- cm2012 7y ago
  There's nothing in their data to support this, and if the effect was there they would have seen it (since they have yearly happiness data). They describe a linear correlation.
  - macleginn 7y ago
    They describe a linear correlation because they fitted linear correlation. All kinds of interesting effects could be hidden in the residuals, but they don't show them.
anoncake 7y ago
Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible if there is no trade-off.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did, there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow because of ads.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness. Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist. The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expand but advertising isn't free either. In any case, an independent press is much more suitable to actually inform people than the ad industry which at best informs people by accident while trying to convince people to buy $PRODUCT. Ads are like military: It's mostly necessary because it exists.
    - cm2012 7y ago
      Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it. There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better. How do you get plumbers to hear about your product? 1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale. 2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable. 3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential. 4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts. See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them. This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
JohnFen 7y ago
> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. Not to those 3%, and since advertising provides very little benefit to anyone who isn't in the ad business, I would be happy to that 3%.
- cm2012 7y ago
  I don't think that correlation is accurate. But even if it is, there is a trade-off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034507
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I understand. I'm not saying that I accept that the correlation is accurate. I'm just saying that if it is, the tradeoff to stop making 3% of people less happy is totally worthwhile. But of course, still in the hypothetical, it wouldn't be necessary for ads to disappear to accomplish this. All that would be necessary is for advertising to adhere to the ideals the ad industry itself says it holds: rather than manipulating people, ads could just inform people what the product is, what it does, and what its strengths (and, as long as I'm dreaming, weaknesses) are. But the vast majority of ads do none of that. Instead, they engage in psychological manipulation.
    - cm2012 7y ago
      I'd take issue with that. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Gap&view_all_page_id=14856729724 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... and look up some random brands you've heard of. The vast majority of ads are on the level. The ones that aren't are when the product itself is a scam most of the time.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        I don't do Facebook, and have no clue what FB ads look like. I'm talking about advertising generally, online and off. I very rarely see ads that are like that.
FabHK 7y ago
> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. You are wrong. The paper goes on to say, in the very next sentence, that 3% is "approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed", thus (while smaller), it's the same order of magnitude. Presumably you do not consider the impact of marriage or unemployment "basically negligible"? > It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. That may be as it may, but that is not what the paper is talking about.
- cm2012 7y ago
  I saw that. I still think it's small. 3% is 3%, even if their measure shows marriage being 6%. Changing peoples minds about their self worth is still changing their mind.
scottrogowski 7y ago
This. I am surprised to see hacker news jump on this as proof that advertising causes reduced happiness when this article can only conclude that they are correlated. The common statistical maxim is that correlation does not imply causation. A far more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that greater development is associated with both increased advertising and a reduction in happiness. And yes, the summary does state that they were able to show that it is uncorrelated with GDP but what's telling is that the prominent bar graph is "uncorrected". So, after correcting, the advertising effect may be so minor that they chose not to graph it at all. I do my best to limit advertising in my own life because I myself believe that I am a happier person without it. This study, however, is misleading and doesn't give us evidence of much of anything.
countavdhesh 7y ago
GDP measures activity involving money, but makes no distinction between useful, useless and harmful activity. the cost of cleaning up pollution is added to the GDP.

jandrese 7y ago

Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness. You're basically being negged by advertisers.

maxxxxx 7y ago
I guess that’s the current form of advertising. It tries to create demand where there has been none before. You could also imagine advertising that tries to address your actual needs. Unfortunately that probably would make a much smaller market.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Current? A German philosopher wrote in 1844: > every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    I was thinking about people Edward Bernays who took things to the next level.
  - smogcutter 7y ago
    > A German philosopher Subtle, I like it.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
rimliu 7y ago
I would not say it works that way for me. I see most advertising as a visual noice and/or annoying interruption. I think majority of the time I am not even aware what is being advertised.

throwayEngineer 7y ago

I can't help but imagine there are worse companies than others for this. Between Apple and Samsung, these are companies that advertise Average products but charge luxury pricing. I find this incredibly unethical. But my non Engineering counterparts believe that Sales are necessary.

plg 7y ago

my kids only watch netflix and shows/movies we buy on iTunes so basically they see virtually no ads, SO unlike my experience growing up watching network TV where every 12 minutes there was a series of 5 or 6 30-second ads

burntoutcase 7y ago
They might not see explicit advertisements, but they're getting exposed to a metric assload of product placement.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative? If I open someone's fridge, I don't see a bunch of stuff with the labels conveniently turned backwards or removed, I see Coca-Cola and Sunny-D and Hellman's Mayo and Heinz ketchup. If I walk through a college classroom I don't see a bunch of laptops with featureless lids, I see Apple logos and Dell logos and HP logos. If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos. Is it really detracting from a movie to have a bottle of Pepsi sitting on the table at dinner while they're eating their Pizza Hut pizza? Isn't that how the real world actually exists? Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - burntoutcase 7y ago
    > Honest question and I don't have super strong opinions on the subject, but is product placement really that big of a negative? If a product placement can't be justified on plot or characterization grounds, then I find it an obnoxious distraction and a sign of spinelessness on the part of the director and editors. > If I'm driving down the road, I don't see a bunch of de-badged cars, I see Chevy logos and Ford logos and VW logos. Do it really matter what kind of car James Bond drives? Not really. All that matters is that it's something only rich pigs can afford and was customized by Q with all kinds of non-standard and outrageously illegal features, like artfully concealed machine guns. > Basically: aren't we all exposed to a metric assload of product placement all day anyway? If I want reality, I know where to find it. If I go to the movies, it's to get a reprieve from reality. I'm paying good money for the convenience of a ready-made waking dream, and the presence of gratuitous product placement cheapens the fantasy. If product placement doesn't bother you, that's fine. It annoys the fuck out of me, so I prefer to read novels or play video games when I want to relax. (Besides, the prevalence of CG makes most mass-market movies nothing but defective video games anyway. Who needs MCU when you can watch a let's play of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Libertines?)

bayouborne 7y ago

"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed." Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect on life satisfaction?

djtriptych 7y ago
I think they say "absolute size" to mean absolute value. e.g. 3% drop is half the absolute size of a 6% rise.
- bayouborne 7y ago
  ah, thank you.
dan-robertson 7y ago
Higher, assuming that it came from this reference at the bottom of the article: https://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11176 https://www.pnas.org/content/100/19/11176
theonlyklas 7y ago
Examining 87 countries (N = 292,525) covering a period of 29 years, marriage will increase life satisfaction. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280308599_The_Life_Satisfaction_Advantage_of_Being_Married_and_Gender_Specialization https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280308599_The_Life_...

burntoutcase 7y ago

I'm not surprised. Advertising is nothing but private-sector psyops.

Toine 7y ago

Mimetic theory explains why

return1 7y ago

> Germany after 1989, Convenient. I think they should include DDR which had no advertising at all.

jacquesm 7y ago
That is not correct. Over the highways there were all kinds of signs back in the day, mostly insurance.

brentm 7y ago

Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater dissatisfaction with lack of income?

bediger4000 7y ago
I've asked academic economists about this, albeit indirectly. I've asked if any studies of the effect of advertising have ever been made, if they've been replicated, etc etc. I tried to vary phrasing, and use the jargon. I got a lot of "I don't know" and variants. It seems difficult to google up references, because the key words are common words.
oregontechninja 7y ago
The jobs are abstract time waisters anyhow. Let me surf and hike my days away while the machines toil in the fields.
netsharc 7y ago
It seems like it's the gospel of capitalism (or neo-liberalism?) that has fooled of us that we need more money to be more happy. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-... As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a good group of friends improves your health so much as you grow older. Admiteddly we were sitting in a restaurant, where the food and drink cost money.
- funkymike 7y ago
  Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.
FabHK 7y ago

enlyth 7y ago

To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit. We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.

locknumber110 7y ago
As a wise philosopher once said regarding advertising, "Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little."
maerF0x0 7y ago
Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop. I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
- worble 7y ago
  You realise the reason why it's so effective is that it's psychological manipulation right? Telling people to just "stop rewarding" it is almost the same as telling abused partners to "just leave the relationship"; it's not that simple, and trying to reduce it as such is at best unhelpful, and at worst actively harmful.
- xg15 7y ago
  But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works. You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
- 7y ago

nullandvoid 7y ago

I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused. Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about

deogeo 7y ago
> necessary evil Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.
- chc 7y ago
  How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?
  - deogeo 7y ago
    How many are necessary, or even desirable, and not a net drain on human happiness by optimizing for endless engagement? I don't like the direction in which the ad-supported model is pushing content. Internet pre-advertising had plenty of useful and interesting sites. And Wikipedia is ad-free as well. And without the competition of zero-cost ad-supported commercial sites, other business models would rise to take their place.
    - drstewart 7y ago
      And what makes you think these other business models will have only net positive contributions on human happiness?
      - deogeo 7y ago
        They probably won't - but it dispels the myth that advertising is necessary.
  - 7y ago

seasoup 7y ago

I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.

eswat 7y ago
It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.
- erentz 7y ago
  While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way. We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.
  - mayniac 7y ago
    I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything. One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

oregontechninja 7y ago

I view any and all non-obiective advertising as literally evil. There is absolutely no good reason for advertising to exist it's current state. Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? I've heard some governments outlaw advertising to children.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago
well there's lots. in my country (Aus), there's regulations on tobacco, alcohol, gambling: each of varied levels of deliberate and actual effectiveness. A lot of places limit billboards. And then there's even cultural aspects: Melbourne culture says that the level of a places' 'coolness' is inversely related to its amount of external signage...
bediger4000 7y ago
I could not agree more. I have gone out of my way to teach my children that advertising is lies. Literally. That's what I told them, and demonstrated to them. I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript in browsers I control, plus my own DNS-based advertising domain blocklist.
- inetknght 7y ago
  If only lies were illegal
FabHK 7y ago
> Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? Well, in North Korea the only billboards I saw were of Kim Il-Song and Kim Jong-Il. The two restaurants in the hotel for foreigners on the island in the middle of Pyongyang were imaginatively called "Restaurant 1" and "Restaurant 2". So, not too much marketing there. I do hope that there is some more sensible middle ground.
asdff 7y ago
Sao Paulo banned advertising, removing 15k billboards in the process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

perfunctory 7y ago

What can I say "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)

kaybe 7y ago
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.) If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
- fourthark 7y ago
  What's a war without killing people?
  - kaybe 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor Even though that was meant tongue in cheek, I fear there will be innumerable deaths before this is over. We can discuss who killed them then. edit: A war-economy-level effort is needed, with the same dedication of all participants, so there is another similar line of though.
    - fwn 7y ago
      Here's another take on the war metaphor in international relations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(international_relations) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(internationa... > an extreme version of politicization that enables extraordinary means to be used in the name of security

adamwong246 7y ago

Real luxury is being able to pay for the content you want, to watch how and when you want, without subsidizing the experience with attention-sucking ads. I refuse to hook up our cable box for this reason.

deogeo 7y ago

Advertising is necessary to stave off the greatest threat against Western civilization: https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsizerender.jpg https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsi...

RickJWagner 7y ago

This has been a problem since Mick Jagger sang about it, last century. https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-lyrics https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfac...

lwb 7y ago

The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch. I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it! It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games). I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.

JohnFen 7y ago
> The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television Yes, I agree with this. I gave up on television about 20 years ago, and it was the ads that pushed me that way. Every so often I'll see a TV program, and it's still intolerable -- things are so much worse than they were 20 years ago.
contingencies 7y ago
Two more media stories from the last 18 hours. I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired". This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car. I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
mrep 7y ago
> I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. What??? You can pay for ad-free hulu! Why are you complaining?

anoncake 7y ago

> Easterlin (1974) found early evidence suggesting that society does not become happier as it grows richer. This is why equality is important. A society becoming less equal is a problem, even if everyone gets richer.

sesteel 7y ago

I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.

quickthrower2 7y ago
It's good advice, but I find it ironic. Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products. To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over. It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.
- cm2012 7y ago
  The content of targeted advertising is usually way less spammy than untarged advertising. More or less the only people who can make money on completely blind online ads are scammers (whiten your teeth! etc)
- MichaelDickens 7y ago
  An index fund invests in lots of companies. The ones that are driven by ad revenue only make up a fairly small percent of the fund.

vertline3 7y ago

There is a documentary from BBC about the history of philosophy of happiness that was on YouTube, in the documentary it is mentioned that the Greek Philosphers had discussed advertising as lowering our happiness in order to replace the hole with their product. I think it was epicurus but I am not certain. the narrator is Alain de Botton

hristov 7y ago

There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.

codeulike 7y ago

When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by children.

inetknght 7y ago
That actually sounds like a pretty damn awesome suggestion.
asdff 7y ago
Print some out and put them up on top!

return1 7y ago

Ironically, advertising your position against advertising is also a form of advertising. I dont think it's right to view advertising as inherently unethical. Communication and signaling are parts of human nature

FabHK 7y ago
Rape and murder are parts of human nature, too. Still inherently unethical.
- return1 7y ago
  you think communicating with you is unethical?
  - FabHK 7y ago
    I'm objecting to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, good (the "appeal to nature" fallacy).
    - return1 7y ago
      "not inherently evil" != "good"
      - FabHK 7y ago
        I'm objecting furthermore to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, not inherently evil.

jasonhansel 7y ago

I really want a study to show what percentage of online ads are downright deceptive (or at least highly misleading). I suspect it's well over 60-70%.

noir_lord 7y ago

One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts. I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web. So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work). I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.

hindsightbias 7y ago
The perfect VR app would be a visual ad blocker. IEMs have taken care of my ears (at least until iTunes or audible have ads).
- asdff 7y ago
  Plenty of people are probably chomping at the bit to get AR ads rolling . I can't wait for the youtube ads to pause and wait for my eyes to re center on them before they continue.

okr 7y ago

I remember developing an App. And then we have talked about, how can we be seen. And then all my grudges on advertising disappeared. Thank god, that it exists.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
Probably your app is not that special then. You know: build it, and they’ll come.* * If it’s worth it.
- okr 7y ago
  Maybe. Or the market is big.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Definitely not. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730.

50656E6973 7y ago

Big Advertising is a root cause not only for mass mental dissatisfaction, but also mass health epidemics (i.e. obesity in the US), and ecological destruction/climate change.

cwkoss 7y ago
Advertising is a cancer on our society. Every time you see an ad, make an effort to to make that impression net-negative ROI. Tweet about how the brand causes horrible health problems, makes customers look like idiots, has disgusting business practices etc. Who care's if it's true, most ads (or tweets for that matter) are not either!

Nursie 7y ago

I think there's (at least) another factor not investigated here - advertising as a stress inducing, unnecessary noise in life. People are trying to bombard you, through every possible avenue, with advertising. They want your eyes and your mind and they won't waste a second or a flat surface when trying to get at them. I find it abusive and exhausting.

xfitm3 7y ago

Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.

bediger4000 7y ago
That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  Youtube proves otherwise.

40acres 7y ago

I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung here. "Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."

FabHK 7y ago

The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value. It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.) [1] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-economy-26428.html https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-econom...

clairity 7y ago
i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff). but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it. the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products). in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.

amelius 7y ago

I suspect the root of the problem is with the way we view our economy. Instead of measuring happiness we use e.g. GDP as a metric, but I wouldn't be surprised if a high GDP correlates with and causes unhappiness and on top of that it certainly also negatively impacts the environment. Also, capitalism/the free market seems like a very unfair system (no need to provide examples I hope), and unfairness is also a known cause of unhappiness. But meanwhile, instead of addressing these problems, our brightest minds are trying to make people click more ads ...

tim333 7y ago
Well there are some people trying to measure happiness now eg https://worldhappiness.report/ https://worldhappiness.report/ and there seems a trend in that direction, may it continue.

mlinksva 7y ago

I don't see a link or reference to it, but I guess this is a slightly condensed version of https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019Easte... Tax ads! Added: actually it's in the reference list as: > Michel C, M Sovinsky, E Proto, A J Oswald (forthcoming), "Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One Million Europeans", to be published in 2019 in a volume in honor of Richard Easterlin.

makecheck 7y ago

Imagine having a person constantly walking too-close next to you, picking just the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before every little thing you try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for everything! It isn’t exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for pretty much everyone.

cfarm 7y ago

It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this finding still hold true?

l33tbro 7y ago

I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues. If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.

phkahler 7y ago

"They Live" should be classic shown in every 5th grade classroom.

clevep 7y ago

This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper. That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well. There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead. Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider. That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. There’s a reason services refuse to offer paid plans: people would realize how much the functionality of these services are destroyed in service of showing ads—you can see a tiny fraction of this reaction with the hulu anecdote. It’s also at the core of our “screen addiction”: imagine the savings in mental health care alone if ads disappeared....
- clevep 7y ago
  Perhaps there would be a massive public health benefit! I could legitimately see that. We just need to properly weigh all of the negative outcomes alongside the positive ones when discussing a change, otherwise it's an exercise in mental masturbation. And on your first point, I don't think most ad driven services refuse to offer paid plans because they are afraid to show their products without ads. Most would diversify their revenue stream if given a reasonable opportunity.
ACow_Adonis 7y ago
this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service. in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base. In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising. while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.

User23 7y ago

Advertising is inherently predatory. I'm well aware of the arguments like "we're providing customers with useful information about things they might like to buy," but that's a lie. It's using propaganda and persuasion techniques that were discovered in the early 20th century and have been increasingly perfected. And that's just the first order effect. The higher order effects of advertising are even more pernicious. Advertising has destroyed far more lives than guns ever have. That's not hyperbole, the opioid epidemic is the result of predatory advertising and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma.

walrus01 7y ago

I wish that there were some easy way to integrate the general philosophical concept of ublock origin into the rest of my life, outside a web browser.

lars512 7y ago

If there's big negative externalities to advertising, wouldn't you ideally tax it and use the funds for initiatives to improve subjective well-being?

andrei_says_ 7y ago

Why would people buy anything if they are content? Combine this with the need for constant growth encoded in management incentives and the push to remove content from everyone is pretty powerful.

deepakkarki 7y ago

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."

HNLurker2 7y ago
Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph his father)
- anewhnaccount2 7y ago
  Wow. And I suppose they managed to eroticise Netflix itself via "Netflix and chill". Pretty brazen stuff when you think about it.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Netflix content mostly feels empty and shallow, so it seems to not be working correctly. Or maybe they were aiming for this cheap TV ambiance. Or it is working perfectly, since I have a subscription (for now).
analog31 7y ago

bcherny 7y ago

I read over the page twice, and didn’t see an actual study linked. Does someone have a link to the PDF? And was this actually published in a peer reviewed journal?

ehmish 7y ago

I've wondered if the reason governments haven't passed legislation taxing or otherwise outlawing advertising is that they rely on advertising companies to get elected (election advertising)

hi41 7y ago

Our economy is dependent on advertising so that revenue increases every quarter. Any curtailing of advertising would also have a impact on revenue and then result in job loses. We need to arrive at solutions that is able to reduce such impact on individuals and families.

wow425 7y ago

Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue. Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don’t smoke