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Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate. 3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor. However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing. I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire. Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with. We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.

rkallos 7y ago
The only thing I know of that somewhat resembles what you describe is https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/
iamnothere 7y ago
> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was. The whole site is basically a giant ad/referral scheme, but as long as you're aware of that then it's not bad as a starting point for research. I used to just do a search on Amazon and start from there. Now it's 1 or 2 big brands followed by 20 pages of the same identical Chinese clone product with names like "Wootoo" and "Yungoo".
- fermienrico 7y ago
  Agree, you can't trust reviews anymore. 10 years ago I would go on Amazon and I can trust a 5 star product. Now a days, any product is between 4 and 5 stars. The dynamic range literally is 4.0, 4.5, 5.0. Look at Japanese restaurant review site called Tabelog. Anything above 3 is good. 3.5 is excelltent. 4.0 is rare, probably expensive. 4.5 is michelin star category, mostly sushi places. I've never seen a 5.0 rated restaurant on Tabelog.
- leonardmh 7y ago
  Yep it has been incredibly difficult to buy anything of quality from Amazon for the past 2-3 years at least. I will likely cancel my Prime membership this year, it’s just no longer worth it.
xixixao 7y ago
One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print). > Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with. Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.
- spectramax 7y ago
  "What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend. In modern society, we have INSANE...I mean insane amount of deceit, psychological tricks, store smells, layout optimization, there is a huge industry built around deceiving people and not playing by level rules. Instead of focusing on quality, businesses are spending money on marketing. > Advertisement is literally as old as civilization. or rather evolved into a monstrous industry worth billions of dollars if not trillion+ dollars. You didn't have Aztec farmers shot by an arrow every 5 mins that had a note attached to it "BUY THIS NEW FUCKING PLOUGH" in ancient times.
  - xixixao 7y ago
    You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - bad-joke 7y ago
      Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail. That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work. If you're worried about the well-being of these people or believe their service is a public good that should exist regardless of profitability on the market, you should allocate public funding for them.
maxxxxx 7y ago
It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think that’s what you are talking about. Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore. I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools. It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.
- j-c-hewitt 7y ago
  They are still context sensitive, just the retargeting guy is bidding higher so that is what is showing.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    I don’t know much about ads but that’s something I have noticed. When online ads started they are actually sometimes useful to me because of context. Now they are totally useless to me. They are just noise.
- yorwba 7y ago
  HN does have a section for job ads [1], which are exempt from the usual voting mechanism and don't stay on the front page for long. I think that's a good compromise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  On the plus side, this means that a website operator of a low-profit topic can still earn a living. When I was blogging a decade ago I would write almost exclusively about finance because it paid the best. With this system, I could write about other topics and still capture some of that finance-context revenue.
StreamBright 7y ago
Could not agree more. The pull approach of ad would be great. - much less CO2 production - much less chance of malware / virus spreading - much higher accuracy - the web would be usable again without ad filters
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  How would this reduce CO2 production?
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    Going to takes some stabs into the dark: Less people pulling ads = less demand on ad servers = less energy consumption? Less people pulling ads = less people consuming crappy products = less products being manufactured in poluty factories?
javery 7y ago
This is what VRM is supposed to be. https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
veridies 7y ago
Oddly enough, PETA’s website does a great job with this. They have a whole section of their site that’s just paid listings of vegan products. It’s actually fun to browse; it feels like you’re in a shop and seeing new things you hadn’t considered (like vegan travel packages or a cork briefcase). I felt very strange that I was enjoying looking at ads.
jrockway 7y ago
> 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. To be a devil's advocate, doesn't that mean that advertisers should get MORE of your personal data, so they know every product you own and won't suggest you buy something you already have? Whenever you see a bad ad, it means whatever privacy precautions you're taking are working. The advertiser would love to not spend money advertising their thingie to someone that already has it. But you didn't let them. That sounds like a success to me.
- lancesells 7y ago
  That's kind of true but that's only because adtech is siloed. Let's say you're identified by Facebook as having an interest in the Sony headphones. User clicks an ad and heads over to Amazon to purchase. The purchase is made and Amazon knows the conversion happened but Facebook does not. Facebook does purchase credit card usage information but it's not nearly as perfect as having a conversion pixel on the site. Future laws should really focus on cross-site / app tracking and the legality of purchasing third-party data.
- singron 7y ago
  A big part of the article is about how all the middle men want to spend more money, not less. For all the "tech" in AdTech, it's surprising how much gets canceled because it increased efficiency and made revenue go down. Even efforts to align incentives end to end like CPA (cost per action/conversion) don't do well for the same reasons.
stevesearer 7y ago
My site Office Snapshots (https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com) might be of interest to you. We publish office design projects and the advertising is based on the content which usually ends up being office furniture, products, and services. We also sell and host our own advertising to make sure they are high quality and that they load quickly. Your digital trade show note is interesting too as we work with furniture manufacturers who can have a digital presence on the site to highlight their products. Here is a popular phone booth company's page for reference: https://officesnapshots.com/brands/framery/ https://officesnapshots.com/brands/framery/
crooked-v 7y ago
> I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. On that note: https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529
saketuec 7y ago
> "However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it..." Isn't this similar to what Amazon Marketplace does? Of course, they do allow advertisers to promote their stuff, but apart from a top few sponsored content, rest all are ranked by reviews (or so they say).
- thirdsun 7y ago
  Funnily enough this kind of advertising has an adverse effect on me: Showcasing your product as sponsored content at the top of the search results at Amazon, as well as Google or the App Store, suggests that this is a subpar product that needs to pay to be relevant. I’m not sure how common this attitude is, but by now I subconsciously ignore these ads. Of course there are also brands and products I know and like, which appear in these ads, but I see them as an exception, as a shining pearl in a sea of mediocrity, and continue to regard sponsored content as a strong indicator for lacking quality.
danmg 7y ago
Wasn't this the idea behind Froogle?
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
There's a DFW area startup I once interviewed for called iuzeit (not affiliated) that is trying to solve some of the problems of consumer items and reviews. I am unaware of whether they could solve your pressure cooker conundrum, but I know they intend to increase the breadth of the type of items they cover.
dillonmckay 7y ago
It sounds like you are describing a shopping mall to me.
la_barba 7y ago
Like it or not, there is a large swath of people (engineers, designers, workers, etc, etc) whose jobs would simply go away if masses of people didn't buy useless stuff they didn't want or need and couldn't afford. We all work for someone, and we all feed this system in some way or another. The only way to escape this is to go off the grid completely. And so, I think that advertising is not the root cause, its consumerism, which has been anointed as this engine that drives positive economic growth under capitalism. And like any other macroeconomic theory it falls in this contradicting category of 'thats bullshit' and 'that totally makes sense'. "Studies show X" whoop-de-doo. Advertising simply enables consumerism, and the people who you're calling dickheads actually enable a TON of software developers to even have jobs. Where is all the tech we're building being used? To build websites to sell stuff. To build databases to store all this info, to build entertainment platforms to sell you more stuff, to build logistic systems to organize this useless selling of stuff, etc, etc. Unless you're somehow connected with selling things or otherwise generating economic activity, why would anyone pay you to build it?
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  I'm not sure that line of argument holds up terribly well; people working in an industry I consider immoral aren't really my primary concern. How would you respond to an analogous argument like "landmines are made by people in factories - if we stopped making landmines, all those poor people would lose their jobs, is that what you want?" (side note, the answer to that hypothetical is also 'yes').
  - la_barba 7y ago
    I am talking about convincing a consumer to buy something like a headphone or a smartphone or a laptop that they don't need... not about selling weapons to kill people. Personally, I have never seen an online ad for a landmine. Edit: Sorta off topic, but our little conversation reminded me of a quote from Lord Of War. >Yuri Orlov : I don't want people dead, Agent Valentine. I don't put a gun to anybody's head and make them shoot. But shooting is better for business. But, I prefer people to fire my guns and miss. Just as long as they are firing. Can I go now?

rkallos 7y ago

The only thing I know of that somewhat resembles what you describe is https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/

iamnothere 7y ago

> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was. The whole site is basically a giant ad/referral scheme, but as long as you're aware of that then it's not bad as a starting point for research. I used to just do a search on Amazon and start from there. Now it's 1 or 2 big brands followed by 20 pages of the same identical Chinese clone product with names like "Wootoo" and "Yungoo".

fermienrico 7y ago
Agree, you can't trust reviews anymore. 10 years ago I would go on Amazon and I can trust a 5 star product. Now a days, any product is between 4 and 5 stars. The dynamic range literally is 4.0, 4.5, 5.0. Look at Japanese restaurant review site called Tabelog. Anything above 3 is good. 3.5 is excelltent. 4.0 is rare, probably expensive. 4.5 is michelin star category, mostly sushi places. I've never seen a 5.0 rated restaurant on Tabelog.
leonardmh 7y ago
Yep it has been incredibly difficult to buy anything of quality from Amazon for the past 2-3 years at least. I will likely cancel my Prime membership this year, it’s just no longer worth it.

xixixao 7y ago

One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print). > Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with. Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.

spectramax 7y ago
"What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend. In modern society, we have INSANE...I mean insane amount of deceit, psychological tricks, store smells, layout optimization, there is a huge industry built around deceiving people and not playing by level rules. Instead of focusing on quality, businesses are spending money on marketing. > Advertisement is literally as old as civilization. or rather evolved into a monstrous industry worth billions of dollars if not trillion+ dollars. You didn't have Aztec farmers shot by an arrow every 5 mins that had a note attached to it "BUY THIS NEW FUCKING PLOUGH" in ancient times.
- xixixao 7y ago
  You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bad-joke 7y ago
    Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail. That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work. If you're worried about the well-being of these people or believe their service is a public good that should exist regardless of profitability on the market, you should allocate public funding for them.

maxxxxx 7y ago

It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think that’s what you are talking about. Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore. I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools. It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.

j-c-hewitt 7y ago
They are still context sensitive, just the retargeting guy is bidding higher so that is what is showing.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I don’t know much about ads but that’s something I have noticed. When online ads started they are actually sometimes useful to me because of context. Now they are totally useless to me. They are just noise.
yorwba 7y ago
HN does have a section for job ads [1], which are exempt from the usual voting mechanism and don't stay on the front page for long. I think that's a good compromise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Scoundreller 7y ago
On the plus side, this means that a website operator of a low-profit topic can still earn a living. When I was blogging a decade ago I would write almost exclusively about finance because it paid the best. With this system, I could write about other topics and still capture some of that finance-context revenue.

StreamBright 7y ago

Could not agree more. The pull approach of ad would be great. - much less CO2 production - much less chance of malware / virus spreading - much higher accuracy - the web would be usable again without ad filters

chipperyman573 7y ago
How would this reduce CO2 production?
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  Going to takes some stabs into the dark: Less people pulling ads = less demand on ad servers = less energy consumption? Less people pulling ads = less people consuming crappy products = less products being manufactured in poluty factories?

javery 7y ago

This is what VRM is supposed to be. https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/

veridies 7y ago

Oddly enough, PETA’s website does a great job with this. They have a whole section of their site that’s just paid listings of vegan products. It’s actually fun to browse; it feels like you’re in a shop and seeing new things you hadn’t considered (like vegan travel packages or a cork briefcase). I felt very strange that I was enjoying looking at ads.

jrockway 7y ago

> 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. To be a devil's advocate, doesn't that mean that advertisers should get MORE of your personal data, so they know every product you own and won't suggest you buy something you already have? Whenever you see a bad ad, it means whatever privacy precautions you're taking are working. The advertiser would love to not spend money advertising their thingie to someone that already has it. But you didn't let them. That sounds like a success to me.

lancesells 7y ago
That's kind of true but that's only because adtech is siloed. Let's say you're identified by Facebook as having an interest in the Sony headphones. User clicks an ad and heads over to Amazon to purchase. The purchase is made and Amazon knows the conversion happened but Facebook does not. Facebook does purchase credit card usage information but it's not nearly as perfect as having a conversion pixel on the site. Future laws should really focus on cross-site / app tracking and the legality of purchasing third-party data.
singron 7y ago
A big part of the article is about how all the middle men want to spend more money, not less. For all the "tech" in AdTech, it's surprising how much gets canceled because it increased efficiency and made revenue go down. Even efforts to align incentives end to end like CPA (cost per action/conversion) don't do well for the same reasons.

stevesearer 7y ago

My site Office Snapshots (https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com) might be of interest to you. We publish office design projects and the advertising is based on the content which usually ends up being office furniture, products, and services. We also sell and host our own advertising to make sure they are high quality and that they load quickly. Your digital trade show note is interesting too as we work with furniture manufacturers who can have a digital presence on the site to highlight their products. Here is a popular phone booth company's page for reference: https://officesnapshots.com/brands/framery/ https://officesnapshots.com/brands/framery/

crooked-v 7y ago

> I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. On that note: https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529

saketuec 7y ago

> "However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it..." Isn't this similar to what Amazon Marketplace does? Of course, they do allow advertisers to promote their stuff, but apart from a top few sponsored content, rest all are ranked by reviews (or so they say).

thirdsun 7y ago
Funnily enough this kind of advertising has an adverse effect on me: Showcasing your product as sponsored content at the top of the search results at Amazon, as well as Google or the App Store, suggests that this is a subpar product that needs to pay to be relevant. I’m not sure how common this attitude is, but by now I subconsciously ignore these ads. Of course there are also brands and products I know and like, which appear in these ads, but I see them as an exception, as a shining pearl in a sea of mediocrity, and continue to regard sponsored content as a strong indicator for lacking quality.

danmg 7y ago

Wasn't this the idea behind Froogle?

MisterBastahrd 7y ago

There's a DFW area startup I once interviewed for called iuzeit (not affiliated) that is trying to solve some of the problems of consumer items and reviews. I am unaware of whether they could solve your pressure cooker conundrum, but I know they intend to increase the breadth of the type of items they cover.

dillonmckay 7y ago

It sounds like you are describing a shopping mall to me.

la_barba 7y ago

Like it or not, there is a large swath of people (engineers, designers, workers, etc, etc) whose jobs would simply go away if masses of people didn't buy useless stuff they didn't want or need and couldn't afford. We all work for someone, and we all feed this system in some way or another. The only way to escape this is to go off the grid completely. And so, I think that advertising is not the root cause, its consumerism, which has been anointed as this engine that drives positive economic growth under capitalism. And like any other macroeconomic theory it falls in this contradicting category of 'thats bullshit' and 'that totally makes sense'. "Studies show X" whoop-de-doo. Advertising simply enables consumerism, and the people who you're calling dickheads actually enable a TON of software developers to even have jobs. Where is all the tech we're building being used? To build websites to sell stuff. To build databases to store all this info, to build entertainment platforms to sell you more stuff, to build logistic systems to organize this useless selling of stuff, etc, etc. Unless you're somehow connected with selling things or otherwise generating economic activity, why would anyone pay you to build it?

blacksmith_tb 7y ago
I'm not sure that line of argument holds up terribly well; people working in an industry I consider immoral aren't really my primary concern. How would you respond to an analogous argument like "landmines are made by people in factories - if we stopped making landmines, all those poor people would lose their jobs, is that what you want?" (side note, the answer to that hypothetical is also 'yes').
- la_barba 7y ago
  I am talking about convincing a consumer to buy something like a headphone or a smartphone or a laptop that they don't need... not about selling weapons to kill people. Personally, I have never seen an online ad for a landmine. Edit: Sorta off topic, but our little conversation reminded me of a quote from Lord Of War. >Yuri Orlov : I don't want people dead, Agent Valentine. I don't put a gun to anybody's head and make them shoot. But shooting is better for business. But, I prefer people to fire my guns and miss. Just as long as they are firing. Can I go now?