13 ms·

Advertising may make people miserable, but it still has its uses

77 points by jkuria 7y ago

GlennS 7y ago
There's been talk of a "banker's oath", because behaviour that is a little bit slimy or reckless - but not criminally so, nor perhaps even unambiguously unethical - can hurt a lot of people when your job involves looking after lots of money. I wonder if people working in marketing, advertising and journalism should have to swear an oath in which they promise not to manipulate or deceive people. Lying or deliberately misleading is obviously not criminal in general, but perhaps it should be punishable in certain professional settings? I appreciate that this is very delicate, and needs a bit more thought on how to avoid it becoming a potential tool of government or corporate oppression. Of course, this is pie in the sky. Most people in advertising and marketing seem to believe that what they are doing is fine.
sologoub 7y ago
The research into emotional well-being this article cites interestingly appears to be in favor of highly targeted advertising, as a means of showing only highly relevant offers and not making one feel inadequate by showing offers way out of the price range. That said, I don’t know if such a system, if it was possible to be 100% accurate, would also have unintended consequences of denying people that are not as well off some important deals, such as a lower APR, because they are less profitable overall. Still, this is an interesting concept to ponder - if advertising was as relevant as possible and goods attainable without undue stress, people would likely feel better about themselves.
perfunctory 7y ago
Gotta love that "but" after "make people miserable"
- rukittenme 7y ago
  "Getting vaccinated makes kids miserable but it still has its uses."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 7y ago
    "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Fnoord 7y ago
  You could say the same about blocking ads. It makes some people miserable. The premise of the article: > Ads and other forms of marketing ostensibly serve a straightforward economic role. Firms selling goods and services need to tell consumers about the availability and desirability of their wares, and spend on advertising to do so. By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world. (Had to laugh hard at the last sentence.) Good products don't have to use advertising. Their existence alone, plus worth of mouth (e.g. reviews) assures customers become aware of good deals. Take good Black Friday deals, for example. There's a lot of BS and fake deals around, but if you search well enough there are some true gems hidden within. Also, to me, advertising always meant some kind of deal. Merely mentioning the existence of a product doesn't cut it. It has to be a real deal where I'm saving money on the conventional price. Of course, marketeers hacked their way around that by making the discount price higher and the normal/non-discount price higher (above the actual real normal price). Old trick which is also heavily in use during Black Friday. The conundrum is the more these tricks are used on consumers they will figure them out (eventually) and quit falling for them. So false advertising kills off the advertising market. My argument is that exposure to [such] false advertising killed the advertising market for me, and being the reason why I use adblockers 24/7. > Some firms target impressionable children Which is AFAIK illegal in NL, as it should be. However targeting the parents of children is legal, and... annoying.
- buboard 7y ago
  Dentists make people miserable, but they still have their uses
  - anoncake 7y ago
    That's why people voluntarily visit dentists. They don't voluntarily view ads.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    Pain and misery are not the same.
- neonate 7y ago
  That's the Economist's headline humor.
fromthestart 7y ago
Paywalled, so I don't know how the rest of the article reads, but >By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world. Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or anything of the like, and do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in media. But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting, shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core. I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like I'd be directly harming society in building such technology. In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on TV got one for Christmas.
- goatherders 7y ago
  I disagree with this cynical take. A Dell computer ad may exist to drive sales but that isnt exclusive to informing people of features and benefits of the machine. The purpose of a good ad should be to inform the viewer/listener of how what and why the product offers. Many do exactly that.
  - maxdamantus 7y ago
    If noone advertised their computers, people would still look into the various brands of computers as long as there is a natural demand for them. If you need a computer, you can go to a website or a physical store and have the ability to relatively fairly compare the different brands. Advertising doesn't really help with this. The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year. Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?
ducttape12 7y ago
If I'm in the market for a product, if a company makes a decent product chances are I'll find out about it by reading reviews, etc. I don't need ads for that. Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.
- mankyd 7y ago
  This isn't a complete picture. If you are in the need for a product, you will be more comfortable with a product if it feels familiar. This is true whether that familiarity comes from having used it before, because you've seen others use it before, _or_ if you've simply seen the name a lot before. Brand recognition has impact. You might still go read reviews of the product first, but they still need you to seek it out to do that. That's where advertising comes in.
- delish 7y ago
  One of the standard seemingly-counterintuitive examples of uses of advertising is car ads. Very few people see TV ads for a Mercedes and walk into a dealership and buy one. So why does Mercedes-Benz run TV ads? The standard explanation is, MB's ads are for the end of the month, when you see (1) your car payment and (2) Toyota's ads claiming a car payment 1/3 what you're paying. So the ads are intended to help you avoid post-purchase guilt. Hence their emotional appeal: you're a certain kind of person etc. That keeps you buying MBs on a scale of decades, rather than jump ship to a lower prestige, lower cost brand. The larger point is there are many reasons to run ads, not just to attract leads.
  - chii 7y ago
    This is what i would call 'branding'. It's the same as apple running those "stylistic" ipod and iphone ads - full of happy dancing people using their product.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Source / citation?
  - SerLava 7y ago
rolltiide 7y ago
I actually like Hulu ads, primarily from knowing when it will end. 60 or 90 seconds of ads. It makes it so much more tolerable and I am glad that I find out about things. I'm not sure how much targeting they do, but I expect them too and it feels like great customer attentiveness. Seeing an ad with the same actor as the show I'm currently watching, and its like yes I did want to know about that.
- bulditand 7y ago
  That's great and I'm glad you find joy in this. Me, I spent nights going to a show named "Nuit des Publivores" and loved it. But like every pleasure in life, it needs to be consensual.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/U69lk http://archive.is/U69lk
cm2012 7y ago
I post all the time in HN ad threads that most companies grow very slowly if at all from word of mouth, and need to use ads to grow (beyond a local level). 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. Here's a real life example: I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old. Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3. Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.
- anoncake 7y ago
  If plumbers don't want to hear about your damn app, leave them alone instead of spamming them. You are not entitled to customers. The only valid reason for a business to exist, including yours, is to produce things people want. If no one wants your product, your business should not grow. Useless businesses not growing is a good thing. > Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am. I know that advertising is useful to companies that do it. But I don't care. What matters are not the individual interests of your company but the collective interests of society as a whole.
mindcrime 7y ago
I'm not the biggest fan of advertising in the world, and I make a distinction between "levels of annoyingness" and "levels of usefulness" of ads. But even at their worst, I have a pretty hard time justifying the phrase "makes people miserable" in regards to ads. Unless this article is talking about a kind of ad that I've never encountered. Blipverts[1] maybe? For my money, if I could just get rid of any in-browser ad that starts playing audio without prompting, I'd be mostly OK with the state of ads. Note that, in this context, I'm not including any concerns about ad tracking networks, etc. I'm just talking about the actual ads themselves. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  Back when I started reading HN I saw a comment mentioning that that person always muted TV ads. I started requesting my family members to mute TV ads, and once you start doing it, hearing the occasional 'unblocked' TV ad in the background becomes extremely annoying. It is really no different from someone coming into your house and camping in your living room - their sound volume and jingles are intentionally meant to make you pay attention and distract you.
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    Sure, no argument there. But to me, there is a huge gap between "annoying" and "makes people miserable". Miserable, to me, is the excruciating pain I had for a week after shoulder surgery. Being annoyed by a jingle is barely on the same spectrum in my book.
    - AlexandrB 7y ago
      I think the “miserable” here is in the Buddhist sense of a bottomless pit of desire that leaves your life feeling perpetually unfulfilled. Ads are like a backhoe for making that pit deeper.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Ads are still often: - attention-stealing (not just sound, but animation, flashing, etc) - heavy (many of us can only afford mobile plans with small caps) - misleading (e.g. fake download buttons near the real one) - manipulative (using clickbait and divisive politics to get you to click) - encourage censorship (since there's always the fear that advertisers will pull out if you show controversial stuff) But personally, I could live with non-tracking web ads. Street ads are worse, in my opinion.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Advertising for me measures on 3 orthogonal axes 1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's better, or how it's suited to a particular niche. 2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc. 3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever. Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is kind of harmless but much overdone. Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  There's a fourth, crucially important axis - costly signalling. Spending a ton of money on mass advertising sends a clear and impossible-to-fake message that your company is in it for the long haul. Sony could exclusively buy targeted ads on social media and the metrics would probably say it's a good idea, but their brand would be fundamentally less trustworthy if they stopped sponsoring soccer teams and buying prime-time commercials. That's why you intuitively trust their TVs more than a random brand you've never heard of, even if you don't consciously realise it; Sony have invested a lot more in establishing their brand, so they have a lot more to lose by tarnishing it. It's no guarantee that their TVs are the best, but it's a fairly strong indication that they won't be absolute crap and that the warranty might actually mean something. Prior to the media age, bank branches were invariably grand and expensive buildings. On one level, that's just a waste of money; on a more important level, it's a costly signal of permanence. Would you deposit your life savings with a bank that operated out of a trailer?
  - barrkel 7y ago
    If you've been around on the planet for a while, you'll notice that the signal isn't reliable. Big names go bankrupt with regularity - especially banks. What saves the day is size, not branding: if the political cost of failure is too high, they get bailed out. Not just banks, but car manufacturers, factories, etc.
egoisticalgoat 7y ago
I've been thinking about this for a while, what would a world look like if we only had about purely informational ads without any connection to companies? Like, purely informing you that a product exists and is helpful, without ever mentioning any particular brand?
goodmachine 7y ago
Everyone hates advertising, until they have something to advertise.
- xtracerx 7y ago
  Everywhere I have ever worked has relied on advertising for its existence, especially the ones that aren't household names. I understand how annoying some ads can be but, in general, the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Doing work that ultimately neither makes anyone happier or healthier nor furthers progress in any other way is essential to all of us having (full-time) jobs. So you aren't wrong.
  - bulditand 7y ago
    > the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs Citation needed.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Everyone hates murder until they have someone to silence.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Direct link to the research that the Economist article is talking about: https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dissatisfaction https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis... Of note, is they make not firm conclusions about _why_ advertising makes people less happy in a society, only that it does, and that this is true even when controlling for economic growth and other normally understood factors that influence this. In fact, for a given country, looking at the growth in ad spending in one year, is apparently a good way to predict if people will be more or less happy a few years from now. It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds up over time.

77 points by jkuria 7y ago

There's been talk of a "banker's oath", because behaviour that is a little bit slimy or reckless - but not criminally so, nor perhaps even unambiguously unethical - can hurt a lot of people when your job involves looking after lots of money. I wonder if people working in marketing, advertising and journalism should have to swear an oath in which they promise not to manipulate or deceive people. Lying or deliberately misleading is obviously not criminal in general, but perhaps it should be punishable in certain professional settings? I appreciate that this is very delicate, and needs a bit more thought on how to avoid it becoming a potential tool of government or corporate oppression. Of course, this is pie in the sky. Most people in advertising and marketing seem to believe that what they are doing is fine.

sologoub 7y ago

The research into emotional well-being this article cites interestingly appears to be in favor of highly targeted advertising, as a means of showing only highly relevant offers and not making one feel inadequate by showing offers way out of the price range. That said, I don’t know if such a system, if it was possible to be 100% accurate, would also have unintended consequences of denying people that are not as well off some important deals, such as a lower APR, because they are less profitable overall. Still, this is an interesting concept to ponder - if advertising was as relevant as possible and goods attainable without undue stress, people would likely feel better about themselves.

perfunctory 7y ago

Gotta love that "but" after "make people miserable"

rukittenme 7y ago
"Getting vaccinated makes kids miserable but it still has its uses."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 7y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fnoord 7y ago
You could say the same about blocking ads. It makes some people miserable. The premise of the article: > Ads and other forms of marketing ostensibly serve a straightforward economic role. Firms selling goods and services need to tell consumers about the availability and desirability of their wares, and spend on advertising to do so. By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world. (Had to laugh hard at the last sentence.) Good products don't have to use advertising. Their existence alone, plus worth of mouth (e.g. reviews) assures customers become aware of good deals. Take good Black Friday deals, for example. There's a lot of BS and fake deals around, but if you search well enough there are some true gems hidden within. Also, to me, advertising always meant some kind of deal. Merely mentioning the existence of a product doesn't cut it. It has to be a real deal where I'm saving money on the conventional price. Of course, marketeers hacked their way around that by making the discount price higher and the normal/non-discount price higher (above the actual real normal price). Old trick which is also heavily in use during Black Friday. The conundrum is the more these tricks are used on consumers they will figure them out (eventually) and quit falling for them. So false advertising kills off the advertising market. My argument is that exposure to [such] false advertising killed the advertising market for me, and being the reason why I use adblockers 24/7. > Some firms target impressionable children Which is AFAIK illegal in NL, as it should be. However targeting the parents of children is legal, and... annoying.
buboard 7y ago
Dentists make people miserable, but they still have their uses
- anoncake 7y ago
  That's why people voluntarily visit dentists. They don't voluntarily view ads.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Pain and misery are not the same.
neonate 7y ago
That's the Economist's headline humor.

fromthestart 7y ago

Paywalled, so I don't know how the rest of the article reads, but >By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world. Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or anything of the like, and do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in media. But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting, shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core. I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like I'd be directly harming society in building such technology. In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on TV got one for Christmas.

goatherders 7y ago
I disagree with this cynical take. A Dell computer ad may exist to drive sales but that isnt exclusive to informing people of features and benefits of the machine. The purpose of a good ad should be to inform the viewer/listener of how what and why the product offers. Many do exactly that.
- maxdamantus 7y ago
  If noone advertised their computers, people would still look into the various brands of computers as long as there is a natural demand for them. If you need a computer, you can go to a website or a physical store and have the ability to relatively fairly compare the different brands. Advertising doesn't really help with this. The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year. Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?

ducttape12 7y ago

If I'm in the market for a product, if a company makes a decent product chances are I'll find out about it by reading reviews, etc. I don't need ads for that. Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.

mankyd 7y ago
This isn't a complete picture. If you are in the need for a product, you will be more comfortable with a product if it feels familiar. This is true whether that familiarity comes from having used it before, because you've seen others use it before, _or_ if you've simply seen the name a lot before. Brand recognition has impact. You might still go read reviews of the product first, but they still need you to seek it out to do that. That's where advertising comes in.
delish 7y ago
One of the standard seemingly-counterintuitive examples of uses of advertising is car ads. Very few people see TV ads for a Mercedes and walk into a dealership and buy one. So why does Mercedes-Benz run TV ads? The standard explanation is, MB's ads are for the end of the month, when you see (1) your car payment and (2) Toyota's ads claiming a car payment 1/3 what you're paying. So the ads are intended to help you avoid post-purchase guilt. Hence their emotional appeal: you're a certain kind of person etc. That keeps you buying MBs on a scale of decades, rather than jump ship to a lower prestige, lower cost brand. The larger point is there are many reasons to run ads, not just to attract leads.
- chii 7y ago
  This is what i would call 'branding'. It's the same as apple running those "stylistic" ipod and iphone ads - full of happy dancing people using their product.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Source / citation?
- SerLava 7y ago

rolltiide 7y ago

I actually like Hulu ads, primarily from knowing when it will end. 60 or 90 seconds of ads. It makes it so much more tolerable and I am glad that I find out about things. I'm not sure how much targeting they do, but I expect them too and it feels like great customer attentiveness. Seeing an ad with the same actor as the show I'm currently watching, and its like yes I did want to know about that.

bulditand 7y ago
That's great and I'm glad you find joy in this. Me, I spent nights going to a show named "Nuit des Publivores" and loved it. But like every pleasure in life, it needs to be consensual.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/U69lk http://archive.is/U69lk

cm2012 7y ago

I post all the time in HN ad threads that most companies grow very slowly if at all from word of mouth, and need to use ads to grow (beyond a local level). 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. Here's a real life example: I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old. Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3. Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

anoncake 7y ago
If plumbers don't want to hear about your damn app, leave them alone instead of spamming them. You are not entitled to customers. The only valid reason for a business to exist, including yours, is to produce things people want. If no one wants your product, your business should not grow. Useless businesses not growing is a good thing. > Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am. I know that advertising is useful to companies that do it. But I don't care. What matters are not the individual interests of your company but the collective interests of society as a whole.

mindcrime 7y ago

I'm not the biggest fan of advertising in the world, and I make a distinction between "levels of annoyingness" and "levels of usefulness" of ads. But even at their worst, I have a pretty hard time justifying the phrase "makes people miserable" in regards to ads. Unless this article is talking about a kind of ad that I've never encountered. Blipverts[1] maybe? For my money, if I could just get rid of any in-browser ad that starts playing audio without prompting, I'd be mostly OK with the state of ads. Note that, in this context, I'm not including any concerns about ad tracking networks, etc. I'm just talking about the actual ads themselves. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)

the_pwner224 7y ago
Back when I started reading HN I saw a comment mentioning that that person always muted TV ads. I started requesting my family members to mute TV ads, and once you start doing it, hearing the occasional 'unblocked' TV ad in the background becomes extremely annoying. It is really no different from someone coming into your house and camping in your living room - their sound volume and jingles are intentionally meant to make you pay attention and distract you.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  Sure, no argument there. But to me, there is a huge gap between "annoying" and "makes people miserable". Miserable, to me, is the excruciating pain I had for a week after shoulder surgery. Being annoyed by a jingle is barely on the same spectrum in my book.
  - AlexandrB 7y ago
    I think the “miserable” here is in the Buddhist sense of a bottomless pit of desire that leaves your life feeling perpetually unfulfilled. Ads are like a backhoe for making that pit deeper.
icebraining 7y ago
Ads are still often: - attention-stealing (not just sound, but animation, flashing, etc) - heavy (many of us can only afford mobile plans with small caps) - misleading (e.g. fake download buttons near the real one) - manipulative (using clickbait and divisive politics to get you to click) - encourage censorship (since there's always the fear that advertisers will pull out if you show controversial stuff) But personally, I could live with non-tracking web ads. Street ads are worse, in my opinion.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Advertising for me measures on 3 orthogonal axes 1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's better, or how it's suited to a particular niche. 2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc. 3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever. Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is kind of harmless but much overdone. Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.

jdietrich 7y ago
There's a fourth, crucially important axis - costly signalling. Spending a ton of money on mass advertising sends a clear and impossible-to-fake message that your company is in it for the long haul. Sony could exclusively buy targeted ads on social media and the metrics would probably say it's a good idea, but their brand would be fundamentally less trustworthy if they stopped sponsoring soccer teams and buying prime-time commercials. That's why you intuitively trust their TVs more than a random brand you've never heard of, even if you don't consciously realise it; Sony have invested a lot more in establishing their brand, so they have a lot more to lose by tarnishing it. It's no guarantee that their TVs are the best, but it's a fairly strong indication that they won't be absolute crap and that the warranty might actually mean something. Prior to the media age, bank branches were invariably grand and expensive buildings. On one level, that's just a waste of money; on a more important level, it's a costly signal of permanence. Would you deposit your life savings with a bank that operated out of a trailer?
- barrkel 7y ago
  If you've been around on the planet for a while, you'll notice that the signal isn't reliable. Big names go bankrupt with regularity - especially banks. What saves the day is size, not branding: if the political cost of failure is too high, they get bailed out. Not just banks, but car manufacturers, factories, etc.

egoisticalgoat 7y ago

I've been thinking about this for a while, what would a world look like if we only had about purely informational ads without any connection to companies? Like, purely informing you that a product exists and is helpful, without ever mentioning any particular brand?

goodmachine 7y ago

Everyone hates advertising, until they have something to advertise.

xtracerx 7y ago
Everywhere I have ever worked has relied on advertising for its existence, especially the ones that aren't household names. I understand how annoying some ads can be but, in general, the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Doing work that ultimately neither makes anyone happier or healthier nor furthers progress in any other way is essential to all of us having (full-time) jobs. So you aren't wrong.
- bulditand 7y ago
  > the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs Citation needed.
anoncake 7y ago
Everyone hates murder until they have someone to silence.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Direct link to the research that the Economist article is talking about: https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dissatisfaction https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis... Of note, is they make not firm conclusions about _why_ advertising makes people less happy in a society, only that it does, and that this is true even when controlling for economic growth and other normally understood factors that influence this. In fact, for a given country, looking at the growth in ad spending in one year, is apparently a good way to predict if people will be more or less happy a few years from now. It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds up over time.