6 ms·

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 parti

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.
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    But up until the point they fail, it sure feels like they'll be around for ever. There's a reason Lehman Brothers going under was "the death of a wall street institution" and not "shaky money scrubbers finally tip over". Their name had been associated with longevity and history, and brands like Coca Cola or IBM don't change their logos much, I feel in some part due to the logic the commenter above spoke about.
m463 7y ago
people always miss the hidden stuff: - identification - identifying you. tracking your movements, learning your habits, your demographics, age sex race religion income address, etc - discrimination - opting you out of advertisements that are unprofitable. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education>, you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit and then make the minimum payment for the rest of your life. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit, make a few payments, then default. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, pay it off in full every month and not be very profitable to the cc company. Unless you're the first type, you may rarely see a credit card offer. Now think about this in other ways keeping in mind that the people who buy some expensive items are sometimes the least able to afford them. This basically subjugates a lot of people.
quicklime 7y ago
What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain (3)? To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only care about cost cutting. Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind, or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  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. Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so. But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  I think that is where parsing them out on an axial graph helps. A brand can be a pure brand - a classical example is the many cartoon/cutesy characters that are used in Japan to represent everything from supermarkets to local government. A brand can also be polluted with axis-3 psychological manipulation[1], implied claims that aren't true, false differentiation, and so forth. You can separate at least in abstract as a thought experiment, how much it is of each. [1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.
gopiandcode 7y ago
I believe the best way to separate 1 from 2 and 3 is to try and push for the removal of the artistic components of Advertising. For example, to allow for creative expression, concepts such as puffery (unfounded claims) are explicitly allowed in adverts, and while it is true that they facilitate this kind of art, they are also prone to abuse when a profit motive is involved.
tim333 7y ago
The trouble with banning 3 is how are you going to do it in practice? I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that? Maybe a better approach would be to rate ads as good or bad on a scale like yours and then people could chose to use selective ad blockers?
- amelius 7y ago
  > I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that? Simple: ban the appearance of people in ads. It is less drastic than you might think. In many countries, naked people are not allowed in public ads. So it is only a small step to ban people altogether.
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    I'm not sure it's as small a step as you think. Naked people aren't allowed in public in most places either, so not being in ads isn't that wild, you don't see many naked people that you don't want to. I think banning people in ads is closer on the scale of likelihood to banning the actual products than it is to banning naked people.
    - amelius 7y ago
      Ok, the link to naked people would be a step too far. But in some countries there is a discussion about showing models that are too thin. When we ban those, then it is only a small step to ban all imagery of people (and humanoid characters).
SquishyPanda23 7y ago
Axis 1 is useful, but only if it's honest. Advertisers are almost never incentivized to be honest with that information. This seems to be intrinsic. Third-party sources either seem to rapidly grow dishonest (e.g. Amazon reviews) or to be very limited (e.g. Consumer Reports). This doesn't seem to be intrinsic (e.g. Amazon could crack down on fake reviews). As a result consumers are assaulted with ads and marketing and there is no indication it helps consumers make better choices. Advetising essentially just draws consumer attention to the products that shout the loudest, not to the best products.
- craftinator 7y ago
  I think the original comment meant intrinsic in that, because advertising has the greatest value when it advertises a better product than other categorically similar products, advertisers converge toward advertising a better product than they actually sell. If your product has the same qualities as a number of other products, the only way to increase value is to make your product seem better than it is. Also, this is not a new thing by any stretch; humans have been doing this since Ogg sold his "Magic Fire-God Kit" (1 piece wood, 1 piece flint, 1 piece rock) as making better fire than Uhg's "Fire Kit", consisting of the exact same stuff. Seems intrinsic to human nature. I think this is why innovators are more important than advertisers.
maxdamantus 7y ago
My feeling is that 3) is the main result of advertising. The main point seems to be to drive a demand for something, not to inform people about market differentiation. Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see: * 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store * a window cleaning product * KFC ad * "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store * an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains * "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store * Powerade ad I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?
- mindcrime 7y ago
  I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, I may be in the minority here, but I am extremely skeptical of suggestions regarding the ability of ads to truly compel one to desire something they really don't want. Anecdotally speaking, I've seen hundreds or thousands of commercials for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and the like. And I watch a lot of football at sports bars, where I have plenty of opportunities to drink that stuff. Heck, they even have hot girls in skimpy outfits come in to the bar and give away random freebies, run silly contests, blah, blah, etc., to advertise those brands. And yet, while I am a (light) drinker, I have never felt any desire whatsoever to drink Coors, Budweiser, Miller, etc. When I do drink, it's almost always either a Sam Adams product, or a microbrew / craft beer. Yeah, n=1 and all that, but if advertising were as powerful as some people make it out to be, surely I'd be drinking at least a little Coors or Miller by now.
  - maxdamantus 7y ago
    So .. are you saying those companies are wasting their money by producing advertisements? Maybe you should inform them that they could be saving money by not putting effort into producing those ads.
randomsearch 7y ago
I see advertising as a bug in capitalism. One of many critical flaws. You’re not creating wealth, but you can manipulate people into believing you are by making them want what you make.
- rocqua 7y ago
  Capitalism requires informed customers. Without that, there is no sense in competing on quality. Advertising (in the broadest sense) is essentially the only way for a new player with a superior product to get the word out. That is far from the only way advertising is used, but it is a rather important role.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    That's just propaganda. The word on good products will spread by Word of mouth. Advertising is an indicator that the product in question is garbage and overpriced.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      This is just untrue. You can have a quality product but just starting out without customers. You could be a niche market in a local area (I'm in this bucket) where paid advertising (usually search) is the only way to get the word out. I don't believe I'm "emotionally hacking people" by paying Google to put our phone number and a few snippets of text in front of potential customers.
      - randomsearch 7y ago
        Indeed. Has a perfect valid use, hence we can't "close the bug" by removing marketing completely.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        You're right. This kind of advertising isn't ideal but definitely not useless either. And GP explicitly wrote "in the broadest sense" which I missed.

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.
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  But up until the point they fail, it sure feels like they'll be around for ever. There's a reason Lehman Brothers going under was "the death of a wall street institution" and not "shaky money scrubbers finally tip over". Their name had been associated with longevity and history, and brands like Coca Cola or IBM don't change their logos much, I feel in some part due to the logic the commenter above spoke about.

m463 7y ago

people always miss the hidden stuff: - identification - identifying you. tracking your movements, learning your habits, your demographics, age sex race religion income address, etc - discrimination - opting you out of advertisements that are unprofitable. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education>, you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit and then make the minimum payment for the rest of your life. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit, make a few payments, then default. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, pay it off in full every month and not be very profitable to the cc company. Unless you're the first type, you may rarely see a credit card offer. Now think about this in other ways keeping in mind that the people who buy some expensive items are sometimes the least able to afford them. This basically subjugates a lot of people.

quicklime 7y ago

What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain (3)? To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only care about cost cutting. Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind, or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?

Broken_Hippo 7y ago
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. Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so. But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
I think that is where parsing them out on an axial graph helps. A brand can be a pure brand - a classical example is the many cartoon/cutesy characters that are used in Japan to represent everything from supermarkets to local government. A brand can also be polluted with axis-3 psychological manipulation[1], implied claims that aren't true, false differentiation, and so forth. You can separate at least in abstract as a thought experiment, how much it is of each. [1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.

gopiandcode 7y ago

I believe the best way to separate 1 from 2 and 3 is to try and push for the removal of the artistic components of Advertising. For example, to allow for creative expression, concepts such as puffery (unfounded claims) are explicitly allowed in adverts, and while it is true that they facilitate this kind of art, they are also prone to abuse when a profit motive is involved.

tim333 7y ago

The trouble with banning 3 is how are you going to do it in practice? I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that? Maybe a better approach would be to rate ads as good or bad on a scale like yours and then people could chose to use selective ad blockers?

amelius 7y ago
> I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that? Simple: ban the appearance of people in ads. It is less drastic than you might think. In many countries, naked people are not allowed in public ads. So it is only a small step to ban people altogether.
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  I'm not sure it's as small a step as you think. Naked people aren't allowed in public in most places either, so not being in ads isn't that wild, you don't see many naked people that you don't want to. I think banning people in ads is closer on the scale of likelihood to banning the actual products than it is to banning naked people.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Ok, the link to naked people would be a step too far. But in some countries there is a discussion about showing models that are too thin. When we ban those, then it is only a small step to ban all imagery of people (and humanoid characters).

SquishyPanda23 7y ago

Axis 1 is useful, but only if it's honest. Advertisers are almost never incentivized to be honest with that information. This seems to be intrinsic. Third-party sources either seem to rapidly grow dishonest (e.g. Amazon reviews) or to be very limited (e.g. Consumer Reports). This doesn't seem to be intrinsic (e.g. Amazon could crack down on fake reviews). As a result consumers are assaulted with ads and marketing and there is no indication it helps consumers make better choices. Advetising essentially just draws consumer attention to the products that shout the loudest, not to the best products.

craftinator 7y ago
I think the original comment meant intrinsic in that, because advertising has the greatest value when it advertises a better product than other categorically similar products, advertisers converge toward advertising a better product than they actually sell. If your product has the same qualities as a number of other products, the only way to increase value is to make your product seem better than it is. Also, this is not a new thing by any stretch; humans have been doing this since Ogg sold his "Magic Fire-God Kit" (1 piece wood, 1 piece flint, 1 piece rock) as making better fire than Uhg's "Fire Kit", consisting of the exact same stuff. Seems intrinsic to human nature. I think this is why innovators are more important than advertisers.

maxdamantus 7y ago

My feeling is that 3) is the main result of advertising. The main point seems to be to drive a demand for something, not to inform people about market differentiation. Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see: * 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store * a window cleaning product * KFC ad * "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store * an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains * "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store * Powerade ad I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?

mindcrime 7y ago
I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, I may be in the minority here, but I am extremely skeptical of suggestions regarding the ability of ads to truly compel one to desire something they really don't want. Anecdotally speaking, I've seen hundreds or thousands of commercials for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and the like. And I watch a lot of football at sports bars, where I have plenty of opportunities to drink that stuff. Heck, they even have hot girls in skimpy outfits come in to the bar and give away random freebies, run silly contests, blah, blah, etc., to advertise those brands. And yet, while I am a (light) drinker, I have never felt any desire whatsoever to drink Coors, Budweiser, Miller, etc. When I do drink, it's almost always either a Sam Adams product, or a microbrew / craft beer. Yeah, n=1 and all that, but if advertising were as powerful as some people make it out to be, surely I'd be drinking at least a little Coors or Miller by now.
- maxdamantus 7y ago
  So .. are you saying those companies are wasting their money by producing advertisements? Maybe you should inform them that they could be saving money by not putting effort into producing those ads.

randomsearch 7y ago

I see advertising as a bug in capitalism. One of many critical flaws. You’re not creating wealth, but you can manipulate people into believing you are by making them want what you make.

rocqua 7y ago
Capitalism requires informed customers. Without that, there is no sense in competing on quality. Advertising (in the broadest sense) is essentially the only way for a new player with a superior product to get the word out. That is far from the only way advertising is used, but it is a rather important role.
- anoncake 7y ago
  That's just propaganda. The word on good products will spread by Word of mouth. Advertising is an indicator that the product in question is garbage and overpriced.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    This is just untrue. You can have a quality product but just starting out without customers. You could be a niche market in a local area (I'm in this bucket) where paid advertising (usually search) is the only way to get the word out. I don't believe I'm "emotionally hacking people" by paying Google to put our phone number and a few snippets of text in front of potential customers.
    - randomsearch 7y ago
      Indeed. Has a perfect valid use, hence we can't "close the bug" by removing marketing completely.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      You're right. This kind of advertising isn't ideal but definitely not useless either. And GP explicitly wrote "in the broadest sense" which I missed.