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Advertising (Which appears to be defined in your broad doc as anything that gets your attention without asking for it first) is the worst way to get people to p
by cm2012 7y ago
Advertising (Which appears to be defined in your broad doc as anything that gets your attention without asking for it first) is the worst way to get people to pay attention to things, except for all the other ways. The alternative to "advertising" is the rate of people discovering new things dropping to 1% of what it is now.
1% of products have natural virality and will be found on their own. The other 99% of products and services in existence, no matter the quality, needs to be promoted so people can find them and use them.
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.
- wpietri 7y ago> 1% of products have [...] 99% of products and services [...] plumber productivity would go up 50% [...] Did know that 97% of statistics are made up on the spot? The problem with your fictions here is that they're based in a world with a lot of advertising. In your fantasy, people just sit around dying of thirst because there's nobody to advertise water at them. But in reality, people would still find ways to get what they need. I find great new products all the time despite living an ad-free life. I find them through friends. Through internet discussion like Hacker News. And through sites like Wirecutter and Consumer Reports. I don't find my life particularly lacking. Would ending ads mean it would be harder for businesses to manipulate their growth numbers? Sure. So I can get why you feel panicked at the thought. But you're used to a world where everybody's burning investor money to get attention, so it's required to do the same. Maybe think about the world where nobody can do that. I promise you, it'll keep on turning.
- cm2012 7y agoMy job is talking to start-ups and established companies that want to grow. It's not a fiction to say that most companies don't grow if they don't promote themselves.
- philwelch 7y agoBecause they’re operating in an adversarial environment where every other business engages in advertising. It’s game theory.
- cm2012 7y agoThey're operating in an adversarial environment where other businesses exist.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWithout advertising being a crucial part of that environment, they'd have to focus on making a better and cheaper product than their competition, instead of engaging in a shouting match.
- cm2012 7y agoWithout advertising, no matter how good your product is, people will never find you. People would just go with whatever product they happened to know (the market incumbent, usually), or just not have access to that category of product.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI agree that competition against incumbents might get more difficult, though if the offering was truly superior, it would become known through word of mouth alone. As for not having access, why would that happen? When people have problems, at least a fraction of them is actively looking for a solution, and those people would introduce everyone else to a new category of products. What would definitely suffer is products that exist only to fulfill a manufactured demand, but that would be a good thing.
- lostlogin 7y ago> Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am. Some who works in adverting values advertising? Yes, you’re well placed to judge, but I’ve little time for adverts and actually dedicate time to avoiding Facebook (blockers, Pihole etc). If I miss the odd product or service, so be it. The current situation is toxic.
- RivieraKid 7y agoThis is a valid point but.. advertising seems like a very inefficient way to solve that problem. In an ideal world, people would have knowledge of all available products and services and also the ability to pick optimally among them. Something that could possibly replace the function of advertising would be an independent organization that would provide tools for picking the best product given your situation. And information channels for new high-quality products (i.e. there's a new restaurant in your neighbourhood).