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Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction

453 points by jrepinc 7y ago

non-entity 7y ago
I remember a while back seeing an ad for smart toilets. Somewhat intrigued, I googled for them and found that a good many of them cost several grand. I remember thinking "who the hell are they advertising to?" No average person is going to spend that money on a smart toilet, and I'm sure even the upper middle class has better purchases to make in that price range. Also I've noticed everything in commercials is so idyllic. A nice house in a beautiful setting, with a functional family. People just buying each other cars as Christmas gifts. It's kinda distressing to realize that most people, including myself will never have this (in part, because I dont think it exists)
- jbob2000 7y ago
  There are people in the middle class that I call "uni-purchasers". They buy one very expensive thing, and that's their "thing" that they spend their limited amounts of money on. They give up on medium-level experiences and draw everything else to a minimum to get the thing they really want.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    When I started my first business, a mentor gave me advice along these lines: identify the two or three pieces of equipment that are truly key to your business, and go high-end on those. Everything else should be as cheap as possible.
    - jbob2000 7y ago
      Those types of goods usually aren't mass advertised, e.g. high end music or video gear, mechanic's tools, etc. Peleton bikes, smart toilets, diamond rings, high-end purses, and so on are all things you can get the cheaper versions of and still get roughly the same experience.
      - aabbcc1241 7y ago
        Sometime, people choose a product/band over the alternatives solely because their choice is more expensive, so others will appreciate or jealous on them...
    - tartoran 7y ago
      Generally I agree. It is important to know though, that there's a thin line between high end and luxury-brand where you pay a lot of money for the latter.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        True. By "high end", what's meant is genuinely high quality, not necessarily flashy or luxury brands.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    Smart toilet not the best example, but I can get tremendous joy from buying something high quality and knowing that this thing could last my entire lifetime. Buying that product once forever removes my need to crave for an upgrade (unless it breaks, of course). My 98yr grandma inspired this behavior. She bought her kitchen utensils as a young mother, and used them forever. Her wooden cutting board is now so worn, that its thinned and almost breaks in half. Yet not a hair on her head would want to replace it until that happens.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  That stuff exists, it just costs a lot of money. Well, except for a functional family, money can't buy that. Want a house that looks clean and perfectly staged all the time? Hire a full-time cleaner to come every day and sweep, pick up, do the dishes, etc. The lie in those commercials is that their target audience can never afford something like that. So in a sense, you're right, they're showing "you" what you can never have.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    You can also keep your house clean and perfectly staged all the time by cleaning it yourself. It's not impossible, or even difficult.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      Well, duh. I kinda thought that went without saying. But it's work. And if you have 4 kids and 3600 sqft McMansion that aspires to be one of those beautiful, large homes in the commercial with the car with over-sized bow out front, you'll spend most your time doing that. But that's not what people want. They want a perfect, clean home and to be able to spend all their free time on leisure activities, just like the commercial promised them.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Yes, but what are you giving up to do that?
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        Video games and Netflix, for most people. I really don't think the trade-off between Netflix time and house cleanliness is a false perception synthesized by advertisers.
        wutbrodo 7y ago
        Netflix and videogsmes are very passive activities, and time cleaning your house presumably isn't fungible with them, from a mental energy perspective. I'm not in the habit of watching TV, but my sister is a good example: over the course of her medical education and early career, her Netflix addiction has tracked pretty directly with how mentally exhausting her workload is. If she was at full-enough capacity during Netflix time to be cleaning house, she'd be spending it on one of her hobbies, or reading.
- itronitron 7y ago
  That is a lot, however I can see a smart toilet being a reasonable cost during a bathroom renovation (I assume you are referring to the type that wash your behind and are standard in Japan.) Although since a toilet is an easy thing to install afterwards, unlike bath, sinks, and shower, then the purchase may just be delayed a year (and then another year...)
logjammin 7y ago
I spent a lot of time in Vermont many years ago. I'd been there a little while, blissfully unaware, before someone told me "yeah, they banned billboards here in the sixties - you didn't notice?" I hadn't consciously noticed, no, but I'd spent my time there until that comment driving around stunned at how beautiful the place was. Now I knew the reason for that (well, partial reason - billboards or not, it's a pretty part of the world, especially in summer and fall). I've thought a lot about that billboard ban ever since, and I'm convinced it enabled a measure of calm in me. I'm not sure how much I buy the study talked about in the OP's article - spurious correlation strikes me as a possibility - but the intuition about advertising is spot-on, I think. It'd cool if our societies had more ad-free spaces.
- glitchc 7y ago
  Whoa, I never realized that. I live north of the border and drive through Vermont every so often to visit family. Now that you mention it, there are zero billboards on the highways.
  - logjammin 7y ago
    Hell yeah! Cool to be able to share that eureka moment with others who know the area. Spread the word.
    - interestica 7y ago
      You've made me want to visit Vermont.
      - sylk 7y ago
        They have a remote workers program.
- andyjsong 7y ago
  This is why I take 280 instead of 101 when traveling to and from SF to South Bay even though it's slightly longer.
itronitron 7y ago
that's how you know that the advertising is working
- wpietri 7y ago
  Exactly. This is classic POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... People mainly buy things to solve problems, to end negative feelings. So if you want people to buy things, the obvious solution is to create negative feelings that can be ended by spending money on your product. The most obvious example is of course addictive products. Just when we were finally weaning society of nicotine, Juul has been very successful in creating a new generation of addicts. But I think they dynamic is true more broadly. Feeling low in social status? Buy this expensive car, these expensive clothes, this expensive watch! And if you aren't feeling like that, let's show you enough fancy people with fancy things until you do feel bad. Social status isn't your weakness? Well we have plenty of creative teams who will find something we can make you feel bad about. And for those who are skeptical, I encourage you to read about Edward Bernays, the "father of public relations", who took his inspiration from war propaganda and applied it to manipulating consumer behavior: http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393 http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...
  - nickelcitymario 7y ago
    Public relations != advertising. Ed Bernays != spokesperson for all PR professionals. There are shady people in every industry.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      > Public relations != advertising. Not a distinction I care to make. The problems with both are fundamentally the same. > Ed Bernays != spokesperson for all PR professionals. Okay, but all PR professionals and advertisers are trying to manipulate people. That is literally the job. Everyone else in the industry has the same goals--Bernays may have been willing to do more unscrupulous things to achieve those goals, but the goals are fundamentally unscrupulous. > There are shady people in every industry. But some industries, the purpose of the industry itself is shady. Advertising and PR are such industries.
banads 7y ago
Isn't that the primary goal of most advertising? To create a dissatisfaction in people in such a way that they're driven to buy your product in an attempt to fill that void?
- Juliate 7y ago
  It is.
- nck4222 7y ago
  That question is addressed in the article: "Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one."
  - banads 7y ago
    I guess I just think it's funny that we need scientific studies for blatantly disingenuous claims: "their task is to simply provide information and in that way they raise human well-being." It's like doing a scientific study on the common claim of advertisers that "the internet would not exist without advertising".
    - nck4222 7y ago
      The research wasn't done to test a "blatantly disingenuous" claim, it was done to determine the effect of advertising on mood. They're able to quantify how much of an effect it has on happiness as well. "Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That’s about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed." That's a pretty significant amount, and if confirmed could certainly be used as an argument to regulate advertising, or a way for therapists to help improve the lives of their patients, or in many additional ways I haven't thought of in the 30 seconds I've spent thinking about it. I wouldn't be so quick to be dismissive of "blatantly obvious" scientific studies.
xtracto 7y ago
This reminds me of an anecdote a friend told me: This friend dedicates his time in going to very rural areas/towns here in Mexico to implement government programs. At some point in the past he got to a town were the cantina had just gotten the only TV in town... apparently people in the town were generally happy, and they had everything they needed... so in their view they were not poor. But once they started watching TV, they started seeing the Nikes, the fridges, the trips to Europe and all that "stuff" that they couldn't get... and there they started to ask why couldnt they get all that and thus started feeling poor. Amazing what advertising can do for perceived "needs"
- banads 7y ago
  Another personal anecdote: once I stopped watching TV I stopped feeling self conscious about driving a 10+ year old car, and no longer yearned to buy a new one.
  - chapium 7y ago
    That helps explain how much advertising is done for durable goods that we only buy every X years.
  - Franciscouzo 7y ago
    Driving a newish car is a pretty good idea though, they are generally way safer.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      If you are talking about one from the 80s probably yes, 2009 not so much.
      - theptip 7y ago
        I don't think this is correct. A lot of the new driver assistance technologies are having a significant effect on safety: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/22/new-report-shows-how-many-accidents-injuries-collision-avoidance-systems-prevent.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/22/new-report-shows-how-many-ac... These features are new in the last 10 years, some are new in the last couple years, and they are continually improving.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
the goal of advertising is to make you want something you don't have. QED
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Something you don’t need, FTFY.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  Using advertising to create demand is only a tiny part of the advertising market, and arguably the worst way to spend your ad budget. Most advertising is to maintain your market share in already established and very competitive markets. E.g., Coca-Cola plastering their logo everywhere to prevent Pepsi from doing the same. It's certainly not to convince those who don't drink Coke to start doing so.
  - darkarmani 7y ago
    > Coca-Cola plastering their logo everywhere to prevent Pepsi from doing the same. Why would Pepsi do want to do it? Solely to prevent coca-cola from doing it? If it isn't to convince people to drink Pepsi for those who don't drink Pepsi, why would it matter if they did Pepsi instead of Coca-cola?
    - asdff 7y ago
      Because, if you glance at a pepsi logo on a billboard in the morning, you are more likely to grab a pepsi than a coke out of the cooler at the store in the afternoon. Suddenly, your eyeballs become an arms race, and here we are today.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    It seems like as a society if we agreed not to have advertising, we would save both companies (b|m)illions of dollars. This isn't an argument for advertising, it's an argument that advertising is an infectious disease: once one company in an industry starts advertising, the others have to advertise to compete. And that hurts consumers because every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar that comes out of the pockets of consumers and is not spent on improving the product.
nabla9 7y ago
New animated ads and videos in the street are just horrible. Eyes follow movement automatically. You have to consciously avert you gaze constantly to not look into them. Two hours in the city and you start feeling tired from the cognitive load and the resistance towards impulse buy decreases a little. * Walking on the street looking down is the only defense in the streets. * Online only ad-blockers keep you sane.
- HONEST_ANNIE 7y ago
  The book 'The Space Merchants' (1952) from Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth describes this type world. World is run by ad companies (FB, Google,...) who select political leaders. People have to be careful on the street not to be trapped by highly aggressive ads.
  - r00fus 7y ago
    In fiction I also liked Richard K Morgan's take on holographic advertising in Altered Carbon.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Rugged screens that can be built right into pavement are coming I'm sure.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Waiting for unskippable ads that pause if you take your eyes off the screen. The tech is already there now that we all have face scanners in our cellphones.
JohnFen 7y ago
This makes sense, given that a very large amount of (most?) advertising intentionally attempts to make you feel bad about something, in order to make you more likely to buy their "solution".
nickelcitymario 7y ago
I'm gonna take the contrarian viewpoint here. Full disclosure: I'm in advertising. The researcher states that increasing "aspiration" (their term) leads to dissatisfaction and more unhappiness. Sure! But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. I don't disagree that ambition and aspiration can make a person unhappy. But it's also what drives literally all human progress. So unless you believe primitive man was living their best life and that everything that has happened since then is a regression (and certainly some people hold that view), I find it hard to swallow that aspirations are a bad thing. Yes, there's a negative to them. But virtually every good thing people have ever done was because of their aspirations. Therefore I don't agree with the notion that advertising is inherently bad because it raises people's expectations for themselves. I consider that a good thing even if it comes at the cost of a decrease in personal happiness. HOWEVER (I can feel your hatred), there's a difference between motivating people to aspire to better things vs simply making them feel shitty about themselves so they'll buy your crap. ex: When a fashion brand shows impossibly attractive people wearing their clothes, they're not showing us how to live better lives. They're simply making us feel shitty for not being models, and then hoping we'll make the conclusion that we'd look better if we bought those clothes. That doesn't make anyone's life better. That's just a shit sandwich all around. ex: When a tech company shows us a bunch of people being really productive using their products, it can inspire us to want to be more productive. If their product truly can make us more productive (like the invention of the PC... no reasonable person would argue that PCs didn't make us more productive, right?), then that's great. ex: Pharmaceutical drugs have been a fantastic boon for humanity. We rely on them constantly to extend our lives and improve our quality of life. Yet some (many?) drugs are nowhere near as beneficial as they are advertised (I'm looking at you, Fentanyl). So I think the question is simply: does the product actually improve our lives in the way the advertising suggests? Or is it just a bait-and-switch? Advertising isn't inherently bad, any more than aspirations are inherently bad. It boils down to what's being advertised and how honest the ads are about it.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. Excluding fancy schools (which I believe aren't exactly a good thing), none of those things were inspired by "aspiration" in the sense being used here. They were inspired by genuine need. > I consider that a good thing even if it comes at the cost of a decrease in personal happiness. We could not possibly disagree more. I think it is straight-up immoral for anyone to intentionally make another's life worse in order to sell them stuff. > Advertising isn't inherently bad, any more than aspirations are inherently bad. It boils down to what's being advertised and how honest the ads are about it. We agree here. Advertising, in the form that advertisers tend cite to people who are critical of advertising (informing people about products) is not inherently bad. However, the vast majority of advertising isn't of that form at all. It's of the form of manipulating people instead. That's the sort of advertising that is terrible.
tombert 7y ago
I was the first person in my family to do the "cord cutting" thing, where I only had an Amazon Prime and Netflix account, and a bunch of DVDs and Blu-Rays (around 2012). People asked me why, and I said that I think it's dumb to pay money for advertisements, and that I think ads are bad for you. My brother-in-law is overall a smart guy, but he works at Taco Bell full-time, making minimum wage in NYC (~$15/hour). He decided that he needed the newest iPhone 11, presumably because of some good marketing, spent over a grand (through financing of course...ugh), and he'll spend the next year paying it off. I have nothing against the iPhone, I have one, but let's be honest here, do most people even benefit from the "newest" phones? He mostly watches YouTube and listens to music, and occasionally plays PUBG, all of which you could do on previous versions. He's also not some passionate photographer, so the fancier camera isn't going to make a huge difference.
- taurath 7y ago
  It’s to get rid of the shame he feels about having an older inferior phone, frequently from peers who’ve been exposed to advertising
  - tartoran 7y ago
    I personally would feel quite ashamed to have the latest IPhone, I'd feel that I'd fallen prey to apple's marketing. I live pretty well with a 5 year old SE. For the same reason I refuse to wear visibly branded clothes and am not ashamed to buy some used items. Living frugally by choice gets you back some freedoms.
    - taurath 7y ago
      Certainly, but you're also a product of an environment which values that sort of self-expression. If every time you went and hung out with your friends they shamed you, saying you look homeless, you might think differently. Its certainly a sign of maturity to not really care about those things, but depending on your life trajectory different values will hit. And clearly, a lot of people value a new iphone. OTOH - its a device that you use for hours and hours a day, for entertainment, organization, communication, and a camera. Having a "better" one is a decent investment if it helps all those areas.
j45 7y ago
Reading this article made me think of how different you tn felt to use YouTube without ads. So much so that I'd consider paying a bit more to be free of search ads. And Twitter Ads.
cryptica 7y ago
Even if you yourself are not too directly affected by advertising, it can still affect your friends and family members. Collectively, it can create expectations and social pressure on you which makes your life less pleasant and more complicated than it needs to be.
ckosidows 7y ago
I think this video points out Epicurus' opinions on advertisement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3dLWwmDDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3dLWwmDDw. I don't have time to re-watch the video, but I remember the gist being that the _point_ of advertisements is to make you feel like you're missing out on something. If an ad can't make you feel that way, how will it sell you on its product? Someone who feels they have everything doesn't need to purchase anything to fill a need/want. Really it's simple when you think about it. Company wants to sell you a product. You think you don't need anything else in your life because you're content. Company tells you your life could be better with their product; therefore, your life is missing something (said product). You are no longer content until you have said product. It's nice to have evidence that supports an idea proposed centuries ago.
perfunctory 7y ago
Advertising is so pervasive in our lives that it’s become like water for fish - it is hard to imagine a world without ads. Even bigger problem with advertisement - it is (indirectly) driving climate change. Most likely we’d be happier and safer without ads. Sigh.
hogFeast 7y ago
This doesn't feel like a very scientific approach. Looking at national satisfaction and then national advertising spend...seems like there would be huge scope for bias regardless of how many controls you put in. In particular, something like individual wellbeing is just that...individual. Really very tricky (and as always you see the researcher give out ludicrously unjustified advice to individuals...if you go to a psychologist and tell them you are unhappy, they don't ask how many adverts you saw recently).
dpflan 7y ago
Could this help paint advertising as a public health problem?
swills 7y ago
Disappointed this thread has made it this long without this, so here it is: By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. -- Bill Hicks
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I get that this is a comedian telling a joke. I also am one of the most anti-advertising people here: you can look through my post history to verify that. Still let's not tell people to kill themselves.
polskibus 7y ago
Adblockers make you happy!
NPMaxwell 7y ago
Write up of methodology & results: https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019E...
4ntonius8lock 7y ago
Having read the article, it seems they are concluding a causality that isn't necessarily there. The whole study is based on: there's a correlation between advertising spend per capita and life satisfaction between countries in Europe. Now that COULD mean advertising is making people unhappy. Or it could mean that people who are less satisfied tend to buy more crap and when people buy more crap they get more advertising. It's not as if advertisers are stupid. The researcher in the article even admits to this being a one off with no other studies backing his claim. Now what's more likely, he discovered something no one else has, or he misinterpreted the data?
- throwawaymath 7y ago
  I wish yours wasn't the only comment talking about this. It saddens me to see articles like this, where causation is imposed on correlation. Everyone "knows" correlation doesn't imply causation, but they only seem to know it in the sense of a student reciting it. They don't apply that knowledge critically. A single study of two things as complicated as advertising measurement and happiness/satisfaction, and the intuitively compelling conclusion is immediately embraced as the truth because it's "obvious." Edit: Again with the downvotes...come on HN. I'm not defending advertising, I'm criticizing the reporting on a study in a world which has a rampant replication crisis.
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    The funny thing is, the most up voted comments on this topic don't even seem to be about the FA. They are mostly just 'generic advertising is bad comment/anecdote related to the title'. Another idea I had after reading the article is that advertising is more pervasive in big cities. From what I can recall, big city inhabitants tend to have a lower life satisfaction rating than smaller town dwellers. So countries with more urban dwellers might normally have more advertising and less life satisfaction... because big cities, not necessarily advertising. Also richer nations tend to be less happy, and by being richer have more advertising. There's a lot of ways to interpret the data. It's funny to see the group-think dynamic on display needed to make non relevant comments go up and comments related to the article be down-voted (which aren't even stating anything specific... you and I never even said 'it's this' just questioning 'maybe not that') Another super interesting thing that I glean from the down-votes is the bottom down view only when convenient. If you post on HN that tech companies are evil and conspiring against our privacy, people will say (IMO mostly rightly BTW) that it's mostly bottom up, with consumers CHOOSING bad options. But as soon as advertising comes in the mix, now the world is top down, with evil marketeers manipulating the masses anyway they want. To all the down-voters: your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer!
throwawaymath 7y ago
I can see a few compelling arguments for it, but personally I'd be very wary of concluding causation from this relationship. The two things are very complicated and have many confounding variables involved. I see it just as likely that the correlation is spurious, and people exposed to advertising have lower life satisfaction for a variety of complex reasons incidental to the ads themselves. Capitalism affords many opportunities for someone to be unhappy and unsatisfied; advertising may cause this or simply exacerbate what is already there. I'm disappointed with the way HBR reported this. The researchers are explicitly quoted as saying they found a "negative connection", which, yes, is an inverse correlation. No matter how intuitively compelling, you can't just extrapolate that to a conclusion of causation as the author of this article proceeded to do right in the introduction. Edit: Why is this being downvoted? Do you disagree with my point that we can't extrapolate causation from correlation, or do find my comment to be off topic?
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Do you have an alternative hypothesis for why advertising would be inversely correlated with satisfaction? If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns. You did at one point say that advertising might not be causing the lower satisfaction, it might just be exacerbating other problems that cause lower satisfaction. While that possibility certainly warrants investigation to see what those other problems are, it doesn't have any implications for how we treat advertising: either way we should be seeking to decrease its influence on our lives.
  - throwawaymath 7y ago
    > If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns. Nope! We shouldn't. Speculation is precisely what we should do! That's what a critical review of research involves. We should take this as excellent motivation for further research. It could be true, but we haven't done nearly enough work to conclude as much. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's uncertain, and it's strictly unscientific to proceed by assuming something uncertain is the truth just because it's intuitively compelling. Intuitively compelling narratives are very dangerous in science, because they make you believe you have a shortcut to the truth and they're vindicated right up until they aren't. It's not a good habit. Happiness is incredibly complicated. Contradicting evidence and results abound across studies of life satisfaction. Measuring the impact and success of advertising itself is highly complex; the researchers have shown this correlation under their current methodology. What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with a different conclusion? That's very possible, and we can't dismiss it. The researchers themselves hedge their claims and don't come out and say they've found causation. I don't really have a dog in the race with advertising. But I really despise this kind of reporting by HBR, because the result is threads like this one where people walk away with unproven "truths" that become part of the popular zeitgeist because they just seem to vindicate obvious beliefs. Today it's advertising, tomorrow it'll be something else. Given the replication crisis we're undergoing, we shouldn't take anything away from studies like this except that further research is required.
hristov 7y ago
When this topic comes up I like to remind people of the brilliant and under appreciated movie Roger Dodger. The main character in it is an advertising executive and he flat out said that his job is to convince people their lives sucked. First you have to convince someone their life sucks and then it is quite easy to convince them that the latest product will improve their lives. This is the way advertising works.
- asdff 7y ago
  Mad men is great, too; it's positioned right at the bellwether moment of market research and psychology taking over whimsy narratives in advertisement in the 1960s.
s0meone 7y ago
We should always be careful of drawing big conclusions based on observational studies...
newscracker 7y ago
It’s ironic that an article about advertising having an inverse correlation with life satisfaction thrusts a popup ad when the page is opened! sigh It reminded me of the New York Times article on tracking on the web while NYT itself was using several trackers.
me551ah 7y ago
That's the core of Buddha's teaching right there. Craving leads to suffering/dissatisfaction and advertisement is all about increasing craving for a product. The more things you crave, the more things you cannot get. And the things you cannot get give rise to negative feelings like jealousy, sadness and even frustration.
infogulch 7y ago
Advertising is an attack on your psyche. Its very existence is an assumption that you should be dissatisfied with your life, and any advertising 'tricks' (only showing happy, beautiful people using it etc, aka 95% of the content of most advertisements) beyond purely factual statements about the product are explicitly designed to hijack every possible unconscious bias in their target audience to make them want it. Sure, if you are concentrating and paying attention to the effect an ad has on you and the tricks it's using to manipulate you, you can pretty easily analyze and counteract the effect. But can you keep that up for every moment of every day, ever vigilant resisting the imposition of another's will onto yours, wriggling into your mind one tiny crack at a time? Don't blink.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Put on the expletive glasses: https://youtu.be/yjw_DuNkOUw https://youtu.be/yjw_DuNkOUw
- bluntfang 7y ago
  >you can pretty easily analyze and counteract the effect. How? From my previous research I've found that it's one of those things that even if you know you're being tricked, it still affects your decision making.
  - infogulch 7y ago
    I agree, but I've seen people insist otherwise. s/can pretty easily/may be able to/ is more reasonable I guess, but the point of that sentence is that even if you can perfectly counter it, can you do it perfectly forever?
cyorir 7y ago
I find it just a bit funny that when I clicked on the link to an article titled, "advertising makes us unhappy," the first thing that happened is that an ad popped up to cover the whole page.
jacobsimon 7y ago
The irony of seeing a popup ad on HBR immediately when clicking on this link.
mhb 7y ago
Since they're smart, I'll assume that they somehow controlled for the cause of the lower life satisfaction not being the ads but exposure to the types of media which display ads. ?
bduerst 7y ago
Title is misleading - the inverse correlation is between advertising spending and life satisfaction. This could be indicative of ads causing unhappiness, but it could also be indicative of increased social media use, which also causes unhappiness.
sidhantgandhi 7y ago
The first thing I see when I click the link: ADVERTISEMENT pop up.
kaffeemitsahne 7y ago
For a few weeks now, the billboards (including video billboards...) at train stations in the Netherlands are blank, due to a legal issue[1]. I take the train multiple times a week and I think it's very pleasant. Unfortunately it won't last. [1] There was a bid held between two ad companies, a third company sued because they wanted to get included in the bid, too.
pascalxus 7y ago
I have a hard time relating to these findings. Advertisement almost never works on me. And, the few times it does work on me, I'm actually quite glad and appreciative because I only buy products I really want or really need. If I look at all my credit card, amazon and ebay purchases for the last several years, which i do often, i see it's just the things I need/want: gas, maintenance, groceries a few times going out to eat, etc. almost 0 merchandise, those things don't make me happier. It's pretty rare that I see an appealing advertisement (to me). but it does happen. ads don't really say much about the product. but, I do find them interesting because they say a huge amount about segments of our population: their hopes, their dreams, their perceptions, how they want to be seen, how much they care what others think, etc. it's a great case study for humanity.
- dibujaron 7y ago
  "Advertising doesn't work on me" is a lie that nearly everyone tells themselves. Advertisers love this. Ads rarely makes anyone rush out to go buy x out of the blue, but if someone is choosing between x product and y product, they're much more likely to pick x if has been advertised to them before. The substance of the ad is almost irrelevant; just because they've heard the name of x repeatedly before, they're much more likely to choose it.
  - pascalxus 7y ago
    Your might be right about most people. (advertisers love to tell this to their CEO but they've been wrong about this before - just look at the 20 million dollar case study with Ebay and their wasted ad spend on google ads). But, it really doesn't work on me 99.9% of the time. I know because I review all my spending habits and I can clearly see 1/2 of the products I buy don't even advertise. Ever seen an ad for cucumbers or tomatoes or other real food? or rotten robbies gas station? i have no idea what label is on my clothes. etc. And even on the rare occasions when it does work, the vast majority of the ads still are completely wasted. How many times have I seen an ad for metromile, when I'm already a happy customer of theirs. their targetting must be awful. Sometimes I use the product because I'm forced to: like when sharebuilder got bought out by etrade. how many times will I see the completely useless etrade ads over my lifetime? i mean I'm already their customer (by default), so all their ad dollars are completely wasted.
darthreid 7y ago
The true irony of having to close an ad before being able to read this article
hirako2000 7y ago
Do we really need research to confirm this?
screye 7y ago
One pretty tangential anecdote. My university enforced a no-laptop-no-internet rule (back in the 2011, 2G internet era in India) for our Freshman year. It was the single best year of my life. Me, a person who had grown up on and shaped by the internet, quickly realized how little of it mattered to my happiness after a few days away from it. It made me realize how subjective things like happiness and satisfaction are. Especially given that I had already been exposed to the opulence of things on offer growing up on the internet. But, the second it stopped being shoved in my face incessantly, my priorities realigned and I started finding happiness and satisfaction in other, more local things. Coming full circle, the second we entered our sophomore year we got high speed internet and laptops. People just as quickly reverted to their old selves, all while lamenting how they miss how things were in the freshmen year.
denkmoon 7y ago
Removing ads from my life is a personal crusade. Psychologically manipulative garbage.
sologoub 7y ago
> If I see this $10,000 watch and then look at my watch, which I probably paid about $150 for, I might think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” That entire paragraph made me really sad and the quote is probably the saddest part. People actually think like this, and it’s unclear what, if anything, can be done to help.
emddudley 7y ago
So what you're saying is that I should stop visiting levels.fyi ...?

453 points by jrepinc 7y ago

I remember a while back seeing an ad for smart toilets. Somewhat intrigued, I googled for them and found that a good many of them cost several grand. I remember thinking "who the hell are they advertising to?" No average person is going to spend that money on a smart toilet, and I'm sure even the upper middle class has better purchases to make in that price range. Also I've noticed everything in commercials is so idyllic. A nice house in a beautiful setting, with a functional family. People just buying each other cars as Christmas gifts. It's kinda distressing to realize that most people, including myself will never have this (in part, because I dont think it exists)

jbob2000 7y ago
There are people in the middle class that I call "uni-purchasers". They buy one very expensive thing, and that's their "thing" that they spend their limited amounts of money on. They give up on medium-level experiences and draw everything else to a minimum to get the thing they really want.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  When I started my first business, a mentor gave me advice along these lines: identify the two or three pieces of equipment that are truly key to your business, and go high-end on those. Everything else should be as cheap as possible.
  - jbob2000 7y ago
    Those types of goods usually aren't mass advertised, e.g. high end music or video gear, mechanic's tools, etc. Peleton bikes, smart toilets, diamond rings, high-end purses, and so on are all things you can get the cheaper versions of and still get roughly the same experience.
    - aabbcc1241 7y ago
      Sometime, people choose a product/band over the alternatives solely because their choice is more expensive, so others will appreciate or jealous on them...
  - tartoran 7y ago
    Generally I agree. It is important to know though, that there's a thin line between high end and luxury-brand where you pay a lot of money for the latter.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      True. By "high end", what's meant is genuinely high quality, not necessarily flashy or luxury brands.
- rapnie 7y ago
  Smart toilet not the best example, but I can get tremendous joy from buying something high quality and knowing that this thing could last my entire lifetime. Buying that product once forever removes my need to crave for an upgrade (unless it breaks, of course). My 98yr grandma inspired this behavior. She bought her kitchen utensils as a young mother, and used them forever. Her wooden cutting board is now so worn, that its thinned and almost breaks in half. Yet not a hair on her head would want to replace it until that happens.
nkrisc 7y ago
That stuff exists, it just costs a lot of money. Well, except for a functional family, money can't buy that. Want a house that looks clean and perfectly staged all the time? Hire a full-time cleaner to come every day and sweep, pick up, do the dishes, etc. The lie in those commercials is that their target audience can never afford something like that. So in a sense, you're right, they're showing "you" what you can never have.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  You can also keep your house clean and perfectly staged all the time by cleaning it yourself. It's not impossible, or even difficult.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Well, duh. I kinda thought that went without saying. But it's work. And if you have 4 kids and 3600 sqft McMansion that aspires to be one of those beautiful, large homes in the commercial with the car with over-sized bow out front, you'll spend most your time doing that. But that's not what people want. They want a perfect, clean home and to be able to spend all their free time on leisure activities, just like the commercial promised them.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Yes, but what are you giving up to do that?
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      Video games and Netflix, for most people. I really don't think the trade-off between Netflix time and house cleanliness is a false perception synthesized by advertisers.
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        Netflix and videogsmes are very passive activities, and time cleaning your house presumably isn't fungible with them, from a mental energy perspective. I'm not in the habit of watching TV, but my sister is a good example: over the course of her medical education and early career, her Netflix addiction has tracked pretty directly with how mentally exhausting her workload is. If she was at full-enough capacity during Netflix time to be cleaning house, she'd be spending it on one of her hobbies, or reading.
itronitron 7y ago
That is a lot, however I can see a smart toilet being a reasonable cost during a bathroom renovation (I assume you are referring to the type that wash your behind and are standard in Japan.) Although since a toilet is an easy thing to install afterwards, unlike bath, sinks, and shower, then the purchase may just be delayed a year (and then another year...)

logjammin 7y ago

I spent a lot of time in Vermont many years ago. I'd been there a little while, blissfully unaware, before someone told me "yeah, they banned billboards here in the sixties - you didn't notice?" I hadn't consciously noticed, no, but I'd spent my time there until that comment driving around stunned at how beautiful the place was. Now I knew the reason for that (well, partial reason - billboards or not, it's a pretty part of the world, especially in summer and fall). I've thought a lot about that billboard ban ever since, and I'm convinced it enabled a measure of calm in me. I'm not sure how much I buy the study talked about in the OP's article - spurious correlation strikes me as a possibility - but the intuition about advertising is spot-on, I think. It'd cool if our societies had more ad-free spaces.

glitchc 7y ago
Whoa, I never realized that. I live north of the border and drive through Vermont every so often to visit family. Now that you mention it, there are zero billboards on the highways.
- logjammin 7y ago
  Hell yeah! Cool to be able to share that eureka moment with others who know the area. Spread the word.
  - interestica 7y ago
    You've made me want to visit Vermont.
    - sylk 7y ago
      They have a remote workers program.
andyjsong 7y ago
This is why I take 280 instead of 101 when traveling to and from SF to South Bay even though it's slightly longer.

itronitron 7y ago

that's how you know that the advertising is working

wpietri 7y ago
Exactly. This is classic POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... People mainly buy things to solve problems, to end negative feelings. So if you want people to buy things, the obvious solution is to create negative feelings that can be ended by spending money on your product. The most obvious example is of course addictive products. Just when we were finally weaning society of nicotine, Juul has been very successful in creating a new generation of addicts. But I think they dynamic is true more broadly. Feeling low in social status? Buy this expensive car, these expensive clothes, this expensive watch! And if you aren't feeling like that, let's show you enough fancy people with fancy things until you do feel bad. Social status isn't your weakness? Well we have plenty of creative teams who will find something we can make you feel bad about. And for those who are skeptical, I encourage you to read about Edward Bernays, the "father of public relations", who took his inspiration from war propaganda and applied it to manipulating consumer behavior: http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393 http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...
- nickelcitymario 7y ago
  Public relations != advertising. Ed Bernays != spokesperson for all PR professionals. There are shady people in every industry.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > Public relations != advertising. Not a distinction I care to make. The problems with both are fundamentally the same. > Ed Bernays != spokesperson for all PR professionals. Okay, but all PR professionals and advertisers are trying to manipulate people. That is literally the job. Everyone else in the industry has the same goals--Bernays may have been willing to do more unscrupulous things to achieve those goals, but the goals are fundamentally unscrupulous. > There are shady people in every industry. But some industries, the purpose of the industry itself is shady. Advertising and PR are such industries.

banads 7y ago

Isn't that the primary goal of most advertising? To create a dissatisfaction in people in such a way that they're driven to buy your product in an attempt to fill that void?

Juliate 7y ago
It is.
nck4222 7y ago
That question is addressed in the article: "Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one."
- banads 7y ago
  I guess I just think it's funny that we need scientific studies for blatantly disingenuous claims: "their task is to simply provide information and in that way they raise human well-being." It's like doing a scientific study on the common claim of advertisers that "the internet would not exist without advertising".
  - nck4222 7y ago
    The research wasn't done to test a "blatantly disingenuous" claim, it was done to determine the effect of advertising on mood. They're able to quantify how much of an effect it has on happiness as well. "Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That’s about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed." That's a pretty significant amount, and if confirmed could certainly be used as an argument to regulate advertising, or a way for therapists to help improve the lives of their patients, or in many additional ways I haven't thought of in the 30 seconds I've spent thinking about it. I wouldn't be so quick to be dismissive of "blatantly obvious" scientific studies.

xtracto 7y ago

This reminds me of an anecdote a friend told me: This friend dedicates his time in going to very rural areas/towns here in Mexico to implement government programs. At some point in the past he got to a town were the cantina had just gotten the only TV in town... apparently people in the town were generally happy, and they had everything they needed... so in their view they were not poor. But once they started watching TV, they started seeing the Nikes, the fridges, the trips to Europe and all that "stuff" that they couldn't get... and there they started to ask why couldnt they get all that and thus started feeling poor. Amazing what advertising can do for perceived "needs"

banads 7y ago
Another personal anecdote: once I stopped watching TV I stopped feeling self conscious about driving a 10+ year old car, and no longer yearned to buy a new one.
- chapium 7y ago
  That helps explain how much advertising is done for durable goods that we only buy every X years.
- Franciscouzo 7y ago
  Driving a newish car is a pretty good idea though, they are generally way safer.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    If you are talking about one from the 80s probably yes, 2009 not so much.
    - theptip 7y ago
      I don't think this is correct. A lot of the new driver assistance technologies are having a significant effect on safety: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/22/new-report-shows-how-many-accidents-injuries-collision-avoidance-systems-prevent.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/22/new-report-shows-how-many-ac... These features are new in the last 10 years, some are new in the last couple years, and they are continually improving.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

the goal of advertising is to make you want something you don't have. QED

goatinaboat 7y ago
Something you don’t need, FTFY.
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
Using advertising to create demand is only a tiny part of the advertising market, and arguably the worst way to spend your ad budget. Most advertising is to maintain your market share in already established and very competitive markets. E.g., Coca-Cola plastering their logo everywhere to prevent Pepsi from doing the same. It's certainly not to convince those who don't drink Coke to start doing so.
- darkarmani 7y ago
  > Coca-Cola plastering their logo everywhere to prevent Pepsi from doing the same. Why would Pepsi do want to do it? Solely to prevent coca-cola from doing it? If it isn't to convince people to drink Pepsi for those who don't drink Pepsi, why would it matter if they did Pepsi instead of Coca-cola?
  - asdff 7y ago
    Because, if you glance at a pepsi logo on a billboard in the morning, you are more likely to grab a pepsi than a coke out of the cooler at the store in the afternoon. Suddenly, your eyeballs become an arms race, and here we are today.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  It seems like as a society if we agreed not to have advertising, we would save both companies (b|m)illions of dollars. This isn't an argument for advertising, it's an argument that advertising is an infectious disease: once one company in an industry starts advertising, the others have to advertise to compete. And that hurts consumers because every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar that comes out of the pockets of consumers and is not spent on improving the product.

nabla9 7y ago

New animated ads and videos in the street are just horrible. Eyes follow movement automatically. You have to consciously avert you gaze constantly to not look into them. Two hours in the city and you start feeling tired from the cognitive load and the resistance towards impulse buy decreases a little. * Walking on the street looking down is the only defense in the streets. * Online only ad-blockers keep you sane.

HONEST_ANNIE 7y ago
The book 'The Space Merchants' (1952) from Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth describes this type world. World is run by ad companies (FB, Google,...) who select political leaders. People have to be careful on the street not to be trapped by highly aggressive ads.
- r00fus 7y ago
  In fiction I also liked Richard K Morgan's take on holographic advertising in Altered Carbon.
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Rugged screens that can be built right into pavement are coming I'm sure.
- asdff 7y ago
  Waiting for unskippable ads that pause if you take your eyes off the screen. The tech is already there now that we all have face scanners in our cellphones.

JohnFen 7y ago

This makes sense, given that a very large amount of (most?) advertising intentionally attempts to make you feel bad about something, in order to make you more likely to buy their "solution".

nickelcitymario 7y ago

I'm gonna take the contrarian viewpoint here. Full disclosure: I'm in advertising. The researcher states that increasing "aspiration" (their term) leads to dissatisfaction and more unhappiness. Sure! But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. I don't disagree that ambition and aspiration can make a person unhappy. But it's also what drives literally all human progress. So unless you believe primitive man was living their best life and that everything that has happened since then is a regression (and certainly some people hold that view), I find it hard to swallow that aspirations are a bad thing. Yes, there's a negative to them. But virtually every good thing people have ever done was because of their aspirations. Therefore I don't agree with the notion that advertising is inherently bad because it raises people's expectations for themselves. I consider that a good thing even if it comes at the cost of a decrease in personal happiness. HOWEVER (I can feel your hatred), there's a difference between motivating people to aspire to better things vs simply making them feel shitty about themselves so they'll buy your crap. ex: When a fashion brand shows impossibly attractive people wearing their clothes, they're not showing us how to live better lives. They're simply making us feel shitty for not being models, and then hoping we'll make the conclusion that we'd look better if we bought those clothes. That doesn't make anyone's life better. That's just a shit sandwich all around. ex: When a tech company shows us a bunch of people being really productive using their products, it can inspire us to want to be more productive. If their product truly can make us more productive (like the invention of the PC... no reasonable person would argue that PCs didn't make us more productive, right?), then that's great. ex: Pharmaceutical drugs have been a fantastic boon for humanity. We rely on them constantly to extend our lives and improve our quality of life. Yet some (many?) drugs are nowhere near as beneficial as they are advertised (I'm looking at you, Fentanyl). So I think the question is simply: does the product actually improve our lives in the way the advertising suggests? Or is it just a bait-and-switch? Advertising isn't inherently bad, any more than aspirations are inherently bad. It boils down to what's being advertised and how honest the ads are about it.

JohnFen 7y ago
> But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. Excluding fancy schools (which I believe aren't exactly a good thing), none of those things were inspired by "aspiration" in the sense being used here. They were inspired by genuine need. > I consider that a good thing even if it comes at the cost of a decrease in personal happiness. We could not possibly disagree more. I think it is straight-up immoral for anyone to intentionally make another's life worse in order to sell them stuff. > Advertising isn't inherently bad, any more than aspirations are inherently bad. It boils down to what's being advertised and how honest the ads are about it. We agree here. Advertising, in the form that advertisers tend cite to people who are critical of advertising (informing people about products) is not inherently bad. However, the vast majority of advertising isn't of that form at all. It's of the form of manipulating people instead. That's the sort of advertising that is terrible.

tombert 7y ago

I was the first person in my family to do the "cord cutting" thing, where I only had an Amazon Prime and Netflix account, and a bunch of DVDs and Blu-Rays (around 2012). People asked me why, and I said that I think it's dumb to pay money for advertisements, and that I think ads are bad for you. My brother-in-law is overall a smart guy, but he works at Taco Bell full-time, making minimum wage in NYC (~$15/hour). He decided that he needed the newest iPhone 11, presumably because of some good marketing, spent over a grand (through financing of course...ugh), and he'll spend the next year paying it off. I have nothing against the iPhone, I have one, but let's be honest here, do most people even benefit from the "newest" phones? He mostly watches YouTube and listens to music, and occasionally plays PUBG, all of which you could do on previous versions. He's also not some passionate photographer, so the fancier camera isn't going to make a huge difference.

taurath 7y ago
It’s to get rid of the shame he feels about having an older inferior phone, frequently from peers who’ve been exposed to advertising
- tartoran 7y ago
  I personally would feel quite ashamed to have the latest IPhone, I'd feel that I'd fallen prey to apple's marketing. I live pretty well with a 5 year old SE. For the same reason I refuse to wear visibly branded clothes and am not ashamed to buy some used items. Living frugally by choice gets you back some freedoms.
  - taurath 7y ago
    Certainly, but you're also a product of an environment which values that sort of self-expression. If every time you went and hung out with your friends they shamed you, saying you look homeless, you might think differently. Its certainly a sign of maturity to not really care about those things, but depending on your life trajectory different values will hit. And clearly, a lot of people value a new iphone. OTOH - its a device that you use for hours and hours a day, for entertainment, organization, communication, and a camera. Having a "better" one is a decent investment if it helps all those areas.

j45 7y ago

Reading this article made me think of how different you tn felt to use YouTube without ads. So much so that I'd consider paying a bit more to be free of search ads. And Twitter Ads.

cryptica 7y ago

Even if you yourself are not too directly affected by advertising, it can still affect your friends and family members. Collectively, it can create expectations and social pressure on you which makes your life less pleasant and more complicated than it needs to be.

ckosidows 7y ago

I think this video points out Epicurus' opinions on advertisement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3dLWwmDDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3dLWwmDDw. I don't have time to re-watch the video, but I remember the gist being that the _point_ of advertisements is to make you feel like you're missing out on something. If an ad can't make you feel that way, how will it sell you on its product? Someone who feels they have everything doesn't need to purchase anything to fill a need/want. Really it's simple when you think about it. Company wants to sell you a product. You think you don't need anything else in your life because you're content. Company tells you your life could be better with their product; therefore, your life is missing something (said product). You are no longer content until you have said product. It's nice to have evidence that supports an idea proposed centuries ago.

perfunctory 7y ago

Advertising is so pervasive in our lives that it’s become like water for fish - it is hard to imagine a world without ads. Even bigger problem with advertisement - it is (indirectly) driving climate change. Most likely we’d be happier and safer without ads. Sigh.

hogFeast 7y ago

This doesn't feel like a very scientific approach. Looking at national satisfaction and then national advertising spend...seems like there would be huge scope for bias regardless of how many controls you put in. In particular, something like individual wellbeing is just that...individual. Really very tricky (and as always you see the researcher give out ludicrously unjustified advice to individuals...if you go to a psychologist and tell them you are unhappy, they don't ask how many adverts you saw recently).

dpflan 7y ago

Could this help paint advertising as a public health problem?

swills 7y ago

Disappointed this thread has made it this long without this, so here it is: By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. -- Bill Hicks

kerkeslager 7y ago
I get that this is a comedian telling a joke. I also am one of the most anti-advertising people here: you can look through my post history to verify that. Still let's not tell people to kill themselves.

polskibus 7y ago

Adblockers make you happy!

NPMaxwell 7y ago

Write up of methodology & results: https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019E...

4ntonius8lock 7y ago

Having read the article, it seems they are concluding a causality that isn't necessarily there. The whole study is based on: there's a correlation between advertising spend per capita and life satisfaction between countries in Europe. Now that COULD mean advertising is making people unhappy. Or it could mean that people who are less satisfied tend to buy more crap and when people buy more crap they get more advertising. It's not as if advertisers are stupid. The researcher in the article even admits to this being a one off with no other studies backing his claim. Now what's more likely, he discovered something no one else has, or he misinterpreted the data?

throwawaymath 7y ago
I wish yours wasn't the only comment talking about this. It saddens me to see articles like this, where causation is imposed on correlation. Everyone "knows" correlation doesn't imply causation, but they only seem to know it in the sense of a student reciting it. They don't apply that knowledge critically. A single study of two things as complicated as advertising measurement and happiness/satisfaction, and the intuitively compelling conclusion is immediately embraced as the truth because it's "obvious." Edit: Again with the downvotes...come on HN. I'm not defending advertising, I'm criticizing the reporting on a study in a world which has a rampant replication crisis.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  The funny thing is, the most up voted comments on this topic don't even seem to be about the FA. They are mostly just 'generic advertising is bad comment/anecdote related to the title'. Another idea I had after reading the article is that advertising is more pervasive in big cities. From what I can recall, big city inhabitants tend to have a lower life satisfaction rating than smaller town dwellers. So countries with more urban dwellers might normally have more advertising and less life satisfaction... because big cities, not necessarily advertising. Also richer nations tend to be less happy, and by being richer have more advertising. There's a lot of ways to interpret the data. It's funny to see the group-think dynamic on display needed to make non relevant comments go up and comments related to the article be down-voted (which aren't even stating anything specific... you and I never even said 'it's this' just questioning 'maybe not that') Another super interesting thing that I glean from the down-votes is the bottom down view only when convenient. If you post on HN that tech companies are evil and conspiring against our privacy, people will say (IMO mostly rightly BTW) that it's mostly bottom up, with consumers CHOOSING bad options. But as soon as advertising comes in the mix, now the world is top down, with evil marketeers manipulating the masses anyway they want. To all the down-voters: your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer!

throwawaymath 7y ago

I can see a few compelling arguments for it, but personally I'd be very wary of concluding causation from this relationship. The two things are very complicated and have many confounding variables involved. I see it just as likely that the correlation is spurious, and people exposed to advertising have lower life satisfaction for a variety of complex reasons incidental to the ads themselves. Capitalism affords many opportunities for someone to be unhappy and unsatisfied; advertising may cause this or simply exacerbate what is already there. I'm disappointed with the way HBR reported this. The researchers are explicitly quoted as saying they found a "negative connection", which, yes, is an inverse correlation. No matter how intuitively compelling, you can't just extrapolate that to a conclusion of causation as the author of this article proceeded to do right in the introduction. Edit: Why is this being downvoted? Do you disagree with my point that we can't extrapolate causation from correlation, or do find my comment to be off topic?

kerkeslager 7y ago
Do you have an alternative hypothesis for why advertising would be inversely correlated with satisfaction? If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns. You did at one point say that advertising might not be causing the lower satisfaction, it might just be exacerbating other problems that cause lower satisfaction. While that possibility certainly warrants investigation to see what those other problems are, it doesn't have any implications for how we treat advertising: either way we should be seeking to decrease its influence on our lives.
- throwawaymath 7y ago
  > If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns. Nope! We shouldn't. Speculation is precisely what we should do! That's what a critical review of research involves. We should take this as excellent motivation for further research. It could be true, but we haven't done nearly enough work to conclude as much. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's uncertain, and it's strictly unscientific to proceed by assuming something uncertain is the truth just because it's intuitively compelling. Intuitively compelling narratives are very dangerous in science, because they make you believe you have a shortcut to the truth and they're vindicated right up until they aren't. It's not a good habit. Happiness is incredibly complicated. Contradicting evidence and results abound across studies of life satisfaction. Measuring the impact and success of advertising itself is highly complex; the researchers have shown this correlation under their current methodology. What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with a different conclusion? That's very possible, and we can't dismiss it. The researchers themselves hedge their claims and don't come out and say they've found causation. I don't really have a dog in the race with advertising. But I really despise this kind of reporting by HBR, because the result is threads like this one where people walk away with unproven "truths" that become part of the popular zeitgeist because they just seem to vindicate obvious beliefs. Today it's advertising, tomorrow it'll be something else. Given the replication crisis we're undergoing, we shouldn't take anything away from studies like this except that further research is required.

hristov 7y ago

When this topic comes up I like to remind people of the brilliant and under appreciated movie Roger Dodger. The main character in it is an advertising executive and he flat out said that his job is to convince people their lives sucked. First you have to convince someone their life sucks and then it is quite easy to convince them that the latest product will improve their lives. This is the way advertising works.

asdff 7y ago
Mad men is great, too; it's positioned right at the bellwether moment of market research and psychology taking over whimsy narratives in advertisement in the 1960s.

s0meone 7y ago

We should always be careful of drawing big conclusions based on observational studies...

newscracker 7y ago

It’s ironic that an article about advertising having an inverse correlation with life satisfaction thrusts a popup ad when the page is opened! sigh It reminded me of the New York Times article on tracking on the web while NYT itself was using several trackers.

me551ah 7y ago

That's the core of Buddha's teaching right there. Craving leads to suffering/dissatisfaction and advertisement is all about increasing craving for a product. The more things you crave, the more things you cannot get. And the things you cannot get give rise to negative feelings like jealousy, sadness and even frustration.

infogulch 7y ago

Advertising is an attack on your psyche. Its very existence is an assumption that you should be dissatisfied with your life, and any advertising 'tricks' (only showing happy, beautiful people using it etc, aka 95% of the content of most advertisements) beyond purely factual statements about the product are explicitly designed to hijack every possible unconscious bias in their target audience to make them want it. Sure, if you are concentrating and paying attention to the effect an ad has on you and the tricks it's using to manipulate you, you can pretty easily analyze and counteract the effect. But can you keep that up for every moment of every day, ever vigilant resisting the imposition of another's will onto yours, wriggling into your mind one tiny crack at a time? Don't blink.

ohithereyou 7y ago
Put on the expletive glasses: https://youtu.be/yjw_DuNkOUw https://youtu.be/yjw_DuNkOUw
bluntfang 7y ago
>you can pretty easily analyze and counteract the effect. How? From my previous research I've found that it's one of those things that even if you know you're being tricked, it still affects your decision making.
- infogulch 7y ago
  I agree, but I've seen people insist otherwise. s/can pretty easily/may be able to/ is more reasonable I guess, but the point of that sentence is that even if you can perfectly counter it, can you do it perfectly forever?

cyorir 7y ago

I find it just a bit funny that when I clicked on the link to an article titled, "advertising makes us unhappy," the first thing that happened is that an ad popped up to cover the whole page.

jacobsimon 7y ago

The irony of seeing a popup ad on HBR immediately when clicking on this link.

mhb 7y ago

Since they're smart, I'll assume that they somehow controlled for the cause of the lower life satisfaction not being the ads but exposure to the types of media which display ads. ?

bduerst 7y ago

Title is misleading - the inverse correlation is between advertising spending and life satisfaction. This could be indicative of ads causing unhappiness, but it could also be indicative of increased social media use, which also causes unhappiness.

sidhantgandhi 7y ago

The first thing I see when I click the link: ADVERTISEMENT pop up.

kaffeemitsahne 7y ago

For a few weeks now, the billboards (including video billboards...) at train stations in the Netherlands are blank, due to a legal issue[1]. I take the train multiple times a week and I think it's very pleasant. Unfortunately it won't last. [1] There was a bid held between two ad companies, a third company sued because they wanted to get included in the bid, too.

pascalxus 7y ago

I have a hard time relating to these findings. Advertisement almost never works on me. And, the few times it does work on me, I'm actually quite glad and appreciative because I only buy products I really want or really need. If I look at all my credit card, amazon and ebay purchases for the last several years, which i do often, i see it's just the things I need/want: gas, maintenance, groceries a few times going out to eat, etc. almost 0 merchandise, those things don't make me happier. It's pretty rare that I see an appealing advertisement (to me). but it does happen. ads don't really say much about the product. but, I do find them interesting because they say a huge amount about segments of our population: their hopes, their dreams, their perceptions, how they want to be seen, how much they care what others think, etc. it's a great case study for humanity.

dibujaron 7y ago
"Advertising doesn't work on me" is a lie that nearly everyone tells themselves. Advertisers love this. Ads rarely makes anyone rush out to go buy x out of the blue, but if someone is choosing between x product and y product, they're much more likely to pick x if has been advertised to them before. The substance of the ad is almost irrelevant; just because they've heard the name of x repeatedly before, they're much more likely to choose it.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  Your might be right about most people. (advertisers love to tell this to their CEO but they've been wrong about this before - just look at the 20 million dollar case study with Ebay and their wasted ad spend on google ads). But, it really doesn't work on me 99.9% of the time. I know because I review all my spending habits and I can clearly see 1/2 of the products I buy don't even advertise. Ever seen an ad for cucumbers or tomatoes or other real food? or rotten robbies gas station? i have no idea what label is on my clothes. etc. And even on the rare occasions when it does work, the vast majority of the ads still are completely wasted. How many times have I seen an ad for metromile, when I'm already a happy customer of theirs. their targetting must be awful. Sometimes I use the product because I'm forced to: like when sharebuilder got bought out by etrade. how many times will I see the completely useless etrade ads over my lifetime? i mean I'm already their customer (by default), so all their ad dollars are completely wasted.

darthreid 7y ago

The true irony of having to close an ad before being able to read this article

hirako2000 7y ago

Do we really need research to confirm this?

screye 7y ago

One pretty tangential anecdote. My university enforced a no-laptop-no-internet rule (back in the 2011, 2G internet era in India) for our Freshman year. It was the single best year of my life. Me, a person who had grown up on and shaped by the internet, quickly realized how little of it mattered to my happiness after a few days away from it. It made me realize how subjective things like happiness and satisfaction are. Especially given that I had already been exposed to the opulence of things on offer growing up on the internet. But, the second it stopped being shoved in my face incessantly, my priorities realigned and I started finding happiness and satisfaction in other, more local things. Coming full circle, the second we entered our sophomore year we got high speed internet and laptops. People just as quickly reverted to their old selves, all while lamenting how they miss how things were in the freshmen year.

denkmoon 7y ago

Removing ads from my life is a personal crusade. Psychologically manipulative garbage.

sologoub 7y ago

> If I see this $10,000 watch and then look at my watch, which I probably paid about $150 for, I might think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” That entire paragraph made me really sad and the quote is probably the saddest part. People actually think like this, and it’s unclear what, if anything, can be done to help.

emddudley 7y ago

So what you're saying is that I should stop visiting levels.fyi ...?