11 ms·

The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age (2018) [pdf]

80 points by skanderbm 6y ago

scribu 6y ago
The paper proposes a ban on almost all advertising: > It is hard to believe that as late as the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) viewed non-false, non-misleading advertising as anticompetitive conduct capable of violating the antitrust laws. > Advertising has the power, through repetition and brand image creation, to induce consumers to buy things that they do not really want, to the disadvantage of competitors selling the things that consumers would otherwise buy.
- glial 6y ago
  Great. To those ringing their hands about the death of capitalism they fear will follow: if capitalism is premised on buying things you don’t need, destroying the planet in the process, maybe we can do better?
  - mas3god 6y ago
    Maybe it wouldnt be a problem if we didnt have a central bank which makes it irrational to save money.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Capitalism is not premised on buying things you don't need. Capitalism has been invigorated by people buying things they don't need. Capitalism has a very different premise than this. When it ran into problems capitalists (particularly in the US and their boosters) opted to double down on just about all of its negatives, rather than consider real alternatives.
blakesterz 6y ago
This paper is from 2018. They argue the FTC needs to put the hammer down in different ways now that advertising has changed so much. "Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."
ArtWomb 6y ago
>>> an age in which 2 of the 5 largest tech firms in the US earn 90% of revenue by selling advertising I feel as if we are right on the cusp of alternatives to ad-sponsered free internet. Web Crypto Mining being one of the more obvious methods to harvest spare compute cycles of peer meshes.
- ben_w 6y ago
  One thing I’ve never ever understood about crypto mining is: why it can’t do something productive with all the CPU cycles, instead of just finding inputs to hash functions such that they give round-number outputs? Like running quantum chemistry simulations to find new superconductors or treatments for illnesses? It’s not like cloud computing is a zero-cost resource, and things like SETI@home predate Bitcoin.
  - r721 6y ago
    There exist some efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://gridcoin.us/wiki/faq.html https://gridcoin.us/wiki/faq.html
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Somebody else will need to fill in details, but I do recall reading there's a general argument that if your proof-of-work compute provides something else of value as a side effect (e.g. "quantum chemistry simulations"), it stops being a good proof-of-work scheme. I can also imagine that anything non-random is vulnerable to a discovery of a more efficient method of computing the same thing, and the first person to exploit such a method could take over the chain.
    - rabuse 6y ago
      This is correct. Without the brute-forcing nature of finding a solution for a block, it becomes trivial to game. There may be a hybrid approach to it (PoS), but they haven't proven themselves yet in a large scale.
ChaitanyaSai 6y ago
Interesting argument. Worth keeping in mind that Bloomberg spent over half a Billion dollars to win American Samoa. People seem to give advertising undue credit (like with the Russian election influence idea). Advertising can only burnish your product, not change the story entirely. And perhaps, there's a case to be made that the ad itself is a product designed to make you feel better by being part of tribe of consumers. If the argument is that this is unduly influential, then you'd have to start by banning religious evangelism
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  >> Advertising can only burnish your product, not change the story entirely With respect, it is completely the opposite. Advertising IS storytelling and adtech has created the opportunity to tell, retell and invent new stories at a rate and with an impact that has no precedent. Any set of facts (or non-facts), and any storyline- especially false ones which "spread" much more quickly- are promulgated by digital ad campaigns of infinite variety and infinite precision, and create the social disintegration the US especially is experiencing. Advertising is asymmetric, and all it takes is one quip, one framing, and the mind of one person is changed. The cost of finding that one effective personalized message has never been so low. Products- physical, digital, and "people"- have their stories- in the minds of specific target individuals- changed (nudged) in a moment. One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted. The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level. Similarly, Bloomberg's spend should not be evaluated on what it failed to do, but on what it succeeded at. And I agree (implied) that banning advertising is implausible. Best wishes.
  - ChaitanyaSai 6y ago
    Absolutely agree; advertising is storytelling. And storytelling is what makes the object of storytelling memorable. >> One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted. I am skeptical. The only cases I can think of where it has worked (religions and cults) are ones where resonant storytelling is all there is. The power of collective belief and shared meaning outweighs any contradictory facts. In extreme cases, the facts themselves are denied (the fossil evidence is a lie). In most cases, memorable storytelling nudges you to pick one of out essentially similar choices (from coffees to smartphones). >>The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level. This is an interesting point. I'd love to see some objective study looking at who actually changed their beliefs after coming across these hyper-personalized political ads. Getting the already disaffected to reinforce their beliefs is one thing, and getting people to actually shift their beliefs to the other camp is another.
tifadg1 6y ago
I block all ads everywhere. I'm not opposed to paying for services I really need, but so far I've found nothing I couldn't do without. Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something that's not crap. Be it a question about daily life, or a product review, or a tech related thing. Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%. But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?
- etempleton 6y ago
  I think you and many others block ads because on many websites they are implemented so aggressively that it renders the website near unusable. This aggressive implementation is, in a way, a manipulation of the intention of ad tech and ruins how well results can be measured. Pop-up ads create false clicks, numerous ads on a page lessen the value of any given ad impression, etc. The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price, which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are added to websites just to break even.
  - hammock 6y ago
    >The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. That's where we started. It's a solution, but only for one side of the market. It leaves a lot of potential inventory and revenue on the table.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    Maybe, but I think part of the solution is to convince more people to block ads. Most people I know still don't have an adblocker, even though modern ad blockers have been around over 15 years. I think they need to get over the fact that it's not immoral to block ads when those ads not only destroy the experience of the internet but also are often outright scams that Google and the like are complicit with. If the punishment for having overly aggressive and deceptive ads was that the average person blocks the ads, the bar for where ads start to lose money becomes far lower. Most legitimate content creators these days take subscriptions directly, have preroll sponsor ads, or sell merch. If ads make up the majority of the money you take in, what you're peddling probably isn't worth much on its own.
etempleton 6y ago
"Today, consumers can get more product information by reading "add to cart" pages on Amazon, or online product reviews on any number of platforms, than they can get from viewing advertisements on bill-boards or television, or through the advertising links placed by Facebook in its feeds and Google at points all across the web." This creates its own set of problems. Companies looking to sell directly to consumers through their own website lose a powerful way of promoting their product to consumers giving entrenched retailers more power and more control over what is sold to consumers. Does Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. not promote certain types of products over other, either subtly or overtly? What constitutes advertising? I don't think anyone likes misleading or intrusive advertising, but to say that advertising is obsolete is either incredibly naive or put forth in intellectual bad faith.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That quote made me laugh hard. To everyone around me, I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation. Reviews are thoroughly gamed, and have been for many years now. That applies both to vendor-owned stores, where you can assume they're all heavily moderated or fake by default, as well as marketplaces like E-bay, where bribing customers to remove negative reviews or give better ratings is a standard business practice for sellers. Product descriptions - those are always purposefully misleading. Hyping up the positives, hiding negatives, avoiding to provide useful metrics, and doing everything possible to prevent you from comparing between alternatives. The best way I've found so far is to look for communities of people using a given product category, and read up opinions. Not review sites - these are, with few exceptions, just ads in sheep's clothing. But smaller, purpose-oriented communities are much harder to game thoroughly. So personally, unless the product category I'm exploring has a recent review on WireCutter (in which case I just buy one of their top picks; never been burned this way), the first thing I do is googling "<product category> site:reddit.com" and do my research there.
  - hmmazoids 6y ago
    So you never use Amazon for product discovery or evaluation? You've never gone to a store and said "I wonder what Amazon prices that at and what people say about it?"
libertine 6y ago
I honestly think this is a bit of a naive proposition, and an "obsolete" point of view, specially when you factor in the most obvious thing: Advertisement, per definition, is self evident. You have way more "less obvious" marketing tools, like product placement, but even those that are subtle, are in set in a context - like a movie or a tv show. I think it's way more troublesome the obscure parts of what the paper claims to be "product information" - that is where true deception and manipulation occurs. This is where your defenses and your guard are down. You don't know you're being manipulated, even if it's a simple paid 5 star review with no review text, it's a deceptive bias. Another example, is undisclosed paid promotions/reviews from influencers. People would be better off acknowledging that advertising works, and that it is present in media, and we should be critical of it, which I believe in 2020, we're aware of it. Else if you're going that path, then you can start make monopolies on media and information distribution that arguably serve any agenda - even if that agenda is to gather more share/views/audiences, and you end up banning media. Because that's the truth - the majority of endeavors that are distributed in media have an agenda, and try to manipulated the audiences in some way. With this said, I'm not saying that all advertising is fine, in fact, this is probably the hardest times for authorities and regulators to control, and fine, abuses. You just need to log on Facebook and see illegal claims being made in advertising, things that would never be allowed on TV/Radio/Outdoors. Yet they generate massive amounts of reach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  The article is written by lawyers. It's 72 pages long. Did you read it, or just assume that they wouldn't cover the subtleties and nuances you describe above?
  - libertine 6y ago
    Yes - it's 72 pages long where in most pages half of it are references. I confess I didn't check the references, in part because of laziness, other part because I gave them the benefit of the doubt with regards to the references they used. >or just assume that they wouldn't cover the subtleties and nuances you describe above? You tell me.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
> the view that prevails today: that advertising does no more than convey useful product information to consumers. Prevails in which part of society? The vast majority of the few ads that I see at least attempt to be at least mildly misleading by at giving the impression that the product is somehow quite different from competing products but without actually spelling out what the difference really is or whether there really is a difference.
jariel 6y ago
I like reading these by my gosh man, they are always written by people with seeming no material insight into either the practical, strategic or aspirational aspects of branding and marketing. It's pretty hard to take any of it very seriously. What's just as shocking is how naive most of the tech world is in terms of their understanding of what marketing even is, let alone advertising. Similarity for finance and financial concepts. Advertising and Marketing is a complicated thing, but it's part of the structure of business and it's far from irrelevant.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Just because something is complicated, doesn't mean it's ethical. And in fact, pointing out to how complicated and deep the domain of marketing is serves only to distract from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and immoral, and has disastrous consequences for society.
  - jariel 6y ago
    " from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and immoral, and has disastrous consequences for society." This is absurdly false.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I believe it's true. I have a pretty extensive list of reasons here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

80 points by skanderbm 6y ago

The paper proposes a ban on almost all advertising: > It is hard to believe that as late as the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) viewed non-false, non-misleading advertising as anticompetitive conduct capable of violating the antitrust laws. > Advertising has the power, through repetition and brand image creation, to induce consumers to buy things that they do not really want, to the disadvantage of competitors selling the things that consumers would otherwise buy.

glial 6y ago
Great. To those ringing their hands about the death of capitalism they fear will follow: if capitalism is premised on buying things you don’t need, destroying the planet in the process, maybe we can do better?
- mas3god 6y ago
  Maybe it wouldnt be a problem if we didnt have a central bank which makes it irrational to save money.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Capitalism is not premised on buying things you don't need. Capitalism has been invigorated by people buying things they don't need. Capitalism has a very different premise than this. When it ran into problems capitalists (particularly in the US and their boosters) opted to double down on just about all of its negatives, rather than consider real alternatives.

blakesterz 6y ago

This paper is from 2018. They argue the FTC needs to put the hammer down in different ways now that advertising has changed so much. "Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."

ArtWomb 6y ago

>>> an age in which 2 of the 5 largest tech firms in the US earn 90% of revenue by selling advertising I feel as if we are right on the cusp of alternatives to ad-sponsered free internet. Web Crypto Mining being one of the more obvious methods to harvest spare compute cycles of peer meshes.

ben_w 6y ago
One thing I’ve never ever understood about crypto mining is: why it can’t do something productive with all the CPU cycles, instead of just finding inputs to hash functions such that they give round-number outputs? Like running quantum chemistry simulations to find new superconductors or treatments for illnesses? It’s not like cloud computing is a zero-cost resource, and things like SETI@home predate Bitcoin.
- r721 6y ago
  There exist some efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin https://gridcoin.us/wiki/faq.html https://gridcoin.us/wiki/faq.html
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Somebody else will need to fill in details, but I do recall reading there's a general argument that if your proof-of-work compute provides something else of value as a side effect (e.g. "quantum chemistry simulations"), it stops being a good proof-of-work scheme. I can also imagine that anything non-random is vulnerable to a discovery of a more efficient method of computing the same thing, and the first person to exploit such a method could take over the chain.
  - rabuse 6y ago
    This is correct. Without the brute-forcing nature of finding a solution for a block, it becomes trivial to game. There may be a hybrid approach to it (PoS), but they haven't proven themselves yet in a large scale.

ChaitanyaSai 6y ago

Interesting argument. Worth keeping in mind that Bloomberg spent over half a Billion dollars to win American Samoa. People seem to give advertising undue credit (like with the Russian election influence idea). Advertising can only burnish your product, not change the story entirely. And perhaps, there's a case to be made that the ad itself is a product designed to make you feel better by being part of tribe of consumers. If the argument is that this is unduly influential, then you'd have to start by banning religious evangelism

jonahbenton 6y ago
>> Advertising can only burnish your product, not change the story entirely With respect, it is completely the opposite. Advertising IS storytelling and adtech has created the opportunity to tell, retell and invent new stories at a rate and with an impact that has no precedent. Any set of facts (or non-facts), and any storyline- especially false ones which "spread" much more quickly- are promulgated by digital ad campaigns of infinite variety and infinite precision, and create the social disintegration the US especially is experiencing. Advertising is asymmetric, and all it takes is one quip, one framing, and the mind of one person is changed. The cost of finding that one effective personalized message has never been so low. Products- physical, digital, and "people"- have their stories- in the minds of specific target individuals- changed (nudged) in a moment. One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted. The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level. Similarly, Bloomberg's spend should not be evaluated on what it failed to do, but on what it succeeded at. And I agree (implied) that banning advertising is implausible. Best wishes.
- ChaitanyaSai 6y ago
  Absolutely agree; advertising is storytelling. And storytelling is what makes the object of storytelling memorable. >> One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted. I am skeptical. The only cases I can think of where it has worked (religions and cults) are ones where resonant storytelling is all there is. The power of collective belief and shared meaning outweighs any contradictory facts. In extreme cases, the facts themselves are denied (the fossil evidence is a lie). In most cases, memorable storytelling nudges you to pick one of out essentially similar choices (from coffees to smartphones). >>The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level. This is an interesting point. I'd love to see some objective study looking at who actually changed their beliefs after coming across these hyper-personalized political ads. Getting the already disaffected to reinforce their beliefs is one thing, and getting people to actually shift their beliefs to the other camp is another.

tifadg1 6y ago

I block all ads everywhere. I'm not opposed to paying for services I really need, but so far I've found nothing I couldn't do without. Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something that's not crap. Be it a question about daily life, or a product review, or a tech related thing. Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%. But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

etempleton 6y ago
I think you and many others block ads because on many websites they are implemented so aggressively that it renders the website near unusable. This aggressive implementation is, in a way, a manipulation of the intention of ad tech and ruins how well results can be measured. Pop-up ads create false clicks, numerous ads on a page lessen the value of any given ad impression, etc. The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price, which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are added to websites just to break even.
- hammock 6y ago
  >The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. That's where we started. It's a solution, but only for one side of the market. It leaves a lot of potential inventory and revenue on the table.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Maybe, but I think part of the solution is to convince more people to block ads. Most people I know still don't have an adblocker, even though modern ad blockers have been around over 15 years. I think they need to get over the fact that it's not immoral to block ads when those ads not only destroy the experience of the internet but also are often outright scams that Google and the like are complicit with. If the punishment for having overly aggressive and deceptive ads was that the average person blocks the ads, the bar for where ads start to lose money becomes far lower. Most legitimate content creators these days take subscriptions directly, have preroll sponsor ads, or sell merch. If ads make up the majority of the money you take in, what you're peddling probably isn't worth much on its own.

etempleton 6y ago

"Today, consumers can get more product information by reading "add to cart" pages on Amazon, or online product reviews on any number of platforms, than they can get from viewing advertisements on bill-boards or television, or through the advertising links placed by Facebook in its feeds and Google at points all across the web." This creates its own set of problems. Companies looking to sell directly to consumers through their own website lose a powerful way of promoting their product to consumers giving entrenched retailers more power and more control over what is sold to consumers. Does Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. not promote certain types of products over other, either subtly or overtly? What constitutes advertising? I don't think anyone likes misleading or intrusive advertising, but to say that advertising is obsolete is either incredibly naive or put forth in intellectual bad faith.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
That quote made me laugh hard. To everyone around me, I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation. Reviews are thoroughly gamed, and have been for many years now. That applies both to vendor-owned stores, where you can assume they're all heavily moderated or fake by default, as well as marketplaces like E-bay, where bribing customers to remove negative reviews or give better ratings is a standard business practice for sellers. Product descriptions - those are always purposefully misleading. Hyping up the positives, hiding negatives, avoiding to provide useful metrics, and doing everything possible to prevent you from comparing between alternatives. The best way I've found so far is to look for communities of people using a given product category, and read up opinions. Not review sites - these are, with few exceptions, just ads in sheep's clothing. But smaller, purpose-oriented communities are much harder to game thoroughly. So personally, unless the product category I'm exploring has a recent review on WireCutter (in which case I just buy one of their top picks; never been burned this way), the first thing I do is googling "<product category> site:reddit.com" and do my research there.
- hmmazoids 6y ago
  So you never use Amazon for product discovery or evaluation? You've never gone to a store and said "I wonder what Amazon prices that at and what people say about it?"

libertine 6y ago

I honestly think this is a bit of a naive proposition, and an "obsolete" point of view, specially when you factor in the most obvious thing: Advertisement, per definition, is self evident. You have way more "less obvious" marketing tools, like product placement, but even those that are subtle, are in set in a context - like a movie or a tv show. I think it's way more troublesome the obscure parts of what the paper claims to be "product information" - that is where true deception and manipulation occurs. This is where your defenses and your guard are down. You don't know you're being manipulated, even if it's a simple paid 5 star review with no review text, it's a deceptive bias. Another example, is undisclosed paid promotions/reviews from influencers. People would be better off acknowledging that advertising works, and that it is present in media, and we should be critical of it, which I believe in 2020, we're aware of it. Else if you're going that path, then you can start make monopolies on media and information distribution that arguably serve any agenda - even if that agenda is to gather more share/views/audiences, and you end up banning media. Because that's the truth - the majority of endeavors that are distributed in media have an agenda, and try to manipulated the audiences in some way. With this said, I'm not saying that all advertising is fine, in fact, this is probably the hardest times for authorities and regulators to control, and fine, abuses. You just need to log on Facebook and see illegal claims being made in advertising, things that would never be allowed on TV/Radio/Outdoors. Yet they generate massive amounts of reach.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
The article is written by lawyers. It's 72 pages long. Did you read it, or just assume that they wouldn't cover the subtleties and nuances you describe above?
- libertine 6y ago
  Yes - it's 72 pages long where in most pages half of it are references. I confess I didn't check the references, in part because of laziness, other part because I gave them the benefit of the doubt with regards to the references they used. >or just assume that they wouldn't cover the subtleties and nuances you describe above? You tell me.

kwhitefoot 6y ago

> the view that prevails today: that advertising does no more than convey useful product information to consumers. Prevails in which part of society? The vast majority of the few ads that I see at least attempt to be at least mildly misleading by at giving the impression that the product is somehow quite different from competing products but without actually spelling out what the difference really is or whether there really is a difference.

jariel 6y ago

I like reading these by my gosh man, they are always written by people with seeming no material insight into either the practical, strategic or aspirational aspects of branding and marketing. It's pretty hard to take any of it very seriously. What's just as shocking is how naive most of the tech world is in terms of their understanding of what marketing even is, let alone advertising. Similarity for finance and financial concepts. Advertising and Marketing is a complicated thing, but it's part of the structure of business and it's far from irrelevant.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Just because something is complicated, doesn't mean it's ethical. And in fact, pointing out to how complicated and deep the domain of marketing is serves only to distract from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and immoral, and has disastrous consequences for society.
- jariel 6y ago
  " from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and immoral, and has disastrous consequences for society." This is absurdly false.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I believe it's true. I have a pretty extensive list of reasons here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.