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I am just amazed people pay attention to the ads. I’m sure this is happening to me but my brain has gotten so good at filtering them out that I have no idea wha

I am just amazed people pay attention to the ads. I’m sure this is happening to me but my brain has gotten so good at filtering them out that I have no idea what they’re even trying to sell me!

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
I'm with you, but I'm just assuming we're a minority. Otherwise all those companies paying big bucks for "boosted"/"pro" listings are really throwing money down the toilet. Seriously, go visit Stackoverflow Jobs. Start scrolling. It takes me so much conscious effort to read those listings with the yellow background. I'm specifically trying to read every listing and I keep missing them. They just look like rubbish ads, so my brain has been trained to ignore them. It's the same experience with custom adverts on eBay or real estate websites. Any non-standard listing, I keep missing and have to scroll back through several times to "find" them.
lawn 5y ago
Ads? What ads? I don't watch TV and I have adblock for everything. Last time was probably when I went to cinema, which is well over a year ago.
- freeflight 5y ago
  The advertising sector has adapted: On Reddit, Twitter and plenty of other social media, a whole lot of content is ads but veiled as memes.
prepend 5y ago
For me, it’s not paying attention to the ads. I never have. I haven’t clicked on an ad in decades. My interest is in the manipulation taking place on all the people who do click on ads, and the likely negative affect on society. Obviously, enough people click on ads to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. And this is despite all the people who think ads don’t work on them.
- chasebank 5y ago
  I’d wager you’ve clicked hundreds of ads here, just on hacker news! You might have not known they were ads but they were ads none the less.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Perhaps, we’ll never know as there’s lots of types of ads. I was referring to the ads described in OP’s article- ones that show up around “real” content. Of those ads, I’ve clicked none.
edejong 5y ago
That’s exactly the intention. There should not be a conscious connection between the ads and the actions, because it would reduce the effectiveness. Thing is, your brain does all the processing: it reads the label, it detects the colors and brands, it associates it with previous experiences and reinforces all these connections. Then, at the last moment it decides not to engage the neocortex, so you’re not consciously aware of it.
- brundolf 5y ago
  I'll notice the look and feel and signifiers, but I go out of my way to avoid noticing the actual company name. After the ad is gone I'll sometimes try and recall the brand just to make sure that I can't. Usually I can't.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    Does it matter though? Your brain will recognize it based on the look and the feel, isn't that enough when you're in a store?
  - edejong 5y ago
    Doesn't matter at all. If your eye can see it, it goes through the object detection process. Attention is not necessary. In particular, the brain associates it with all adjacent information.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    For the scarce Youtube ad I get, I made it a habit to close one eye, focus next to the video, not see the ad, and only look at the 'skip'-button. What also comes in handy is having a hardware volume knob for my speakers; with one tactful twist of my fingers I turn the volume to zero. This way, I actively prevent ads from entering my brain. See no evil, hear no evil.
    - dalmo3 5y ago
      Doesn't that mean ads have shaped your behaviour in a much deeper way than just nudging you to buy a thing or two?
maccard 5y ago
I don't pay attention to the ads I see either, but occasionally they are a little on the nose and I remember them. It's natural that you could recall one or two ads a year that came up at "the right time"
reedf1 5y ago
It's amazing how few people believe they are affected by ads. You must wonder why it's the most lucrative business in the world? I'm sure I've also read somewhere that those most affected by ads are those who believe they are not affected by them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- manmal 5y ago
  I’m one of those who claim to not (or seldom) be affected by ads, and I’d say my payment history can back that up. I usually buy based on other people’s experiences, eg by scanning 1-star reviews for red flags, or asking people I know about their experiences. When it comes to groceries I just buy products with certain traits (vegan, low on sugar, organic, low waste,...) which usually limits choices to products which are not advertised. Same thing with organic/sustainable fashion.
  - andyana 5y ago
    Organic, in my opinion, is a marketing term for the most part.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    So maybe your purchase history is unaffected, which is a great thing I'd agree, but with ads, I worry about the psychological effect too. People can't really ignore manipulation, so I don't think it's plausible to say that how you _feel_ is unaffected by advertisements. I think the only way to remain impartial to it is to be never exposed the first place.
- fortran77 5y ago
  Exactly. The people here who believe they're too "smart" to be influenced are probably the biggest suckers!
  - npwr 5y ago
    I don't see any ads with ublock on my desktop and mobile browser. I believe the ads I don't see don't influence me. Can you believe that?
tzs 5y ago
There used to be a belief that if you were exposed to am image, say someone drinking a prominently labeled Coca-Cola, it would make you want a Coke even if the image only flashed by so fast that you were not even consciously aware you had seen it such as if the image was a single frame inserted in a scene in a movie. This was debunked. There is, however, something sort of in the same ballpark that has been reproduced and does show that your brain does have an astounding capacity to at least partially remember images seen only briefly. Take a large collection of images of a variety of ordinary things. Pictures of things like a bunch of bananas, a dog catching a Frisbee, a cat sunning itself near a window, kids waiting for a school bus, a cat pouncing on a mouse, someone eating a banana, yadda yadda. Divide the collection randomly into two equal sets, A and B. Show test subjects the images from set A serially, letting them see each image for a hundred milliseconds or two, with occasionally rest breaks if the image set is large (I believe this has been with image sets up to 10K in the total collection, so it can take quite a while to go through set A). If you then tested people on how well they could recall these images, they would suck at it. Ask them to describe all the dog images they saw, for instance, and they will only recall a small fraction of them. Where it gets interesting is if instead the test you do is at a later time you randomly pair up each image from set A with an image from set B, and serially show the subjects these pairs in random order and with the random left/right placement, and ask the subjects to identify which of the two images is one they have seen before. People get it right some astoundingly high percentage of the time, like 90% after several days. They might not really "remember" most of the A set in the sense that they can purposefully recall them, but apparently we do automatically and effortlessly store something that is good enough to let us tell which of two images is the one we've seen before. I wonder if this effect would apply with ads? You see a banner ad in passing for brand X molten boron, not paying attention to it. This doesn't make you subconsciously want to go buy the product--that was the old debunked subliminal advertising theory. But later, you actually need some molten boron and so head out to the store. They have brands X and Y. I wonder if because of the banner ad you saw a few days ago, you'd recognize brand X as one you have seen before and be more likely to choose it over brand Y.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  The classic paper on this is Standing’s 1973 “Learning 10,000 pictures.” The title really says it all: subjects shown up to 10,000 pictures (once, for a five seconds apiece) remembered a substantial fraction of them two days later. This is somewhat specific to images (and even moreso for “vivid” ones); people did worse with dictionary words. However, one important detail is that subjects were told to pay careful attention to the stimuli; they were repeatedly reminded that a memory test was coming up. PDF: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standing_73.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14640747308400340 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
titzer 5y ago
A couple months back, I needed to buy car insurance. Literally, for six months, I had been being bombarded by Liberty Mutual. But I didn't google for car insurance. I the shitstorm that would create. Instead, I thought of 3 of the major ones, priced them out from their own websites and got the cheapest one. One mistake I did make was I went to one of those "compare rates" meta-sites, and the bastards wouldn't leave me alone for a few weeks. One of the companies I priced asked if I had previously had them. I told the truth and a local agent sent me email after email until I told them I already had bought a new plan. It wasn't until some time later when I saw my next Liberty Mutual ad that I realized that they had never even crossed my mind during this whole process. Ha! I still chuckle. Now I am even more conscious to avoid things that I see a ton of ads for. I hate ads!

I am just amazed people pay attention to the ads. I’m sure this is happening to me but my brain has gotten so good at filtering them out that I have no idea what they’re even trying to sell me!

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago

I'm with you, but I'm just assuming we're a minority. Otherwise all those companies paying big bucks for "boosted"/"pro" listings are really throwing money down the toilet. Seriously, go visit Stackoverflow Jobs. Start scrolling. It takes me so much conscious effort to read those listings with the yellow background. I'm specifically trying to read every listing and I keep missing them. They just look like rubbish ads, so my brain has been trained to ignore them. It's the same experience with custom adverts on eBay or real estate websites. Any non-standard listing, I keep missing and have to scroll back through several times to "find" them.

lawn 5y ago

Ads? What ads? I don't watch TV and I have adblock for everything. Last time was probably when I went to cinema, which is well over a year ago.

freeflight 5y ago
The advertising sector has adapted: On Reddit, Twitter and plenty of other social media, a whole lot of content is ads but veiled as memes.

prepend 5y ago

For me, it’s not paying attention to the ads. I never have. I haven’t clicked on an ad in decades. My interest is in the manipulation taking place on all the people who do click on ads, and the likely negative affect on society. Obviously, enough people click on ads to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. And this is despite all the people who think ads don’t work on them.

chasebank 5y ago
I’d wager you’ve clicked hundreds of ads here, just on hacker news! You might have not known they were ads but they were ads none the less.
- prepend 5y ago
  Perhaps, we’ll never know as there’s lots of types of ads. I was referring to the ads described in OP’s article- ones that show up around “real” content. Of those ads, I’ve clicked none.

edejong 5y ago

That’s exactly the intention. There should not be a conscious connection between the ads and the actions, because it would reduce the effectiveness. Thing is, your brain does all the processing: it reads the label, it detects the colors and brands, it associates it with previous experiences and reinforces all these connections. Then, at the last moment it decides not to engage the neocortex, so you’re not consciously aware of it.

brundolf 5y ago
I'll notice the look and feel and signifiers, but I go out of my way to avoid noticing the actual company name. After the ad is gone I'll sometimes try and recall the brand just to make sure that I can't. Usually I can't.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Does it matter though? Your brain will recognize it based on the look and the feel, isn't that enough when you're in a store?
- edejong 5y ago
  Doesn't matter at all. If your eye can see it, it goes through the object detection process. Attention is not necessary. In particular, the brain associates it with all adjacent information.
- rambambram 5y ago
  For the scarce Youtube ad I get, I made it a habit to close one eye, focus next to the video, not see the ad, and only look at the 'skip'-button. What also comes in handy is having a hardware volume knob for my speakers; with one tactful twist of my fingers I turn the volume to zero. This way, I actively prevent ads from entering my brain. See no evil, hear no evil.
  - dalmo3 5y ago
    Doesn't that mean ads have shaped your behaviour in a much deeper way than just nudging you to buy a thing or two?

maccard 5y ago

I don't pay attention to the ads I see either, but occasionally they are a little on the nose and I remember them. It's natural that you could recall one or two ads a year that came up at "the right time"

reedf1 5y ago

It's amazing how few people believe they are affected by ads. You must wonder why it's the most lucrative business in the world? I'm sure I've also read somewhere that those most affected by ads are those who believe they are not affected by them.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
manmal 5y ago
I’m one of those who claim to not (or seldom) be affected by ads, and I’d say my payment history can back that up. I usually buy based on other people’s experiences, eg by scanning 1-star reviews for red flags, or asking people I know about their experiences. When it comes to groceries I just buy products with certain traits (vegan, low on sugar, organic, low waste,...) which usually limits choices to products which are not advertised. Same thing with organic/sustainable fashion.
- andyana 5y ago
  Organic, in my opinion, is a marketing term for the most part.
- npteljes 5y ago
  So maybe your purchase history is unaffected, which is a great thing I'd agree, but with ads, I worry about the psychological effect too. People can't really ignore manipulation, so I don't think it's plausible to say that how you _feel_ is unaffected by advertisements. I think the only way to remain impartial to it is to be never exposed the first place.
fortran77 5y ago
Exactly. The people here who believe they're too "smart" to be influenced are probably the biggest suckers!
- npwr 5y ago
  I don't see any ads with ublock on my desktop and mobile browser. I believe the ads I don't see don't influence me. Can you believe that?

tzs 5y ago

There used to be a belief that if you were exposed to am image, say someone drinking a prominently labeled Coca-Cola, it would make you want a Coke even if the image only flashed by so fast that you were not even consciously aware you had seen it such as if the image was a single frame inserted in a scene in a movie. This was debunked. There is, however, something sort of in the same ballpark that has been reproduced and does show that your brain does have an astounding capacity to at least partially remember images seen only briefly. Take a large collection of images of a variety of ordinary things. Pictures of things like a bunch of bananas, a dog catching a Frisbee, a cat sunning itself near a window, kids waiting for a school bus, a cat pouncing on a mouse, someone eating a banana, yadda yadda. Divide the collection randomly into two equal sets, A and B. Show test subjects the images from set A serially, letting them see each image for a hundred milliseconds or two, with occasionally rest breaks if the image set is large (I believe this has been with image sets up to 10K in the total collection, so it can take quite a while to go through set A). If you then tested people on how well they could recall these images, they would suck at it. Ask them to describe all the dog images they saw, for instance, and they will only recall a small fraction of them. Where it gets interesting is if instead the test you do is at a later time you randomly pair up each image from set A with an image from set B, and serially show the subjects these pairs in random order and with the random left/right placement, and ask the subjects to identify which of the two images is one they have seen before. People get it right some astoundingly high percentage of the time, like 90% after several days. They might not really "remember" most of the A set in the sense that they can purposefully recall them, but apparently we do automatically and effortlessly store something that is good enough to let us tell which of two images is the one we've seen before. I wonder if this effect would apply with ads? You see a banner ad in passing for brand X molten boron, not paying attention to it. This doesn't make you subconsciously want to go buy the product--that was the old debunked subliminal advertising theory. But later, you actually need some molten boron and so head out to the store. They have brands X and Y. I wonder if because of the banner ad you saw a few days ago, you'd recognize brand X as one you have seen before and be more likely to choose it over brand Y.

mattkrause 5y ago
The classic paper on this is Standing’s 1973 “Learning 10,000 pictures.” The title really says it all: subjects shown up to 10,000 pictures (once, for a five seconds apiece) remembered a substantial fraction of them two days later. This is somewhat specific to images (and even moreso for “vivid” ones); people did worse with dictionary words. However, one important detail is that subjects were told to pay careful attention to the stimuli; they were repeatedly reminded that a memory test was coming up. PDF: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standing_73.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14640747308400340 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...

titzer 5y ago

A couple months back, I needed to buy car insurance. Literally, for six months, I had been being bombarded by Liberty Mutual. But I didn't google for car insurance. I the shitstorm that would create. Instead, I thought of 3 of the major ones, priced them out from their own websites and got the cheapest one. One mistake I did make was I went to one of those "compare rates" meta-sites, and the bastards wouldn't leave me alone for a few weeks. One of the companies I priced asked if I had previously had them. I told the truth and a local agent sent me email after email until I told them I already had bought a new plan. It wasn't until some time later when I saw my next Liberty Mutual ad that I realized that they had never even crossed my mind during this whole process. Ha! I still chuckle. Now I am even more conscious to avoid things that I see a ton of ads for. I hate ads!