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I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want t

by alecbz 5y ago

I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all have that would exist completely independently of any kind of outside influence, and that advertising is bad because it tricks us into addressing other manufactured desires instead of our real, true desires. And that there's something wrong with addressing a manufactured desire instead of a "true" desire? Like, when you address a manufactured desire you don't actually feel the joy/fulfillment you would from fulfilling a "true" desire? I don't think that's right. I don't think we really have true, "pure" desires. Almost all of our desires are a result of social influence in one way or another. And even to the extent that some desires are less a product of influence than others, I'm not sure satisfying those desires is necessarily better. I've bought things after I saw an ad about them, and they're things I now genuinely enjoy. Why does it matter if that enjoyment is a result of the ad or would have existed either way? Maybe a much shorter way of saying this: > In other words, you can make people consume considerably more stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads. Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want? I share the gut sentiment that it feels wrong to be manipulated by ads, but I feel like there needs to be more to this argument. Though I think you can still think advertising is bad in an "arms race" kind of way (if everyone stopped doing it at once we'd possibly not really be any worse off and have all that time/money to spend elsewhere).

germinalphrase 5y ago
Are you pretty or ugly? Are you smart or stupid? Are you successful or failing? Do you have high status or low status? Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I have simultaneously ’manufactured’ a ‘need’ where there was/is none.
the8472 5y ago
Is wireheading happiness?
convolvatron 5y ago
we're supposed to be telling the market what to produce through demand signals. this is how we believe that monetary value translates directly into personal value. if instead the market tells us what to buy - who is driving?
lordnacho 5y ago
The real problem is that we have a default theory of value: stuff is just worth whatever people paid for it, otherwise they wouldn't have paid for it is the short version. It's a gaping hole in our economic theories, and unsurprisingly advertisers have driven a goods train through it. It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think people only pay for stuff that they want.
- psd1 5y ago
  Closest I can get is Type 1 and Type 2 fun (i.e. does it still seem fun in hindsight). We might need to quantify wisdom.
leetcrew 5y ago
some kinds of ads are pretty bad, and some are fine. consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool people drinking the product and having a great time. this does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too could be cool if you drink bud light. on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison of features and prices between their product and that of a much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.
mtalantikite 5y ago
> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying. But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways. If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha. My main objection is advertising steals my attention without my consent and actively works against me in order to try and get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy, but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about ads which resonates with me: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."
- alecbz 5y ago
  > Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying. As you more or less say in the next paragraph, you're answering a different question I think. Can advertising make you want things that are bad for you? Absolutely. But so can lots of things. I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire itself is good for you.
dfxm12 5y ago
philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious actors to take, etc. are all wrong. Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it is probably the most prevalent.
- alecbz 5y ago
  I think you're answering the question "is modern advertising bad for any reason?", I asked "is this particular facet of advertising actually bad?"
- teucris 5y ago
  Note that author made an explicit attempt to delineate between the act of advertising and data collection practices. Those things are bad, but I appreciate that he’s trying to have a discussion just on ads.
danShumway 5y ago
> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want? This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want? There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons. Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population? In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them. Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.
- upsidesinclude 5y ago
  Thanks for that perspective. When reading these replies, each person contributes such a distinct and yet clear analysis, it begs the question of whether we are delivering the intended outcome of an agent provocateur. Alternatively, can one view today's advertising techniques in a positive light? The mental gymnastics required to answer that question are certainly more acrobatic if you choose any but the most shallow reply. This is the nature of insidious yet profitable devices. We all know the answer, but the persistence required to defeat these efforts is beyond most.
wpietri 5y ago
Oh? So by a similar theory, it's ok when abused women stay with abusive husbands because who knows what people truly want? Like if the abuse has made them "genuinely" want to stay in an abusive situation, that's cool, and in fact justifies other dudes abusing women until they get the women to that point? Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  >there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. // Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose the characteristics I want to search on. Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it, they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made opaque on purpose. Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call monitoring. Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless. I had to download the manuals and read the usage instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for the lower priced BT phones, crazy). Ebay are pretty good, not perfect. Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose AMD or Nvidia cards first. Then you get the search results and the most expensive cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by "recommended", argh.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Sure. I don't do much product discovery via Amazon either. For that I turn to places not trying to sell me things like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Also forums where other users talk about our shared problems and what has worked for them.
- alecbz 5y ago
  It's a good analogy to think about, but surely you wouldn't say something like "we should never take people at their word, we have to decide what we think they feel and then assume that's how they're feeling, regardless of how they say they feel". Sure, in some cases people get trapped in patterns where if you ask them, they say they want to stay in them, but it's pretty well established that actually they'd be happier if they broke out of it, and the desire is probably not really genuine and more a result of fear/shame/etc. The existence of cases like this doesn't mean we can just blindly apply this argument to everything. It can easily go wrong: "you say you want to be an artist but you're just being manipulated by your lazy friends. Trust us, you'll be much happier becoming an accountant like your dad" > In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. Yeah this is more or less what I mean by the arms race argument.
glenstein 5y ago
>philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own. I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you don't agree with this argument so much as you think it demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with none being really any more better than any other. I do agree that you would have to believe something like that to defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen to think that's absurd. Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we really do need certain things: safety, security, to be understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a highway do more to reflect human nature than something like Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough argument to make. I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!) captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality itself.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making the fulfillment problem worse? This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way. There could be an argument made that we face challenges for fulfillment from the inside out. Therefore objecting to one external force misses the forest for one tree.
  - upsidesinclude 5y ago
    Yeah, but in practice... the iPhone/Apple represents an example par excellence: Planned obsolescence, dated features, software deprecation, false narrative (e.g. privacy). The plan is to always provide that fulfillment until it is time for you to renew your subscription. Then the fulfillment reward is attached to a new product and the consumer must acquiesce. Consumerism is this forest. Stepping any deeper into the waters, keep this outdoorsy pun rolling, is an arbitrary excersize. "What does it mean to 'be'?" Abstraction does not undo the real harm caused by corporations.
bnralt 5y ago
One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads. Companies know this, and often give users an option to pay extra for ad-free versions of their products. I can think of many premium products that where being ad free is a selling point; I can think of _any_ premium product where additional advertisements were a selling point, and the idea is probably laughable to people. I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is true. All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net negative for society.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  > One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads. Not really, or actually people hate excessive in-your-face advertising which unfortunately is the dominant form now online, but at the same time the loss in paper-based and other "traditional" advertising has plateaued, even during these times. In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
  - bnralt 5y ago
    It's not just online. For instance, Hulu's ad-free subscription cost is almost twice that of it's regular cost. This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service[1]. If you go to the SiriusXM radio site right now, you'll see that they advertise it being ad-free. When people are paying extra to avoid something, it's a clear sign that they see it as detrimental. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      > This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service. And how many have actually bothered to? The problem is that you're treating it as a black-and-white thing which is not true at all. It is true that there's a percentage of people who do prefer advertising, 17% in current online advertising (which shows that majority hate online advertising) and 54% in traditional advertising (both are for the US only, data tend to fluctuate but in general this holds nearly everywhere but Asia where they tend to view advertising as more favourable). There is, of course, a balance where the majority of people will be fine. For example, European television and radio stations do have limits on advertising: it definitely helped a lot that it allowed them to know what new services and products are available. Coincidently, they have strong consumer protection - lies in advertising are actively patrolled and most people do get angry when the advertisement is misleading. Unfortunately, the US - which tends to have low-quality, clickbaity commercials - never saw a better alternative, and concluded that all advertising is bad. I'm not surprised that there's a backlash against advertising - they indeed lost the trust in people. Unfortunately, the American model served as the global model online, so here we are.
bayindirh 5y ago
> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want? Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to get new things and I enjoy what I have more. It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items too. In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want stuff way less, and use what I have more. At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.
OJFord 5y ago
I think that might be (even) more interesting as a behavioural psychology question than philosophical. It's.. probably been studied? Seems like it would be interesting even to advertisers themselves, since it tells you who is worth advertising to.
causi 5y ago
philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.
shard 5y ago
Following these thoughts, and flipping the argument the other way: For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup, the startup would ping him), but for most people, including me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the attention of employers.
- Jiejeing 5y ago
  This is a terrible analogy, because I certainly don’t have billions to spend to put billboards of me near the places I want to be hired at. Sending a resume to recruiters is part of the hiring process (although, arguably, in our trade, it is often the other way around as well), being constantly bothered to buy more crap or subscribe to new services is not part of the buying process.
  - shard 5y ago
    The point about $B is a matter of scale, so I don't think it matters, unless you are saying that companies with only $hundreds to spend on ads do not count as advertising. The point about it being part of the hiring process seems to be pointing out that it is a codified and accepted process. If presenting ads are a codified and accepted practice (which I could argue it already is), does that make it acceptable?
    - Jiejeing 5y ago
      The difference here is that the company actually wants to hire people, and is generally not that efficient at reaching out by itself (hence headhunters, etc), so sending your resume is helping them. Me, on the other hand, I do not want to buy a samsung S22 ultra edition.
      - 5y ago
cwkoss 5y ago
> as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Wants do not cause enjoyment. Desire is the root of all suffering.
ctoth 5y ago
A part I feel like you're missing is that it's perfectly possible for someone to want less, and to have their wants stimulated by ads. So whereas the person might have been perfectly content before (pre-ad) they now want something that they otherwise wouldn't, which induces demand that didn't exist. You're focusing on fungibility of wants and ignoring the idea of totally new wants arising from advertising.
- sdoering 5y ago
  In general I would agree. I was thinking about what you wrote in my current context. I very much don't like ads. I don't like the described feeling of generated want. On the other hand I am currently trying to help a local rural coworking space find an audience and customers. So I plan to additionally to other means also employ search advertising targeting keywords that people use when looking for a coworking space. Locally targeted and so on. Am I creating demand? Or am I trying to shift demand from potential others in the market towards my client? I would say a bit of both. Because in targeting keywords I will probably also reach people not looking for a coworking desk right now, but are informing themselves. In them I might create the wish to try it. But others might look at the place and decide to give it a try instead of the place in the next big town. So I am actually torn between both views.
dTal 5y ago
The GP's premise was that wanting things is bad because the "thing" in question is generally "nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard", leading to environmental devastation. It's not the same as "wanting", say, to spend time with friends and family. I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want anything, and convert them to a state where they do want something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered their well-being.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I have no problem with people nagging me and annoying me in their own premises. It's another matter if the persuaders are after me in the street, or in my own home. I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away, because the slot didn't sell) I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses, ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on. Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends to distort the content on the website. When did you last read an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away from those sites. Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid. I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there. But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there; it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive brand advertising. That I can do without.
vannevar 5y ago
>Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all have that would exist completely independently of any kind of outside influence... This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach millions of people means that capital can be used to manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital, the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can I prove that society would be better off without advertising entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society, and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.
MereInterest 5y ago
What was the first time you were disappointed by a toy as a child? When you opened the box, starting playing with it, and found that it didn't live up to your expectations. Were those expectations based on a reasonable evaluation of the toy, or were they based on the excited cheers that played over tv commercials for the toy? Who deliberately cultivated unrealistic expectations, profiting from your disappointment? How much time do you spend researching a product today before buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?
titzer 5y ago
> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally, suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and cruel thing.
WalterBright 5y ago
I don't know about other people, but I don't buy things I don't want. P.S. I guess I am a unique snowflake! P.P.S. Maybe it's because I'm a tightwad. I do not enjoy spending money. So I have to really want something to part with cash for it.
aaroninsf 5y ago
One useful framing is to ask not about the mechanics at the individual level, but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable civilization). There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply shape not just individual behavior but individual understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep. A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves? This converts readily in to the question facing societies since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in the related question, "what is 'the good'?" This problem–the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-manufacturing, resource-consuming culture–has been explicitly analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist revolution. Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand" for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot. TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that addressing these requires systemic (legal, political, economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal responsibility" which however drives that change.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I don't see my "true" desires as some platonic ideal, but I prefer to thinkmit it like the fast and slow thinking idea - what I would like my desires to be and what I can be manipulated into in the moment. I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go. Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals. Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't particularly care which provider I use
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked. Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before. It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you ignored it. Is that wrong? I would say no. But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the person you are envy the person you could be with the product. In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and then offer to sell it back to you."[1] Is that wrong? I would say yes. How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who don't use it are. Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How many are giving you information that something is out there? How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or sexier if you bought their thing? [1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where due.

by alecbz 5y ago

germinalphrase 5y ago

Are you pretty or ugly? Are you smart or stupid? Are you successful or failing? Do you have high status or low status? Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I have simultaneously ’manufactured’ a ‘need’ where there was/is none.

the8472 5y ago

Is wireheading happiness?

convolvatron 5y ago

we're supposed to be telling the market what to produce through demand signals. this is how we believe that monetary value translates directly into personal value. if instead the market tells us what to buy - who is driving?

lordnacho 5y ago

The real problem is that we have a default theory of value: stuff is just worth whatever people paid for it, otherwise they wouldn't have paid for it is the short version. It's a gaping hole in our economic theories, and unsurprisingly advertisers have driven a goods train through it. It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think people only pay for stuff that they want.

psd1 5y ago
Closest I can get is Type 1 and Type 2 fun (i.e. does it still seem fun in hindsight). We might need to quantify wisdom.

leetcrew 5y ago

some kinds of ads are pretty bad, and some are fine. consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool people drinking the product and having a great time. this does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too could be cool if you drink bud light. on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison of features and prices between their product and that of a much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.

mtalantikite 5y ago

> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying. But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways. If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha. My main objection is advertising steals my attention without my consent and actively works against me in order to try and get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy, but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about ads which resonates with me: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

alecbz 5y ago
> Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood movie studios to include their brands in films. That's engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold millions of people suffering and dying. As you more or less say in the next paragraph, you're answering a different question I think. Can advertising make you want things that are bad for you? Absolutely. But so can lots of things. I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire itself is good for you.

dfxm12 5y ago

philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious actors to take, etc. are all wrong. Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it is probably the most prevalent.

alecbz 5y ago
I think you're answering the question "is modern advertising bad for any reason?", I asked "is this particular facet of advertising actually bad?"
teucris 5y ago
Note that author made an explicit attempt to delineate between the act of advertising and data collection practices. Those things are bad, but I appreciate that he’s trying to have a discussion just on ads.

danShumway 5y ago

> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want? This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations to genuinely change what people want? There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't absolve us from asking questions about whether they way they're being influenced is healthy and in their best interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons. Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people manipulating them to have their best interests at heart. Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that kind of power over a population? In general, we view top-down control over people's actual personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum would react negatively to the idea of a government brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every time they voted for a particular political party. At the least, we would want to think about the long-term consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't special, we should have the same fears about them. Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying them required giving a company money. It's worth asking whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that the implication behind it is that you could have also been manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario, it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically my house for free and then going back to their house to live in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative action, even if the end result is that they like what's happening.

upsidesinclude 5y ago
Thanks for that perspective. When reading these replies, each person contributes such a distinct and yet clear analysis, it begs the question of whether we are delivering the intended outcome of an agent provocateur. Alternatively, can one view today's advertising techniques in a positive light? The mental gymnastics required to answer that question are certainly more acrobatic if you choose any but the most shallow reply. This is the nature of insidious yet profitable devices. We all know the answer, but the persistence required to defeat these efforts is beyond most.

wpietri 5y ago

Oh? So by a similar theory, it's ok when abused women stay with abusive husbands because who knows what people truly want? Like if the abuse has made them "genuinely" want to stay in an abusive situation, that's cool, and in fact justifies other dudes abusing women until they get the women to that point? Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
>there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. // Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose the characteristics I want to search on. Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it, they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made opaque on purpose. Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call monitoring. Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless. I had to download the manuals and read the usage instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for the lower priced BT phones, crazy). Ebay are pretty good, not perfect. Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose AMD or Nvidia cards first. Then you get the search results and the most expensive cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by "recommended", argh.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Sure. I don't do much product discovery via Amazon either. For that I turn to places not trying to sell me things like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Also forums where other users talk about our shared problems and what has worked for them.
alecbz 5y ago
It's a good analogy to think about, but surely you wouldn't say something like "we should never take people at their word, we have to decide what we think they feel and then assume that's how they're feeling, regardless of how they say they feel". Sure, in some cases people get trapped in patterns where if you ask them, they say they want to stay in them, but it's pretty well established that actually they'd be happier if they broke out of it, and the desire is probably not really genuine and more a result of fear/shame/etc. The existence of cases like this doesn't mean we can just blindly apply this argument to everything. It can easily go wrong: "you say you want to be an artist but you're just being manipulated by your lazy friends. Trust us, you'll be much happier becoming an accountant like your dad" > In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. Yeah this is more or less what I mean by the arms race argument.

glenstein 5y ago

>philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align with those needs rather than our own. I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you don't agree with this argument so much as you think it demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with none being really any more better than any other. I do agree that you would have to believe something like that to defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen to think that's absurd. Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we really do need certain things: safety, security, to be understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a highway do more to reflect human nature than something like Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough argument to make. I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!) captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality itself.

srcreigh 5y ago
Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making the fulfillment problem worse? This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly way. There could be an argument made that we face challenges for fulfillment from the inside out. Therefore objecting to one external force misses the forest for one tree.
- upsidesinclude 5y ago
  Yeah, but in practice... the iPhone/Apple represents an example par excellence: Planned obsolescence, dated features, software deprecation, false narrative (e.g. privacy). The plan is to always provide that fulfillment until it is time for you to renew your subscription. Then the fulfillment reward is attached to a new product and the consumer must acquiesce. Consumerism is this forest. Stepping any deeper into the waters, keep this outdoorsy pun rolling, is an arbitrary excersize. "What does it mean to 'be'?" Abstraction does not undo the real harm caused by corporations.

bnralt 5y ago

One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads. Companies know this, and often give users an option to pay extra for ad-free versions of their products. I can think of many premium products that where being ad free is a selling point; I can think of _any_ premium product where additional advertisements were a selling point, and the idea is probably laughable to people. I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is true. All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net negative for society.

zinekeller 5y ago
> One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way to avoid ads. Not really, or actually people hate excessive in-your-face advertising which unfortunately is the dominant form now online, but at the same time the loss in paper-based and other "traditional" advertising has plateaued, even during these times. In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for most people for advertising, the online ad market however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
- bnralt 5y ago
  It's not just online. For instance, Hulu's ad-free subscription cost is almost twice that of it's regular cost. This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service[1]. If you go to the SiriusXM radio site right now, you'll see that they advertise it being ad-free. When people are paying extra to avoid something, it's a clear sign that they see it as detrimental. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    > This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the service. And how many have actually bothered to? The problem is that you're treating it as a black-and-white thing which is not true at all. It is true that there's a percentage of people who do prefer advertising, 17% in current online advertising (which shows that majority hate online advertising) and 54% in traditional advertising (both are for the US only, data tend to fluctuate but in general this holds nearly everywhere but Asia where they tend to view advertising as more favourable). There is, of course, a balance where the majority of people will be fine. For example, European television and radio stations do have limits on advertising: it definitely helped a lot that it allowed them to know what new services and products are available. Coincidently, they have strong consumer protection - lies in advertising are actively patrolled and most people do get angry when the advertisement is misleading. Unfortunately, the US - which tends to have low-quality, clickbaity commercials - never saw a better alternative, and concluded that all advertising is bad. I'm not surprised that there's a backlash against advertising - they indeed lost the trust in people. Unfortunately, the American model served as the global model online, so here we are.

bayindirh 5y ago

> Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely changing what they want? Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to get new things and I enjoy what I have more. It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items too. In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want stuff way less, and use what I have more. At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.

OJFord 5y ago

I think that might be (even) more interesting as a behavioural psychology question than philosophical. It's.. probably been studied? Seems like it would be interesting even to advertisers themselves, since it tells you who is worth advertising to.

causi 5y ago

philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them, I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.

shard 5y ago

Following these thoughts, and flipping the argument the other way: For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup, the startup would ping him), but for most people, including me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the attention of employers.

Jiejeing 5y ago
This is a terrible analogy, because I certainly don’t have billions to spend to put billboards of me near the places I want to be hired at. Sending a resume to recruiters is part of the hiring process (although, arguably, in our trade, it is often the other way around as well), being constantly bothered to buy more crap or subscribe to new services is not part of the buying process.
- shard 5y ago
  The point about $B is a matter of scale, so I don't think it matters, unless you are saying that companies with only $hundreds to spend on ads do not count as advertising. The point about it being part of the hiring process seems to be pointing out that it is a codified and accepted process. If presenting ads are a codified and accepted practice (which I could argue it already is), does that make it acceptable?
  - Jiejeing 5y ago
    The difference here is that the company actually wants to hire people, and is generally not that efficient at reaching out by itself (hence headhunters, etc), so sending your resume is helping them. Me, on the other hand, I do not want to buy a samsung S22 ultra edition.
    - 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago

> as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Wants do not cause enjoyment. Desire is the root of all suffering.

ctoth 5y ago

A part I feel like you're missing is that it's perfectly possible for someone to want less, and to have their wants stimulated by ads. So whereas the person might have been perfectly content before (pre-ad) they now want something that they otherwise wouldn't, which induces demand that didn't exist. You're focusing on fungibility of wants and ignoring the idea of totally new wants arising from advertising.

sdoering 5y ago
In general I would agree. I was thinking about what you wrote in my current context. I very much don't like ads. I don't like the described feeling of generated want. On the other hand I am currently trying to help a local rural coworking space find an audience and customers. So I plan to additionally to other means also employ search advertising targeting keywords that people use when looking for a coworking space. Locally targeted and so on. Am I creating demand? Or am I trying to shift demand from potential others in the market towards my client? I would say a bit of both. Because in targeting keywords I will probably also reach people not looking for a coworking desk right now, but are informing themselves. In them I might create the wish to try it. But others might look at the place and decide to give it a try instead of the place in the next big town. So I am actually torn between both views.

dTal 5y ago

The GP's premise was that wanting things is bad because the "thing" in question is generally "nature converted into object we temporarily use and discard", leading to environmental devastation. It's not the same as "wanting", say, to spend time with friends and family. I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want anything, and convert them to a state where they do want something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered their well-being.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I have no problem with people nagging me and annoying me in their own premises. It's another matter if the persuaders are after me in the street, or in my own home. I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away, because the slot didn't sell) I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses, ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on. Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends to distort the content on the website. When did you last read an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away from those sites. Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid. I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there. But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there; it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive brand advertising. That I can do without.

vannevar 5y ago

>Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all have that would exist completely independently of any kind of outside influence... This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach millions of people means that capital can be used to manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital, the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can I prove that society would be better off without advertising entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society, and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.

MereInterest 5y ago

What was the first time you were disappointed by a toy as a child? When you opened the box, starting playing with it, and found that it didn't live up to your expectations. Were those expectations based on a reasonable evaluation of the toy, or were they based on the excited cheers that played over tv commercials for the toy? Who deliberately cultivated unrealistic expectations, profiting from your disappointment? How much time do you spend researching a product today before buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?

titzer 5y ago

> philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally, suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and cruel thing.

WalterBright 5y ago

I don't know about other people, but I don't buy things I don't want. P.S. I guess I am a unique snowflake! P.P.S. Maybe it's because I'm a tightwad. I do not enjoy spending money. So I have to really want something to part with cash for it.

aaroninsf 5y ago

One useful framing is to ask not about the mechanics at the individual level, but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable civilization). There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply shape not just individual behavior but individual understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep. A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves? This converts readily in to the question facing societies since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in the related question, "what is 'the good'?" This problem–the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-manufacturing, resource-consuming culture–has been explicitly analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist revolution. Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand" for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot. TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that addressing these requires systemic (legal, political, economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal responsibility" which however drives that change.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I don't see my "true" desires as some platonic ideal, but I prefer to thinkmit it like the fast and slow thinking idea - what I would like my desires to be and what I can be manipulated into in the moment. I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go. Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals. Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't particularly care which provider I use

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you normally want things? Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked. Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before. It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you ignored it. Is that wrong? I would say no. But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the person you are envy the person you could be with the product. In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and then offer to sell it back to you."[1] Is that wrong? I would say yes. How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who don't use it are. Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How many are giving you information that something is out there? How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or sexier if you bought their thing? [1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where due.