7 ms·

Naive understanding of the world / information. Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard. I bet ther

Naive understanding of the world / information. Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard. I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution. The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem. Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you. In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?

tsimionescu 4y ago
Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the vast majority of advertising is in practice all about obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of a product. Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement. Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
- deltree7 4y ago
  You can reform the Ad industry in several ways (enhancing "truth in advertisment") i) You can only use factual information. ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas) But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Advertisers have done more to attack my ego and self image than 4chan or Qanon, or any other fuckwit internet forum ever has.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    If 4chan and QAnon were the vast majority of the internet, I would agree with the comparison. But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind, not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-in-advertising laws for decades. And banning advertising is not even that harmful to industry - we have the case study of the tabacco industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all wealthy countries.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Limiting advertising created bigger tabacco companies that shut out newer companies. Demand remained constant because it's a drug...That might work for other drug like coffee or pop/soda or social media but will not work for Tom's hardware and nails having an excess inventory of power drills
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        People will still always need power drills and nails, even more so than cigarettes. Do you honestly believe the hardware industry would collapse if it were forced to stop advertising? Now, the biggest problem with advertising is that it is an arms race. If your competitors are advertising and you are not, or are investing significantly less than them, you're very unlikely to remain competitive for long (assuming the products are even vaguely similar in quality).
        ipaddr 4y ago
        With a ban on advertising the biggest companies the ones we all know will benefit as no alternatives would be known. Some brands can spend endless amounts of money and I wouldn't purchase their product because of past experience or reputation. Banning advertising would collapse industries or reduce market size and limit any expansion efforts.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
  - ajl666 4y ago
    Define advertising by segmenting off of Poetry, Prose, and Aphorism. You can't. I don't understand how so many engineers can't do basic logic.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Advertising is "pay someone to say/show something about your product", where "pay" can refer to any kind of payment. It's really really easy to separate, conceptually, from any other discourse. Now, there are situations where this is more ambiguous, and in general any display of a company's products or brands, especially one that is not critical, is suspect of being advertisement for that brand. I'm not even sure how you can even claim that there is any sort of ambiguity between, say, The Raven and a Super Bowl commercial.
      - ajl666 4y ago
        Advertising is a judgement. It is a synthetic definition (defined but it's relationship to other concepts), but you want it to be analytic (ex: the number 5). You completely dodge my point because it's a stake in the vampire heart of your non sequiturs.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Ads => Consumerism => Destruction of the biosphere and depletion of natural resources => Hundreds of millions of extra deaths over the next few hundred years. Now, this is simplified, they don't get to bear all the blame, and there are worse industries, but we better reform them fast, and radically.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  > who never needed it in the first place Absolutely. How else are you going to grow 15% YoY or hit your sales quotas?
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Obfuscate facts. Appeal to emotions. To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers. Are you comparing women to children in their ability to discern advertising drivel from real facts about a product? Not only is that insulting, it is obviously false.
InCityDreams 4y ago
In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems than be advertised at. If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking. If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).
- geoduck14 4y ago
  >If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking. What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster? As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!". The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    In my experience all three options are usually crap and I would have been better served doing my own research. The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes. I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point. I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless. Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
  - plorkyeran 4y ago
    When I am looking to buy something, ads actively get in the way of that. Ads are why we don't have websites that tell you "these are the 3 options you're probably looking for" any more because people figured out that they can make sites like that where the three choices are just ads rather than good recommendations. There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
If I have a know I have problem, I'll look for a solution myself, and perform an objective comparison. I don't need some marketing asshat's stilted sales copy designed to con idiots into buying. Convincing people who are happy that they have problems they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit is morally dubious at best.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  don’t you form an opinion by looking at reviews made by the idiots conned by those asshats?
  - ajl666 4y ago
    It's too subtle a point. The argument here is not about logic, but about intellectual honesty. The parent you replied to believes everybody else is unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or fascism. Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?' So what should we do with all the engineers doing the same?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Some of the reviewers were conned, some weren't, but they actually have the product in front of them and they're generally honest.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      Unfortunately the prevalence of reviews in exchange for money or free product warps this significantly. In those cases, reviewers are being paid to con you with their bias, even if they're unaware.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Unknown Unknowns. How would you let people people know that they may be prone to cancer? How can you inform the world population that there exists coursera that teaches you skills on any imaginable subject that may change their lives? Most people aren't looking for those categories of information.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
>>"The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem." Only way?? No. No no absolutely not. If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it. The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian. Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party. Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.) Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  There was a recent Ask HN from someone who was concerned that maybe greed was the only reason people would work for places like Facebook or Google any more. That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway: I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others. Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else. I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way. Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead. There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up. But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
jen20 4y ago
This attitude is why I hope government crushes the advertising industry. No one is entitled to my information to sell me shit. No one.
intrasight 4y ago
Not naive at all. Certainly, there are a billion products. Group by things that don't matter in the first analysis, and you probably knock it down one or two orders of magnitude. But the consumer knows what they need - and can tell Google. An educated consumer (can we grant them that) will find trusted review sites. That knocks the list down to like ten! At ten, the burden really shifts to the manufacturer to have a quality web site. This, in my opinion, is where most fail. I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers. One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided. Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marssaxman 4y ago
> Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you. I don't need companies to reach me - that's their problem. > I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. I bet not. The problems I care about are not solvable with products. Even if there were unknown products I might be willing to learn about, the problems they solve would necessarily be minor things relative to the primary concerns of my life, and I will very happily forego the opportunity to discover them in order to shut down the overwhelming firehose of inane, manipulative toutery.

tsimionescu 4y ago

Even though this idea of visibility is often touted, the vast majority of advertising is in practice all about obfuscating the actual uses (and especially limitations) of a product. Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement. Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.

deltree7 4y ago
You can reform the Ad industry in several ways (enhancing "truth in advertisment") i) You can only use factual information. ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas) But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Advertisers have done more to attack my ego and self image than 4chan or Qanon, or any other fuckwit internet forum ever has.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  If 4chan and QAnon were the vast majority of the internet, I would agree with the comparison. But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind, not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-in-advertising laws for decades. And banning advertising is not even that harmful to industry - we have the case study of the tabacco industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all wealthy countries.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Limiting advertising created bigger tabacco companies that shut out newer companies. Demand remained constant because it's a drug...That might work for other drug like coffee or pop/soda or social media but will not work for Tom's hardware and nails having an excess inventory of power drills
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      People will still always need power drills and nails, even more so than cigarettes. Do you honestly believe the hardware industry would collapse if it were forced to stop advertising? Now, the biggest problem with advertising is that it is an arms race. If your competitors are advertising and you are not, or are investing significantly less than them, you're very unlikely to remain competitive for long (assuming the products are even vaguely similar in quality).
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        With a ban on advertising the biggest companies the ones we all know will benefit as no alternatives would be known. Some brands can spend endless amounts of money and I wouldn't purchase their product because of past experience or reputation. Banning advertising would collapse industries or reduce market size and limit any expansion efforts.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
- ajl666 4y ago
  Define advertising by segmenting off of Poetry, Prose, and Aphorism. You can't. I don't understand how so many engineers can't do basic logic.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Advertising is "pay someone to say/show something about your product", where "pay" can refer to any kind of payment. It's really really easy to separate, conceptually, from any other discourse. Now, there are situations where this is more ambiguous, and in general any display of a company's products or brands, especially one that is not critical, is suspect of being advertisement for that brand. I'm not even sure how you can even claim that there is any sort of ambiguity between, say, The Raven and a Super Bowl commercial.
    - ajl666 4y ago
      Advertising is a judgement. It is a synthetic definition (defined but it's relationship to other concepts), but you want it to be analytic (ex: the number 5). You completely dodge my point because it's a stake in the vampire heart of your non sequiturs.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Ads => Consumerism => Destruction of the biosphere and depletion of natural resources => Hundreds of millions of extra deaths over the next few hundred years. Now, this is simplified, they don't get to bear all the blame, and there are worse industries, but we better reform them fast, and radically.
waynesonfire 4y ago
> who never needed it in the first place Absolutely. How else are you going to grow 15% YoY or hit your sales quotas?
datavirtue 4y ago
Obfuscate facts. Appeal to emotions. To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > To appeal to emotions with the kind of results they are expecting you have to target women and children...ideally by driving an invisible wedge between them and their supporting caregivers. Are you comparing women to children in their ability to discern advertising drivel from real facts about a product? Not only is that insulting, it is obviously false.

InCityDreams 4y ago

In a funny kind of way, I'd rather have unsolvable problems than be advertised at. If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking. If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).

geoduck14 4y ago
>If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking. What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster? As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!". The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
- Larrikin 4y ago
  In my experience all three options are usually crap and I would have been better served doing my own research. The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes. I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point. I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless. Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
- plorkyeran 4y ago
  When I am looking to buy something, ads actively get in the way of that. Ads are why we don't have websites that tell you "these are the 3 options you're probably looking for" any more because people figured out that they can make sites like that where the three choices are just ads rather than good recommendations. There's been times when I've simply given up on buying something because I got sick of wading through ads looking for any actual information.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

If I have a know I have problem, I'll look for a solution myself, and perform an objective comparison. I don't need some marketing asshat's stilted sales copy designed to con idiots into buying. Convincing people who are happy that they have problems they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit is morally dubious at best.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
don’t you form an opinion by looking at reviews made by the idiots conned by those asshats?
- ajl666 4y ago
  It's too subtle a point. The argument here is not about logic, but about intellectual honesty. The parent you replied to believes everybody else is unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or fascism. Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?' So what should we do with all the engineers doing the same?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Some of the reviewers were conned, some weren't, but they actually have the product in front of them and they're generally honest.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    Unfortunately the prevalence of reviews in exchange for money or free product warps this significantly. In those cases, reviewers are being paid to con you with their bias, even if they're unaware.
deltree7 4y ago
Unknown Unknowns. How would you let people people know that they may be prone to cancer? How can you inform the world population that there exists coursera that teaches you skills on any imaginable subject that may change their lives? Most people aren't looking for those categories of information.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

>>"The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem." Only way?? No. No no absolutely not. If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it. The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian. Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party. Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.) Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->

fuzzfactor 4y ago
There was a recent Ask HN from someone who was concerned that maybe greed was the only reason people would work for places like Facebook or Google any more. That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway: I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others. Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else. I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way. Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead. There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up. But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.

jen20 4y ago

This attitude is why I hope government crushes the advertising industry. No one is entitled to my information to sell me shit. No one.

intrasight 4y ago

Not naive at all. Certainly, there are a billion products. Group by things that don't matter in the first analysis, and you probably knock it down one or two orders of magnitude. But the consumer knows what they need - and can tell Google. An educated consumer (can we grant them that) will find trusted review sites. That knocks the list down to like ten! At ten, the burden really shifts to the manufacturer to have a quality web site. This, in my opinion, is where most fail. I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers. One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided. Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marssaxman 4y ago

> Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you. I don't need companies to reach me - that's their problem. > I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. I bet not. The problems I care about are not solvable with products. Even if there were unknown products I might be willing to learn about, the problems they solve would necessarily be minor things relative to the primary concerns of my life, and I will very happily forego the opportunity to discover them in order to shut down the overwhelming firehose of inane, manipulative toutery.