6 ms·

Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad. Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad. I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.

juliushuijnk 4y ago
Funny, I rather have bad ads that fail to influence me.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Advertising isn't neutral. It defaults to bad. It is, by its nature, a distraction. It makes the world worse. It incentivizes a business model where you attract people's attention by any means necessary and then sell off that attention. Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
- shuntress 4y ago
  > Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. This is my point. Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I think it general we can say "advertising is not wanted" - bar exceptional side cases like the Super Bowl ads, very few people seek out the advertising that costs big money. I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising. The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
    - shuntress 4y ago
      I think in general we can say "BAD advertising is not wanted". Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the companies you love and buy from) is, in general, desirable.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        It's probably not at all the "industry" terms, but I would divide "push advertising" (TV, radio, web ads, blah blah blah) from "pull advertising" (going to the company website, asking for the catalog, etc). What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
      - nehal3m 4y ago
        Found the advertiser.
      - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
        Companies intensely track the percentage of catalogs mailed out that result in an order. They call this number the "order rate," and it's a very important stat for catalogs. You know what's generally seen as a very good order rate? Two percent. Even within that genre, actually deriving any enjoyment or finding a useful product is the exception rather than the rule, and in a time when anyone who wants to see what that company has to offer can check the website, they're effectively useless now. There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Eh, I guess it really depends on how you define "inherently bad." For example, I'd also call "shooting people" inherently bad, but there are certainly cases where a specific shooting is a net good (self defense, etc). It sounds like your definition is different and may require any possible instance to be bad.
    - shuntress 4y ago
      We could spend all day spinning our wheels on increasingly pedantic hypotheticals but it's not exactly productive discussion. Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts (three rights make a left and all that). "shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to be good.
      - santoshalper 4y ago
        Yes, and I'd say the same thing about advertising, though obviously on a lesser scale. All advertising is bad. Some advertising is merely less bad. Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for is hot garbage 100% of the time.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      By your own argument and definition, advertising is inherently bad: Advertising being good is a edge case that requires specific circumstances.
      - SuperCuber 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure that is the point GP was trying to make
ketralnis 4y ago
> Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad. I don't agree. I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis: > feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.
- shuntress 4y ago
  I would agree with you that "most advertising" (your words) is currently immoral in that it tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed. Or: *Spam* But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
  - ketralnis 4y ago
    > tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad. > There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same. That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all. That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well. Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
technoooooost 4y ago
Is this a way of rationalizing your adtech position?
zaik 4y ago
Don't worry, we know exactly what products you might like.
frosted-flakes 4y ago
I don't mind magazine advertising, because those are hyper-specific to the topic you're actually interested in, because you bought a magazine all about it. If I'm reading a woodworking magazine and I see an ad for a new type of clamp or jig a company is advertising, yeah I'm interested! (Free "magazines" are trash, I'm talking about Fine Homebuilding, Ontario Out of Doors, etc.) Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
- shuntress 4y ago
  I don't understand what point you are trying to make. Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists because "women be shopping"?
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    I don't understand your comment. Where did I say that? My point is that I don't mind magazine advertising because it's hyper-specific to a topic I actively wanted to read, but online advertising is so random that none of it is ever relevant.
    - shuntress 4y ago
      > I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?
boxed 4y ago
Ads on A PAGE FOR A SPECIFIC APP in the damn store is 100% super bad and evil. Apple should be ashamed.
mrkeen 4y ago
What would you pay to see a GOOD ad?
rchaud 4y ago
There is no such thing as 'good advertising', least of all on a mobile platform that has to fit the maximum possible ads into a small phone screen viewport. As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this. The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
aussieshibe 4y ago
Nothing is "inherently or automatically bad". Good and bad are matters of opinion, not fact. In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).
imoreno 4y ago
This. Advertising is a fair idea in principle. When you make a new company that truly revolutionizes a product or service, people won't magically find out about it overnight. Word of mouth takes time. As a customer, I don't want to wait years for a good product to get memed before I find out about it. I want to know right away! But the ads are never for revolutionary products that just came out, that I would love to buy. They're always for crap I would never pay for in a million years. I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature. Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years? I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
Browndo, the thirst mutilator... Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can be.

juliushuijnk 4y ago

Funny, I rather have bad ads that fail to influence me.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Advertising isn't neutral. It defaults to bad. It is, by its nature, a distraction. It makes the world worse. It incentivizes a business model where you attract people's attention by any means necessary and then sell off that attention. Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.

shuntress 4y ago
> Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. This is my point. Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I think it general we can say "advertising is not wanted" - bar exceptional side cases like the Super Bowl ads, very few people seek out the advertising that costs big money. I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising. The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
  - shuntress 4y ago
    I think in general we can say "BAD advertising is not wanted". Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the companies you love and buy from) is, in general, desirable.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's probably not at all the "industry" terms, but I would divide "push advertising" (TV, radio, web ads, blah blah blah) from "pull advertising" (going to the company website, asking for the catalog, etc). What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
    - nehal3m 4y ago
      Found the advertiser.
    - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      Companies intensely track the percentage of catalogs mailed out that result in an order. They call this number the "order rate," and it's a very important stat for catalogs. You know what's generally seen as a very good order rate? Two percent. Even within that genre, actually deriving any enjoyment or finding a useful product is the exception rather than the rule, and in a time when anyone who wants to see what that company has to offer can check the website, they're effectively useless now. There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Eh, I guess it really depends on how you define "inherently bad." For example, I'd also call "shooting people" inherently bad, but there are certainly cases where a specific shooting is a net good (self defense, etc). It sounds like your definition is different and may require any possible instance to be bad.
  - shuntress 4y ago
    We could spend all day spinning our wheels on increasingly pedantic hypotheticals but it's not exactly productive discussion. Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts (three rights make a left and all that). "shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to be good.
    - santoshalper 4y ago
      Yes, and I'd say the same thing about advertising, though obviously on a lesser scale. All advertising is bad. Some advertising is merely less bad. Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for is hot garbage 100% of the time.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    By your own argument and definition, advertising is inherently bad: Advertising being good is a edge case that requires specific circumstances.
    - SuperCuber 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that is the point GP was trying to make

ketralnis 4y ago

> Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad. I don't agree. I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis: > feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.

shuntress 4y ago
I would agree with you that "most advertising" (your words) is currently immoral in that it tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed. Or: *Spam* But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
- ketralnis 4y ago
  > tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad. > There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same. That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all. That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well. Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.

technoooooost 4y ago

Is this a way of rationalizing your adtech position?

zaik 4y ago

Don't worry, we know exactly what products you might like.

frosted-flakes 4y ago

I don't mind magazine advertising, because those are hyper-specific to the topic you're actually interested in, because you bought a magazine all about it. If I'm reading a woodworking magazine and I see an ad for a new type of clamp or jig a company is advertising, yeah I'm interested! (Free "magazines" are trash, I'm talking about Fine Homebuilding, Ontario Out of Doors, etc.) Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!

shuntress 4y ago
I don't understand what point you are trying to make. Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists because "women be shopping"?
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I don't understand your comment. Where did I say that? My point is that I don't mind magazine advertising because it's hyper-specific to a topic I actively wanted to read, but online advertising is so random that none of it is ever relevant.
  - shuntress 4y ago
    > I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?

boxed 4y ago

Ads on A PAGE FOR A SPECIFIC APP in the damn store is 100% super bad and evil. Apple should be ashamed.

mrkeen 4y ago

What would you pay to see a GOOD ad?

rchaud 4y ago

There is no such thing as 'good advertising', least of all on a mobile platform that has to fit the maximum possible ads into a small phone screen viewport. As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this. The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.

aussieshibe 4y ago

Nothing is "inherently or automatically bad". Good and bad are matters of opinion, not fact. In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).

imoreno 4y ago

This. Advertising is a fair idea in principle. When you make a new company that truly revolutionizes a product or service, people won't magically find out about it overnight. Word of mouth takes time. As a customer, I don't want to wait years for a good product to get memed before I find out about it. I want to know right away! But the ads are never for revolutionary products that just came out, that I would love to buy. They're always for crap I would never pay for in a million years. I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature. Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years? I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.

w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago

Browndo, the thirst mutilator... Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can be.