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The Age of Advertising Must Come to an End

67 points by voisin 4y ago

rpmisms 4y ago
> The goal and main purpose of ads is to go beyond the narrow limits of real needs and create new ones that did not exist before. Citation very much needed. Advertising is everything. If you own a small business, your sign is an ad. If you were a traveling cobbler in colonial America, your wagon was an ad.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Advertising only became perfidious and ubiquitous after the Soviet Union and it's glorious jihad against class exploitation ended of course, or so implies the author.
- voisin 4y ago
  You aren’t wrong but the majority (certainly by dollars spent) of ads you see are not simply letting people know your business is in the shop or wagon associated with them - they are to manufacture desire to drive sales. You can have a directory like the Yellowpages for simply finding the contact information of someone to fulfill a need you already have, but no one looks at a directory to get ideas of things they may want.
  - rpmisms 4y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't define advertising. I really like useful ads, and I've gotten some very nice products that I simply hasn't heard about before through advertising. I also dislike the modern "you already know about this beer, but drinking it will surround you with swedish bikini models" type of ad, but something like YNAB's simple "Hey, you need a budget" is awesome, because you do, indeed, need a budget.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      There needs to be a special category for ads that are literally targeted to like 12 people. For example, Northup Grumman taking out a Super Bowl ad in for the B-21 stealth bomber. They might as well started it with, "This is a very special message to Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James." https://www.military.com/video/aircraft/military-aircraft/northrop-grummans-2015-super-bowl-ad/4023069094001 https://www.military.com/video/aircraft/military-aircraft/no...
- jehb 4y ago
  We have a lot of words to describe advertising based on what channel it uses, or what stage in an imaginary funnel the marketing might serve, but a pretty poor selection of words to differentiate marketing based on why a person might need a product being advertised. Everyone is trying so hard to convince everyone else that what they sell isn't a commodity, that navigating almost any purchase decision has become a nightmare, even for sophisticated consumers. Do I want fair trade coffee, or organic coffee, or locally roasted coffee, or cheap coffee, or coffee where the beans were previously shit out by monkeys? We're no longer trying to sell the coffee; we're trying to sell the idea that the differentiator is the most important thing. No longer is the first cobbler you see the one you choose to fix your shoes.
KrugerDunnings 4y ago
Yay, an anarchist calling for more regulation.
version_five 4y ago
Just realized: advertising is over, and has been for a few years. How many people here see any ads? And if you watch someone without adblock or money to spend on ad-free versions of stuff, they just ignore them entirely because their attention span has already been destroyed. The big spending ads on social media are "one weird trick" type stuff. Occasionally something breaks though and we're forced to see a subway station takeover or some other embarrassing attempt at relevance. But overall, ads are a joke now. They're either something to be ignored as part of bottom tier "products" or they are bypassed. So while I realize the surface of the web has been destroyed by advertising, and it's now just a kind of toxic wasteland, basically everyone has moved underground and is ok. The only thing I worry about is how it all gets paid for once companies collectively realize nobody cares about ads. Are there really enough "podiatrists hate her" gimmicks to keep paying for FAANG et al?
- marketerinland 4y ago
  I just finished up a job in marketing. We sold primarily to developers and we did this primarily using online ads. The percentage of people using ad blockers (that actually work) is less than you’d think.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    What is the true percentage from your experience?
    - marketerinland 4y ago
      That’s impossible for me to know; however it’s low enough that the company just raised $5m on a $50m Val and is growing significantly in a downturn.
- chezelenkoooo 4y ago
  How can you possibly say this when google is making billions purely from advertising? One of the biggest companies in the world, whose biggest revenue stream, by an absolutely massive margin, and still growing, is ads. I think you forget that we live in a bubble here and we do not generalise out to the rest of the population.
sublinear 4y ago
> The argument that advertisements provide us with information that we would not have otherwise also appears unsubstantiated. This may have been true before the internet, but we no longer need advertisements to stay informed. A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product. Uhh... what? All google search results have always been ads. Even when it's not paid search results, the network effect that causes a page to rank high is the result of marketing.
superb-owl 4y ago
I strongly recommend The Century of the Self, an incredible documentary about the rise of advertising. It has its flaws, but it gives a really powerful lens for understanding how we got here. I reviewed it briefly here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/links-for-september https://superbowl.substack.com/p/links-for-september
Veuxdo 4y ago
> Another major method [of scheduling endless growth] is the artificial creation of previously non-existing needs and desires to extract ever-increasing rents. This is commonly referred to as advertising. The premise of this is flawed on a few counts, but I'll just point out that what the author is referring to here is marketing, of which advertising is only a part.
mgobl 4y ago
> The concept of endless growth is a key ideological component of capitalism. Despite its devastating environmental and social consequences, growth for the sake of growth remains one of the main drivers of the global economy. Without it, the entire system comes crashing down like a gigantic house of cards. I hear this a lot, but is it even true? Yes, our current system incentivizes increased consumption as a primary driver of growth. However, with the internet-era advent of 0-marginal cost goods/services, with extremely sublinear real-world resource usage (ie. electricity), aren't productivity increases just as valid a mode of growth as consumption increases? If we appropriately tax the consumptive inputs that feed an enterprise (eg. Carbon) isn't it reasonable to say that the growth of capital is not necessarily permanently hitched to the cart of otherwise limited real-world consumption? This is a key part of my perspective that degrowth is not the only path forward. Innovation can yield us a carbon-neutral future. In the same vein, can't invention yield us an economy with fewer "devastating environmental and social consequences"? It's incumbent upon us to price the negative externalities of consumption, not to abolish consumption entirely. IANAEconomist, so I'd welcome critique on these points.
- svachalek 4y ago
  Oh they would love to make you "need" all kinds of virtual expenses. But why not both?
  - mgobl 4y ago
    Because consumption feeds the machine that ultimately increases the availability of resources which deliver basic human needs to people around the world [1]. Food, water, and shelter are important. From another perspective: global GDP seems to be in the ballpark of $100T. If we grow at 3% for 100 years, we get 100T*(1.03)^100, almost 2000T global GDP. If we cut off 1% of that growth and use it to feed and house people worldwide, it becomes 100T*(1.02)^100 = 725T, plus 1% of global GDP per year in assistance (1T per year now, 7T in 2123, summing to 35T over 100 years [2]). I think the utilitarian question is whether an additional 1200T in global wealth outweighs 35T of targeted assistance to the most vulnerable people in the world. If we look at the wealth distribution [3], the bottom 53% have 1.4% of the wealth. If that holds (which isn't necessarily a safe assumption, it could get worse), the bottom 53% would get 16T. Doesn't look so great compared to that 35T (probably targeted at the very bottom of that 53%), I admit. If we extend out to 200 years though, even these lines cross (if we make it that far :). I think this tells me the most beneficial path forward is to maximize GDP growth while minimizing inequality to ensure that the fruits of that labor/growth help the vulnerable get food, not the rich buy another boat. That said, I think cutting global wealth by a factor of 3 in 100 years is not a great outcome. It would be like global wealth in 2020 being reverted back to that of 1980ish [4]. Life wasn't so different in the developed world then, but it was quite different outside of it (see [1]). There is a valid criticism that perhaps the world doesn't need more wealth than that which can house, clothe, and feed everyone on earth. And we already produce that much wealth, it's just not distributed evenly enough to meet those needs. OTOH, what luxuries would you forgo to deliver those benefits? AC? Your laundry machine? Availability and quality of healthcare? We also need to motivate 8B people to continue working and producing the goods/services that yield a good life for everyone. In the face of these questions, I don't find capitalism to be as evil as I once did when I was a bit younger. I don't mean to blindly support the invisible hand. The Keynesian approach balances government intervention ("distributions", above) with capital investment. My point is just that the trade-offs are not as simple as I once thought they were, and that growth is not the unmitigated evil many are eager to make it out to be. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo... [2]: https://imgur.com/a/rEneaxK https://imgur.com/a/rEneaxK [3]: https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyramidend2019_1607350808686.jpg https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyr... [4]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...
superb-owl 4y ago
Yesterday I got on the subway and sat down. Two stops in I start to think, this is an oddly pleasant subway ride. Why am I in such a good mood? Then I realize the car I’m in has been stripped of all advertising. No bright colors and sexy women and pithy slogans pulling at my attention. Bliss.
- okr 4y ago
  I still remember my gray socialist upbringing. When i started to glue my playtoy with chewing gum paper from wrigleys, because it had this green, flashy, metallic finish and it looked awesome. I like the blinking distraction.
  - iisan7 4y ago
    grass is always greener =) I remember watching the movie Good Bye Lenin! (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/) and thinking how nice things would be if we had just one choice for every product in the supermarket, so I wouldn't research each one and what made them different, and decide which I wanted, only to have them disappear. I get why products made by a state enterprise with no regard to performance or consumer reception would make for a bad time, though. Store generic/"white label" brands do somewhat meet this niche. But I dig that minimalist, text or line drawing only esthetic!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blibble 4y ago
  lucky you on my computer trains they're adding OLED video ad screens at eyelevel, with constant movement
jonathankoren 4y ago
> "Only in the last century, and especially in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, has the advertising industry grown into this massive all-encompassing behemoth." The irony that a person writes this sentence, and then illustrates his writing solely with advertisements from the early 20th and late 19th centuries. My god we're talking only 32 years ago. Sure it's not his living memory, but come on. Talk about not even looking at the pictures in a history book, let alone reading a history book.
- asdff 4y ago
  You can tell from this the author has not read Manufacturing Consent and if they had not read that book, I question the relevancy of their opinions on this topic.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    Didn't even bother to know Mad Men existed.
marketerinland 4y ago
He can think of a couple of examples where marketing is manipulative, therefore all marketing is manipulative and causes people to make irrational decisions. I sell tours to interesting places. I sell them using advertising. How is that a problem? Let’s say someone decides to open a hair salon. How does that person promote their business if not through advertising? Or is the author wanting to ban people from opening businesses? This is a classic case of placing a binary solution on a problem of degrees. Some advertising has harmful practises, some advertising is too much in some places. This is uncontroversial. Where the author has erred is in his simple black and white diagnosis.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I believe the author addresses your concerns: > Of course, capitalists will strongly oppose all of this. They will argue that advertisements serve a clear and valuable purpose: they inform us about products, assist us in deciding what to buy, and thus increase market efficiency by promoting the sale of quality products and preventing inferior ones from capturing the market. This claim is, of course, nonsense.
  - marketerinland 4y ago
    He ‘attempts’ to address the concern by calling it nonsense, and then offers no viable alternative, while using a long series of poorly structured arguments. As I’ve said above; he’s applying a black and white argument to a problem of degrees. It’s just like Goldilocks - the food can be too hot, the food can be too cold, it can also be just right. The point of these children fables is to teach us basic principles of how the world works and to encourage us to use them to recognise our own mistakes.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      True, he doesn't, but there are alternatives. Back when ads weren't a huge thing yet you had phonebook entries for companies or tradespeople providing a certain service, much like one can find on google maps today. If someone needed something they'd just call a number from the list. Though one might consider those entries ads as well I suppose. I (personally) think the problem isn't so much in the ads themselves since they're obviously useful when you're actively looking for something, it's that they're shoved in your face at every opportunity possible. And sometimes even in some impossible ones too. Given how we're bombarded with it online it may make sense to curb how much it's allowed in public spaces in real life to give people at least some breathing room.
iisan7 4y ago
See also the BBC documentary series, "Century of the Self". The article starts out by basically admitting that there is some informational role that is needed: "In the early 20th century, advertisements served a clear purpose: they informed customers about the useful qualities of a product and how that product solved a specific problem or need." And then came Freud and Bernays. The article doesn't get into it but I thought it interesting that Freud's theories found more fertile ground in the USA than Europe, in retrospect easy to see because the theory of the subconscious was so marketable. I agree that some sort of advertising ban would be nice, but unlike the article, I don't think it will be an argument that advertising is necessary, but rather a free speech argument that advertising can't be distinguished from opinionated speech. And: "A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product." Really now? We're already entering a third phase, where advertising is moving beyond explicitly labeled published ads, into infiltration of social networks and 'hidden advertising' in the form of faked product reviews, fake word of mouth, etc. It's easy to look back on what went wrong with advertising in the 20th c., but I'd rather figure out what to do about what seems to be coming in the 21st.
- Retric 4y ago
  It wouldn’t take much to completely change advertising without limiting free speech. I can only assume puffery for example isn’t a free speech issue and can be dumped.
  - iisan7 4y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. I don't think it will be practical and easy to regulate. How to distinguish commercial speech from other opinionated free speech? Advertising from informing? I can't think of an easy legal fix here. Are you saying that we can/should ban a concept like 'puffery'? And all of this is trying to hit a target that is falling away in the rear view mirror. We can ban billboards and TV ads, but it's going to be harder to ban internet bribes and lies.
    - Retric 4y ago
GianFabien 4y ago
The flip side is that advertisers pay for "services" that the public consumes for free, e.g. radio, free-to-air TV, most of the internet - especially search and social media. In the early days of radio and TV - to my knowledge in England, Australia, NZ (and its colonies?), you had to pay a license fee. In those days you had like 1-2 TV stations to choose from. People hated paying those fees and in many countries they were abolished. Likewise, I doubt that people would pay to have access Google search & Gmail, Facebook etc. As long as advertisers subsidize "free services", they are likely to remain.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  That’s an interesting example because people very much want to pay for TV channels and streaming channels?
- ben_w 4y ago
  TV license still exists in the UK, which you need even if you only watch iPlayer. Similar thing exists here in Germany (or at least Berlin, I don't know all the federalisms yet) except unlike the UK you can't opt out by not having a TV or equivalent.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Presumably though we pay more for the advertised goods and services in order that they can afford the advertising to pay for the services we consume for free. If we removed the advertising part of that then everything could be cheaper.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    No, the price would be the same and the company would just pocket the money instead of spending it on advertising. If they do not get enough customers to sustain the company it will shut down.
college_physics 4y ago
Ads are a brute force mechanism to generate consumption demand. But society in the developed world has satiated itself with consumption, maxed out on its credit etc and is not happier, arguably more stress and dissatisfied than before. On top, the environmental bills of that pointless overconsumption keep growing. So things will change irrespective of whether "they must". People will try to find solace in other ways. Economic structures and social preferences are ever evolving - we tend to ascribe to the recent past a longevity and stability that it does not have. The digital age may accelerate such transitions. Or supress them. It is still a toss. Surveillance capitalism was built on adtech but is somehow conditioned on the masses forever having no agency and no control over digital devices and information flows.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Are there any trends that suggest power in the digital sphere will be returning to the masses? Mobile OSes have been pretty locked down pretty much from the start of the smartphone, and the two desktop OSes that most people use have different flavors of UX control; Windows in particular has taken a nosedive in user autonomy. And that's to say nothing of the websites and social media used.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    All valid (and depressing) data points. It takes some inate optimism to think that things could be otherwise but I believe the commoditisation of digital infrastructure and the suboptimal stewardship acts against its ongoing tight control by a small entrenched minority. The underlying zero marginal cost trend is gnawing at the foundations of the current architecture. The wave upon wave of fizzling hypes is one symptom of this. The other headwind is expressed at the macro level as the missing IT productivity that economists puzzle over. Simply put: the tech industry, through its recurrent monopolies, adtech business models etc is holding societies and economies back. Not developing the tools that will increase welfare both on a financial and psychological scale. The same commoditized tech deployed in a decentralized way could open up a completely new era. As has been stated many times, we live in a feudal digital system and we know for a fact that market systems are superior to feudalism.
i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
With regards to the title, the age of advertising as it is today is likely going to have to change. Some of the largest companies in the world have advertising as their main revenue, and this is a growing trend. Another growing trend is users’ rights over their data, as well as their awareness of the situation and their willingness to exercise those rights. To me, it feels that there’s a natural limit, and a natural instability built in to the entire model: ad revenue depends on users, users don’t like ads. But there’s a third factor at play: their reputation. Ad revenue makes companies so much money that they try to branch out with ridiculous things that end up costing them users (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Meta - all have shifted towards dumb ideas in the last couple of years and their reputations are all in the gutter because of it). As a result, their risky Skynet-wannabe (or in the case of Meta, Lawnmower-Man-wannabe) investments are hurting their core income stream, and they’re resorting to faux-austerity as a result. It’s embarrassing to watch. However, I disagree with the article for a variety of reasons. The main one is “capitalism bad” has never been a viable mechanism for something to cease existing, and while companies make money from it, they’ll do it. Government isn’t incentivised to intervene too strongly because people buying things turns out to be good for the economy and good for the tax man, even if those things are the result of irrational decisions (and even if the aforementioned companies pay so little in tax anyway that it barely scratches the surface).
jerojero 4y ago
I think the biggest issue for me has to do with the fact that, being really into technology, advertisement has taken the form of "reviews", "previous" and so on. Although I block both ads and sponsored content (with sponsorblock) it's still impossible to escape the recommendation algorithms that just show me all the new and exciting things the market is coming up with. And this doesn't just go for technology, it's everywhere, from plants to books to phones to fountain pens. The line is completely blurred. Though it is easiest to see in tech because every tech youtuber out there is doing "non paid reviews" but what are these if not just advertisement? They get the products for free just to show them off, and it's bonanza for everyone... well, everyone but the consumer. The most critical situation for me is that in this age, if you have a little bit of money, there's always a right product fit for you. Sure, I might not be willing to spend the 1400 dollars of this top-of-the-line smartphone but hey, here's a very similar alternative for just half the price; it's chinese but you can always get around some of the drawbacks with a bit of knowledge, now, that's exciting. It's difficult because I really enjoy technology, ultimately, I'm a weak person with a tendency to overspend; but I've realized the grand majority of tech "reviews" out there are nothing but giving you a list of specs on a nicely presented package. What do they add, really? I mean, they barely get to use these products at all! A nice review requires time, but when time has passed then the new product is already out. It's an extremely fast paced cycle that leaves everyone behind and it's all fueled by advertisement. Though there are some reviewers out there that really do a good job and give good information; when I was trying to buy a robot vacuum cleaner there was plenty of really high quality reviews of them. It's become really difficult to separate between people giving valuable information and people just trying to create a need to consume in you.
chrismorgan 4y ago
I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I know of is 40km away on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop, and the second-nearest over 100km away. (Also one road safety billboard (TAC) 45km in a different direction, but that’s at least a bit different.) None in tech or other things, either: no newspaper, radio or TV, nothing on mobile (which I barely use anyway), aggressive ad-blocker and JS disabled by default in Firefox. Just occasionally (considerably less than once a year) I get exposed to TV (which I was not raised with). It’s awful. How does anyone ever willingly subject themselves to it? I detest televisions. They’re far too effective at stealing your attention, distracting you, et cetera, and their ads are regularly just sickening from the rapidity of transitions and visual stimuli. Fairly regularly I go down to Melbourne (where I grew up), mostly by public transport but sometimes driving. Ugh. So many billboards, so many things trying to steal your attention (and designed to steal your attention), so many such things even actively causing safety hazards while driving (especially at night). A lot of current billboard practices should be made illegal as part of road safety laws, quite apart from anything else. Almost all of these practices, I will add, have come about in in the last ten years, mostly even in the 5½ years since I left Melbourne. Things have objectively been getting much worse (e.g. ads inside and outside trains; and digitally-cycling ads are almost ubiquitous instead of rare, and animated ads are common rather than unknown), but I imagine there’s also a good chunk of me becoming more intolerant of these things due to no longer being acclimated to them. I don’t like being in Melbourne very much. Escaping ads and distractingly-dynamic or too-bright digital screens everywhere wasn’t (directly) one of the reasons I left, but it certainly is now.
adnonymous 4y ago
I am intimately involved in online advertising. 500k+ monthly revenue from Google alone (1 of several dozen partners in our stack). Advertising had been changing but the advertisers and the SSPs and the DSPs are changing with it. All is well. https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/ https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/
scotty79 4y ago
Look at the forest. Trees are companies. Canopies are their sales. Ads are the trunks. If all trees were forced to halve the length of their trunks nothing would change but a lot of resources would be saved.
smitty1e 4y ago
I love this caption down-page: > Humans are creative. Give them back their public spaces and let them shape them. BUT THERE MUST BE NO ADVERTISING! What is unclear from the article is: - what will replace advertising while somehow not morphing into advertising - how this brave new ad-free regime will enforce itself without resorting to tyranny
ciconia 4y ago
It seems to me that advertising is one of the main reasons people spend so much money on totally useless crap. What would be the impact on GDP is advertising didn't exist?
eloy 4y ago
> A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed some extraordinary facts: 90% of all American CEOs believed that selling a new product without advertisements would be impossible; 85% were convinced that advertisements persuade people into buying things they don’t need, and 51% — a majority — believed that advertisements persuaded people into buying things they don’t even want.¹ Uhh. So, this point to a book called Less is More — How Degrowth Will Save the World. In that book this statement is indeed made, and as a source it points to "Andre Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1994).". But in that book I can't find any reference to it. Was is completely made up?

67 points by voisin 4y ago

> The goal and main purpose of ads is to go beyond the narrow limits of real needs and create new ones that did not exist before. Citation very much needed. Advertising is everything. If you own a small business, your sign is an ad. If you were a traveling cobbler in colonial America, your wagon was an ad.

readthenotes1 4y ago
Advertising only became perfidious and ubiquitous after the Soviet Union and it's glorious jihad against class exploitation ended of course, or so implies the author.
voisin 4y ago
You aren’t wrong but the majority (certainly by dollars spent) of ads you see are not simply letting people know your business is in the shop or wagon associated with them - they are to manufacture desire to drive sales. You can have a directory like the Yellowpages for simply finding the contact information of someone to fulfill a need you already have, but no one looks at a directory to get ideas of things they may want.
- rpmisms 4y ago
  Sure, but that doesn't define advertising. I really like useful ads, and I've gotten some very nice products that I simply hasn't heard about before through advertising. I also dislike the modern "you already know about this beer, but drinking it will surround you with swedish bikini models" type of ad, but something like YNAB's simple "Hey, you need a budget" is awesome, because you do, indeed, need a budget.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    There needs to be a special category for ads that are literally targeted to like 12 people. For example, Northup Grumman taking out a Super Bowl ad in for the B-21 stealth bomber. They might as well started it with, "This is a very special message to Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James." https://www.military.com/video/aircraft/military-aircraft/northrop-grummans-2015-super-bowl-ad/4023069094001 https://www.military.com/video/aircraft/military-aircraft/no...
jehb 4y ago
We have a lot of words to describe advertising based on what channel it uses, or what stage in an imaginary funnel the marketing might serve, but a pretty poor selection of words to differentiate marketing based on why a person might need a product being advertised. Everyone is trying so hard to convince everyone else that what they sell isn't a commodity, that navigating almost any purchase decision has become a nightmare, even for sophisticated consumers. Do I want fair trade coffee, or organic coffee, or locally roasted coffee, or cheap coffee, or coffee where the beans were previously shit out by monkeys? We're no longer trying to sell the coffee; we're trying to sell the idea that the differentiator is the most important thing. No longer is the first cobbler you see the one you choose to fix your shoes.

KrugerDunnings 4y ago

Yay, an anarchist calling for more regulation.

version_five 4y ago

Just realized: advertising is over, and has been for a few years. How many people here see any ads? And if you watch someone without adblock or money to spend on ad-free versions of stuff, they just ignore them entirely because their attention span has already been destroyed. The big spending ads on social media are "one weird trick" type stuff. Occasionally something breaks though and we're forced to see a subway station takeover or some other embarrassing attempt at relevance. But overall, ads are a joke now. They're either something to be ignored as part of bottom tier "products" or they are bypassed. So while I realize the surface of the web has been destroyed by advertising, and it's now just a kind of toxic wasteland, basically everyone has moved underground and is ok. The only thing I worry about is how it all gets paid for once companies collectively realize nobody cares about ads. Are there really enough "podiatrists hate her" gimmicks to keep paying for FAANG et al?

marketerinland 4y ago
I just finished up a job in marketing. We sold primarily to developers and we did this primarily using online ads. The percentage of people using ad blockers (that actually work) is less than you’d think.
- falcor84 4y ago
  What is the true percentage from your experience?
  - marketerinland 4y ago
    That’s impossible for me to know; however it’s low enough that the company just raised $5m on a $50m Val and is growing significantly in a downturn.
chezelenkoooo 4y ago
How can you possibly say this when google is making billions purely from advertising? One of the biggest companies in the world, whose biggest revenue stream, by an absolutely massive margin, and still growing, is ads. I think you forget that we live in a bubble here and we do not generalise out to the rest of the population.

sublinear 4y ago

> The argument that advertisements provide us with information that we would not have otherwise also appears unsubstantiated. This may have been true before the internet, but we no longer need advertisements to stay informed. A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product. Uhh... what? All google search results have always been ads. Even when it's not paid search results, the network effect that causes a page to rank high is the result of marketing.

superb-owl 4y ago

I strongly recommend The Century of the Self, an incredible documentary about the rise of advertising. It has its flaws, but it gives a really powerful lens for understanding how we got here. I reviewed it briefly here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/links-for-september https://superbowl.substack.com/p/links-for-september

Veuxdo 4y ago

> Another major method [of scheduling endless growth] is the artificial creation of previously non-existing needs and desires to extract ever-increasing rents. This is commonly referred to as advertising. The premise of this is flawed on a few counts, but I'll just point out that what the author is referring to here is marketing, of which advertising is only a part.

mgobl 4y ago

> The concept of endless growth is a key ideological component of capitalism. Despite its devastating environmental and social consequences, growth for the sake of growth remains one of the main drivers of the global economy. Without it, the entire system comes crashing down like a gigantic house of cards. I hear this a lot, but is it even true? Yes, our current system incentivizes increased consumption as a primary driver of growth. However, with the internet-era advent of 0-marginal cost goods/services, with extremely sublinear real-world resource usage (ie. electricity), aren't productivity increases just as valid a mode of growth as consumption increases? If we appropriately tax the consumptive inputs that feed an enterprise (eg. Carbon) isn't it reasonable to say that the growth of capital is not necessarily permanently hitched to the cart of otherwise limited real-world consumption? This is a key part of my perspective that degrowth is not the only path forward. Innovation can yield us a carbon-neutral future. In the same vein, can't invention yield us an economy with fewer "devastating environmental and social consequences"? It's incumbent upon us to price the negative externalities of consumption, not to abolish consumption entirely. IANAEconomist, so I'd welcome critique on these points.

svachalek 4y ago
Oh they would love to make you "need" all kinds of virtual expenses. But why not both?
- mgobl 4y ago
  Because consumption feeds the machine that ultimately increases the availability of resources which deliver basic human needs to people around the world [1]. Food, water, and shelter are important. From another perspective: global GDP seems to be in the ballpark of $100T. If we grow at 3% for 100 years, we get 100T*(1.03)^100, almost 2000T global GDP. If we cut off 1% of that growth and use it to feed and house people worldwide, it becomes 100T*(1.02)^100 = 725T, plus 1% of global GDP per year in assistance (1T per year now, 7T in 2123, summing to 35T over 100 years [2]). I think the utilitarian question is whether an additional 1200T in global wealth outweighs 35T of targeted assistance to the most vulnerable people in the world. If we look at the wealth distribution [3], the bottom 53% have 1.4% of the wealth. If that holds (which isn't necessarily a safe assumption, it could get worse), the bottom 53% would get 16T. Doesn't look so great compared to that 35T (probably targeted at the very bottom of that 53%), I admit. If we extend out to 200 years though, even these lines cross (if we make it that far :). I think this tells me the most beneficial path forward is to maximize GDP growth while minimizing inequality to ensure that the fruits of that labor/growth help the vulnerable get food, not the rich buy another boat. That said, I think cutting global wealth by a factor of 3 in 100 years is not a great outcome. It would be like global wealth in 2020 being reverted back to that of 1980ish [4]. Life wasn't so different in the developed world then, but it was quite different outside of it (see [1]). There is a valid criticism that perhaps the world doesn't need more wealth than that which can house, clothe, and feed everyone on earth. And we already produce that much wealth, it's just not distributed evenly enough to meet those needs. OTOH, what luxuries would you forgo to deliver those benefits? AC? Your laundry machine? Availability and quality of healthcare? We also need to motivate 8B people to continue working and producing the goods/services that yield a good life for everyone. In the face of these questions, I don't find capitalism to be as evil as I once did when I was a bit younger. I don't mean to blindly support the invisible hand. The Keynesian approach balances government intervention ("distributions", above) with capital investment. My point is just that the trade-offs are not as simple as I once thought they were, and that growth is not the unmitigated evil many are eager to make it out to be. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo... [2]: https://imgur.com/a/rEneaxK https://imgur.com/a/rEneaxK [3]: https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyramidend2019_1607350808686.jpg https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyr... [4]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

superb-owl 4y ago

Yesterday I got on the subway and sat down. Two stops in I start to think, this is an oddly pleasant subway ride. Why am I in such a good mood? Then I realize the car I’m in has been stripped of all advertising. No bright colors and sexy women and pithy slogans pulling at my attention. Bliss.

okr 4y ago
I still remember my gray socialist upbringing. When i started to glue my playtoy with chewing gum paper from wrigleys, because it had this green, flashy, metallic finish and it looked awesome. I like the blinking distraction.
- iisan7 4y ago
  grass is always greener =) I remember watching the movie Good Bye Lenin! (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/) and thinking how nice things would be if we had just one choice for every product in the supermarket, so I wouldn't research each one and what made them different, and decide which I wanted, only to have them disappear. I get why products made by a state enterprise with no regard to performance or consumer reception would make for a bad time, though. Store generic/"white label" brands do somewhat meet this niche. But I dig that minimalist, text or line drawing only esthetic!
deleted 4y ago
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blibble 4y ago
lucky you on my computer trains they're adding OLED video ad screens at eyelevel, with constant movement

jonathankoren 4y ago

> "Only in the last century, and especially in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, has the advertising industry grown into this massive all-encompassing behemoth." The irony that a person writes this sentence, and then illustrates his writing solely with advertisements from the early 20th and late 19th centuries. My god we're talking only 32 years ago. Sure it's not his living memory, but come on. Talk about not even looking at the pictures in a history book, let alone reading a history book.

asdff 4y ago
You can tell from this the author has not read Manufacturing Consent and if they had not read that book, I question the relevancy of their opinions on this topic.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Didn't even bother to know Mad Men existed.

marketerinland 4y ago

He can think of a couple of examples where marketing is manipulative, therefore all marketing is manipulative and causes people to make irrational decisions. I sell tours to interesting places. I sell them using advertising. How is that a problem? Let’s say someone decides to open a hair salon. How does that person promote their business if not through advertising? Or is the author wanting to ban people from opening businesses? This is a classic case of placing a binary solution on a problem of degrees. Some advertising has harmful practises, some advertising is too much in some places. This is uncontroversial. Where the author has erred is in his simple black and white diagnosis.

moffkalast 4y ago
I believe the author addresses your concerns: > Of course, capitalists will strongly oppose all of this. They will argue that advertisements serve a clear and valuable purpose: they inform us about products, assist us in deciding what to buy, and thus increase market efficiency by promoting the sale of quality products and preventing inferior ones from capturing the market. This claim is, of course, nonsense.
- marketerinland 4y ago
  He ‘attempts’ to address the concern by calling it nonsense, and then offers no viable alternative, while using a long series of poorly structured arguments. As I’ve said above; he’s applying a black and white argument to a problem of degrees. It’s just like Goldilocks - the food can be too hot, the food can be too cold, it can also be just right. The point of these children fables is to teach us basic principles of how the world works and to encourage us to use them to recognise our own mistakes.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    True, he doesn't, but there are alternatives. Back when ads weren't a huge thing yet you had phonebook entries for companies or tradespeople providing a certain service, much like one can find on google maps today. If someone needed something they'd just call a number from the list. Though one might consider those entries ads as well I suppose. I (personally) think the problem isn't so much in the ads themselves since they're obviously useful when you're actively looking for something, it's that they're shoved in your face at every opportunity possible. And sometimes even in some impossible ones too. Given how we're bombarded with it online it may make sense to curb how much it's allowed in public spaces in real life to give people at least some breathing room.

iisan7 4y ago

See also the BBC documentary series, "Century of the Self". The article starts out by basically admitting that there is some informational role that is needed: "In the early 20th century, advertisements served a clear purpose: they informed customers about the useful qualities of a product and how that product solved a specific problem or need." And then came Freud and Bernays. The article doesn't get into it but I thought it interesting that Freud's theories found more fertile ground in the USA than Europe, in retrospect easy to see because the theory of the subconscious was so marketable. I agree that some sort of advertising ban would be nice, but unlike the article, I don't think it will be an argument that advertising is necessary, but rather a free speech argument that advertising can't be distinguished from opinionated speech. And: "A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product." Really now? We're already entering a third phase, where advertising is moving beyond explicitly labeled published ads, into infiltration of social networks and 'hidden advertising' in the form of faked product reviews, fake word of mouth, etc. It's easy to look back on what went wrong with advertising in the 20th c., but I'd rather figure out what to do about what seems to be coming in the 21st.

Retric 4y ago
It wouldn’t take much to completely change advertising without limiting free speech. I can only assume puffery for example isn’t a free speech issue and can be dumped.
- iisan7 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. I don't think it will be practical and easy to regulate. How to distinguish commercial speech from other opinionated free speech? Advertising from informing? I can't think of an easy legal fix here. Are you saying that we can/should ban a concept like 'puffery'? And all of this is trying to hit a target that is falling away in the rear view mirror. We can ban billboards and TV ads, but it's going to be harder to ban internet bribes and lies.
  - Retric 4y ago

GianFabien 4y ago

The flip side is that advertisers pay for "services" that the public consumes for free, e.g. radio, free-to-air TV, most of the internet - especially search and social media. In the early days of radio and TV - to my knowledge in England, Australia, NZ (and its colonies?), you had to pay a license fee. In those days you had like 1-2 TV stations to choose from. People hated paying those fees and in many countries they were abolished. Likewise, I doubt that people would pay to have access Google search & Gmail, Facebook etc. As long as advertisers subsidize "free services", they are likely to remain.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
That’s an interesting example because people very much want to pay for TV channels and streaming channels?
ben_w 4y ago
TV license still exists in the UK, which you need even if you only watch iPlayer. Similar thing exists here in Germany (or at least Berlin, I don't know all the federalisms yet) except unlike the UK you can't opt out by not having a TV or equivalent.
jemmyw 4y ago
Presumably though we pay more for the advertised goods and services in order that they can afford the advertising to pay for the services we consume for free. If we removed the advertising part of that then everything could be cheaper.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  No, the price would be the same and the company would just pocket the money instead of spending it on advertising. If they do not get enough customers to sustain the company it will shut down.

college_physics 4y ago

Ads are a brute force mechanism to generate consumption demand. But society in the developed world has satiated itself with consumption, maxed out on its credit etc and is not happier, arguably more stress and dissatisfied than before. On top, the environmental bills of that pointless overconsumption keep growing. So things will change irrespective of whether "they must". People will try to find solace in other ways. Economic structures and social preferences are ever evolving - we tend to ascribe to the recent past a longevity and stability that it does not have. The digital age may accelerate such transitions. Or supress them. It is still a toss. Surveillance capitalism was built on adtech but is somehow conditioned on the masses forever having no agency and no control over digital devices and information flows.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Are there any trends that suggest power in the digital sphere will be returning to the masses? Mobile OSes have been pretty locked down pretty much from the start of the smartphone, and the two desktop OSes that most people use have different flavors of UX control; Windows in particular has taken a nosedive in user autonomy. And that's to say nothing of the websites and social media used.
- college_physics 4y ago
  All valid (and depressing) data points. It takes some inate optimism to think that things could be otherwise but I believe the commoditisation of digital infrastructure and the suboptimal stewardship acts against its ongoing tight control by a small entrenched minority. The underlying zero marginal cost trend is gnawing at the foundations of the current architecture. The wave upon wave of fizzling hypes is one symptom of this. The other headwind is expressed at the macro level as the missing IT productivity that economists puzzle over. Simply put: the tech industry, through its recurrent monopolies, adtech business models etc is holding societies and economies back. Not developing the tools that will increase welfare both on a financial and psychological scale. The same commoditized tech deployed in a decentralized way could open up a completely new era. As has been stated many times, we live in a feudal digital system and we know for a fact that market systems are superior to feudalism.

i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago

With regards to the title, the age of advertising as it is today is likely going to have to change. Some of the largest companies in the world have advertising as their main revenue, and this is a growing trend. Another growing trend is users’ rights over their data, as well as their awareness of the situation and their willingness to exercise those rights. To me, it feels that there’s a natural limit, and a natural instability built in to the entire model: ad revenue depends on users, users don’t like ads. But there’s a third factor at play: their reputation. Ad revenue makes companies so much money that they try to branch out with ridiculous things that end up costing them users (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Meta - all have shifted towards dumb ideas in the last couple of years and their reputations are all in the gutter because of it). As a result, their risky Skynet-wannabe (or in the case of Meta, Lawnmower-Man-wannabe) investments are hurting their core income stream, and they’re resorting to faux-austerity as a result. It’s embarrassing to watch. However, I disagree with the article for a variety of reasons. The main one is “capitalism bad” has never been a viable mechanism for something to cease existing, and while companies make money from it, they’ll do it. Government isn’t incentivised to intervene too strongly because people buying things turns out to be good for the economy and good for the tax man, even if those things are the result of irrational decisions (and even if the aforementioned companies pay so little in tax anyway that it barely scratches the surface).

jerojero 4y ago

I think the biggest issue for me has to do with the fact that, being really into technology, advertisement has taken the form of "reviews", "previous" and so on. Although I block both ads and sponsored content (with sponsorblock) it's still impossible to escape the recommendation algorithms that just show me all the new and exciting things the market is coming up with. And this doesn't just go for technology, it's everywhere, from plants to books to phones to fountain pens. The line is completely blurred. Though it is easiest to see in tech because every tech youtuber out there is doing "non paid reviews" but what are these if not just advertisement? They get the products for free just to show them off, and it's bonanza for everyone... well, everyone but the consumer. The most critical situation for me is that in this age, if you have a little bit of money, there's always a right product fit for you. Sure, I might not be willing to spend the 1400 dollars of this top-of-the-line smartphone but hey, here's a very similar alternative for just half the price; it's chinese but you can always get around some of the drawbacks with a bit of knowledge, now, that's exciting. It's difficult because I really enjoy technology, ultimately, I'm a weak person with a tendency to overspend; but I've realized the grand majority of tech "reviews" out there are nothing but giving you a list of specs on a nicely presented package. What do they add, really? I mean, they barely get to use these products at all! A nice review requires time, but when time has passed then the new product is already out. It's an extremely fast paced cycle that leaves everyone behind and it's all fueled by advertisement. Though there are some reviewers out there that really do a good job and give good information; when I was trying to buy a robot vacuum cleaner there was plenty of really high quality reviews of them. It's become really difficult to separate between people giving valuable information and people just trying to create a need to consume in you.

chrismorgan 4y ago

I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I know of is 40km away on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop, and the second-nearest over 100km away. (Also one road safety billboard (TAC) 45km in a different direction, but that’s at least a bit different.) None in tech or other things, either: no newspaper, radio or TV, nothing on mobile (which I barely use anyway), aggressive ad-blocker and JS disabled by default in Firefox. Just occasionally (considerably less than once a year) I get exposed to TV (which I was not raised with). It’s awful. How does anyone ever willingly subject themselves to it? I detest televisions. They’re far too effective at stealing your attention, distracting you, et cetera, and their ads are regularly just sickening from the rapidity of transitions and visual stimuli. Fairly regularly I go down to Melbourne (where I grew up), mostly by public transport but sometimes driving. Ugh. So many billboards, so many things trying to steal your attention (and designed to steal your attention), so many such things even actively causing safety hazards while driving (especially at night). A lot of current billboard practices should be made illegal as part of road safety laws, quite apart from anything else. Almost all of these practices, I will add, have come about in in the last ten years, mostly even in the 5½ years since I left Melbourne. Things have objectively been getting much worse (e.g. ads inside and outside trains; and digitally-cycling ads are almost ubiquitous instead of rare, and animated ads are common rather than unknown), but I imagine there’s also a good chunk of me becoming more intolerant of these things due to no longer being acclimated to them. I don’t like being in Melbourne very much. Escaping ads and distractingly-dynamic or too-bright digital screens everywhere wasn’t (directly) one of the reasons I left, but it certainly is now.

adnonymous 4y ago

I am intimately involved in online advertising. 500k+ monthly revenue from Google alone (1 of several dozen partners in our stack). Advertising had been changing but the advertisers and the SSPs and the DSPs are changing with it. All is well. https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/ https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/

scotty79 4y ago

Look at the forest. Trees are companies. Canopies are their sales. Ads are the trunks. If all trees were forced to halve the length of their trunks nothing would change but a lot of resources would be saved.

smitty1e 4y ago

I love this caption down-page: > Humans are creative. Give them back their public spaces and let them shape them. BUT THERE MUST BE NO ADVERTISING! What is unclear from the article is: - what will replace advertising while somehow not morphing into advertising - how this brave new ad-free regime will enforce itself without resorting to tyranny

ciconia 4y ago

It seems to me that advertising is one of the main reasons people spend so much money on totally useless crap. What would be the impact on GDP is advertising didn't exist?

eloy 4y ago

> A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed some extraordinary facts: 90% of all American CEOs believed that selling a new product without advertisements would be impossible; 85% were convinced that advertisements persuade people into buying things they don’t need, and 51% — a majority — believed that advertisements persuaded people into buying things they don’t even want.¹ Uhh. So, this point to a book called Less is More — How Degrowth Will Save the World. In that book this statement is indeed made, and as a source it points to "Andre Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1994).". But in that book I can't find any reference to it. Was is completely made up?