7 ms·

We banned tobacco advertisements in most places - it seems like alcohol should probably be in a similar category.

soligern 3y ago
[dead]
ericmay 3y ago
We should work toward banning most advertisements in most public places really. If you admit that these ads manipulate people into buying or consuming products they might not otherwise buy or consume, it's easy to extend that down to other products as well. Giant roadside billboards, for example, have no place in America.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Ban intrusive advertising entirely. Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  True
- donatj 3y ago
  I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
  - User23 3y ago
    Since perhaps not everyone is aware, this exact line is one that gets pushed hard during the Google new employee orientation process.
  - lumb63 3y ago
    Have you ever found yourself humming a jingle from a company whose product you have no interest in, and will never have interest in? I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own. To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction. In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    So you regularly forget all about a product like Coca Cola?
    - donatj 3y ago
      What is the argument here? Being able to remember something is manipulative? Are text books the ultimate manipulation?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The point is that Coca Cola doesn't need to inform anyone of their products; all that advertising they're running is trying to hack your brain at subconscious level, by teaching you associations that will make you "spontaneously" remember about their products when you're e.g. thinking about Christmas, or feel thirsty, or see a photo of a polar bear, etc. In ML terms, they are fine-tuning you to increase the chances of your mind generating a sequence "Coca Cola" in increasing number of contexts that otherwise had you not interested in buying.
      - empyrrhicist 3y ago
        Here's an example that should hopefully be provocative. Let's say I work in ad-tech, and am hired to do an online advertising campaign for an online casino. Let's say I leverage some generative models as part of my campaign tuning, as well as some pretty sophisticated user tracking. At the end of the day, suppose my algorithms have done a good job of creating and targeting advertisements that result in conversions. Everybody wins, right? I make money, my client makes money, consumers learn about a product they are (evidently) interested in. Suppose further that the advertisement my algorithms generated does a good job of triggering cravings in gambling addicts (perhaps emulating the sensory experience of slot machines), and that my targeting found online communities focused on addiction. The problems with this should be obvious. At the core, you're assuming that humans are perfect little rational automata, when the reality is that we're sentient animals with a lot of maladaptive brain behavior that can be exploited in known ways. Advertisements are not simple informational notices, but precisely crafted information packets designed to elicit specific behavior.
  - gamegoblin 3y ago
    I agree with you that connecting consumers to products is valuable. I've bought several things from instagram ads (has the best targeting of any platform, IMO), but OP specifically mentioned public places. Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum. Consider this billboard on a boat that ruins the view at a public beach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/this_boat_goes_back_and_forth_showing_ads_so_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/thi... Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else. Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere. Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.
    - donatj 3y ago
      See I don't understand this argument either. Endless water let alone scrub brush on the side of the highway aren't anything worth looking at? I'd rather get signs that aren't targeted to me versus something so painfully boring. I can easily look either side of the sign and see the same thing I would see where the sign is. I genuinely don't see the downside.
      - gamegoblin 3y ago
        If you don't have a preference between seeing Vermont's beautiful hilly forests, and seeing the same forests with a tacky billboard drawing your gaze, I don't really know what to tell you other than that most people feel differently. It is ultimately an aesthetic judgment and everyone can have their own taste. We live in a democracy and it's up to a majority to decide what to do with the public commons. It is telling, to me, that no state that has banned billboards (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) has any serious political movement from any part of the spectrum to reverse the bans.
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        You'll want to avoid Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, and Maine then. I understand billboards are illegal there.
  - ericmay 3y ago
    It depends on how you interpret what ads do. I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want or need. If you say that we should ban public cigarette ads, for example, you're kind of proving the point (which is why I mentioned banning additional ads if you agreed with banning cigarette or alcohol ads). Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want? Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.
    - donatj 3y ago
      > I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want This just seems silly. When was the last time you came home from the store with something, look around “I don’t have a use for this? Why did I buy this?” And I don’t run an ad blocker because I equate it with petty theft. Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
      - nobody9999 3y ago
        >Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free. I take your point, but the other side of the coin is that I want to control what is executed/displayed on my computers (that is, my private property). Especially since it's not just ads. It's web trackers/beacons and other tools to surreptitiously gather data about me. And I don't want to share my PII/browsing habits/interests with a bunch of strangers who just want to sell me stuff[0]. If a web site (someone else's private property) chooses to serve ads, I am under no obligation to download/execute/display those ads or anything else for that matter. And if the owner/publisher of a website wants to insist on showing me ads (by identifying ad blockers and refusing to display actual content -- which some sites do) -- unless I disable my ad blocker), that's the website publisher's right on their private property. But I'll say it again -- I will control what content is displayed/executed/downloaded on my private property. You seem to think that I should give control of my devices to someone else in order to consume their content. I'm unwilling to do so. As such, if someone else doesn't like that, they are free to block me from viewing their site. But I'm not "stealing" by blocking ads, rather I'm protecting my own interests. If you (or anyone else) wants me not to do that, then block me if I'm using an ad blocker. Making the claim that it's somehow "stealing" is ridiculous on its face. [0] To put a really fine point on that: Fuck that noise!
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    The problem is that that's not true in practice; ads that serve only to inform would be great, but they also essentially don't exist in the real world. Have you ever seen a black and white text billboard that says "$BRAND beer exists, and sells for $COST per bottle, has 5% ABV, and has a 87% satisfaction rating."? No, only pictures of happy people and bright lights holding a beer bottle with a logo on top. The goal is not to inform, but to manipulate.
    - User23 3y ago
      I'd love to see those two billboards A/B tested in various markets.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    Do you work in advertising? Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after. Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    > I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad? There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes. Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment. Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      It doesn't help that the US allows a great deal of advertising that is completely misleading and/or inaccurate. Many terms means absolutely nothing when used in advertising and can be used by anyone, but are clearly designed to entice people to buy crap.
  - chris_wot 3y ago
    Yeah, all those United Colors of Benetton ads really introduced the neat features and style of their range.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    What you present is the idealized vision of how advertising should work, from the perspective of consumers. In a perfect world, advertisements would not encourage self-destructive behaviors or gross unnecessary spending, they would simply inform potential buyers about the objective qualities (and detriments) of a given product to help the consumer make an informed decision. The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.
  - retrac 3y ago
    How many people are still unfamiliar with Coca Cola? Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure. At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.
    - kjellsbells 3y ago
      Twas always thus, and is beautifully described by John Berger in his book nd tv series Ways of Seeing. In, I think, 1974? Well worth your youtube time.
      - manicennui 3y ago
        Not sure how well this captures the same information, but I found it when looking for a place to view the series: https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/
  - everdrive 3y ago
    Most advertisements are annoying or emotionally manipulative. It’s usually not the case that someone is just saying “a cool screwdriver with the follow specs exists.” Usually it’s an advertisement sort of implying that you agree with some social agenda, or else implying that women would be attracted to you if you could afford a BMW, or something else. It’s similar to a lot of what makes social media terrible.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
    If they aren't manipulative, if I actually want what they are selling, why are they inserting themselves into my attention instead of waiting for me to look for them in a catalog? The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon. If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      Catalogs are also forms of advertising, but your larger point on push vs pull is correct. Something being shoved in your face is invasive and abusive while having something accessible should you decide to request or seek it out is the ideal. I've gone to some lengths to remove as many ads from my life as I can and discoverability is a real problem. There are times when I only hear about something I'm very interested in long after others have and there's likely things I'd buy, but I don't even know it exists as an option. Even with that problem, it's still worth it to me to shut out as much of that manipulation and noise as I can.
- manicennui 3y ago
  States such as Vermont have banned billboards.
  - Arnt 3y ago
    Norway hasn't had alcohol advertising since 1970 or so. Society hasn't collapsed as a result.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      The concern in the US is always that regulation will hurt corporate profits. It took decades before we did anything about cigarettes and the tobacco companies fought it every step of the way. People literally rather die/cause other people to die than give up profits.
mr_00ff00 3y ago
How the US tackled tobacco should be a case study in how to eliminate usage of a dangerous substance. Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
- ipaddr 3y ago
  You may not have been part of the cool group.
  - mr_00ff00 3y ago
    Lol you may be right, but from my understanding, the older generations everyone smoked. For a while in my generation, a small minority did. Now though, everyone vapes. Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.
civilitty 3y ago
Absolutely. As a former smoker, that ban has probably done a lot more good than people realize - not just to prevent people from picking up the habit but also helping smokers quit. Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal. Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
- kedean 3y ago
  > I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment. I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    > I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute. Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot. To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately. I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
littlestymaar 3y ago
Ads for alcohol beverage are almost[1] practically banned in France, despite our massive wine ans spirit industry, which proves that it's actually doable. It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success. [1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)

[dead]

We should work toward banning most advertisements in most public places really. If you admit that these ads manipulate people into buying or consuming products they might not otherwise buy or consume, it's easy to extend that down to other products as well. Giant roadside billboards, for example, have no place in America.

lamontcg 3y ago
Ban intrusive advertising entirely. Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
True
donatj 3y ago
I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
- User23 3y ago
  Since perhaps not everyone is aware, this exact line is one that gets pushed hard during the Google new employee orientation process.
- lumb63 3y ago
  Have you ever found yourself humming a jingle from a company whose product you have no interest in, and will never have interest in? I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own. To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction. In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  So you regularly forget all about a product like Coca Cola?
  - donatj 3y ago
    What is the argument here? Being able to remember something is manipulative? Are text books the ultimate manipulation?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      The point is that Coca Cola doesn't need to inform anyone of their products; all that advertising they're running is trying to hack your brain at subconscious level, by teaching you associations that will make you "spontaneously" remember about their products when you're e.g. thinking about Christmas, or feel thirsty, or see a photo of a polar bear, etc. In ML terms, they are fine-tuning you to increase the chances of your mind generating a sequence "Coca Cola" in increasing number of contexts that otherwise had you not interested in buying.
    - empyrrhicist 3y ago
      Here's an example that should hopefully be provocative. Let's say I work in ad-tech, and am hired to do an online advertising campaign for an online casino. Let's say I leverage some generative models as part of my campaign tuning, as well as some pretty sophisticated user tracking. At the end of the day, suppose my algorithms have done a good job of creating and targeting advertisements that result in conversions. Everybody wins, right? I make money, my client makes money, consumers learn about a product they are (evidently) interested in. Suppose further that the advertisement my algorithms generated does a good job of triggering cravings in gambling addicts (perhaps emulating the sensory experience of slot machines), and that my targeting found online communities focused on addiction. The problems with this should be obvious. At the core, you're assuming that humans are perfect little rational automata, when the reality is that we're sentient animals with a lot of maladaptive brain behavior that can be exploited in known ways. Advertisements are not simple informational notices, but precisely crafted information packets designed to elicit specific behavior.
- gamegoblin 3y ago
  I agree with you that connecting consumers to products is valuable. I've bought several things from instagram ads (has the best targeting of any platform, IMO), but OP specifically mentioned public places. Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum. Consider this billboard on a boat that ruins the view at a public beach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/this_boat_goes_back_and_forth_showing_ads_so_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/thi... Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else. Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere. Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.
  - donatj 3y ago
    See I don't understand this argument either. Endless water let alone scrub brush on the side of the highway aren't anything worth looking at? I'd rather get signs that aren't targeted to me versus something so painfully boring. I can easily look either side of the sign and see the same thing I would see where the sign is. I genuinely don't see the downside.
    - gamegoblin 3y ago
      If you don't have a preference between seeing Vermont's beautiful hilly forests, and seeing the same forests with a tacky billboard drawing your gaze, I don't really know what to tell you other than that most people feel differently. It is ultimately an aesthetic judgment and everyone can have their own taste. We live in a democracy and it's up to a majority to decide what to do with the public commons. It is telling, to me, that no state that has banned billboards (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) has any serious political movement from any part of the spectrum to reverse the bans.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      You'll want to avoid Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, and Maine then. I understand billboards are illegal there.
- ericmay 3y ago
  It depends on how you interpret what ads do. I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want or need. If you say that we should ban public cigarette ads, for example, you're kind of proving the point (which is why I mentioned banning additional ads if you agreed with banning cigarette or alcohol ads). Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want? Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.
  - donatj 3y ago
    > I find that they tend to manipulate people into buying things they don't actually want This just seems silly. When was the last time you came home from the store with something, look around “I don’t have a use for this? Why did I buy this?” And I don’t run an ad blocker because I equate it with petty theft. Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
    - nobody9999 3y ago
      >Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free. I take your point, but the other side of the coin is that I want to control what is executed/displayed on my computers (that is, my private property). Especially since it's not just ads. It's web trackers/beacons and other tools to surreptitiously gather data about me. And I don't want to share my PII/browsing habits/interests with a bunch of strangers who just want to sell me stuff[0]. If a web site (someone else's private property) chooses to serve ads, I am under no obligation to download/execute/display those ads or anything else for that matter. And if the owner/publisher of a website wants to insist on showing me ads (by identifying ad blockers and refusing to display actual content -- which some sites do) -- unless I disable my ad blocker), that's the website publisher's right on their private property. But I'll say it again -- I will control what content is displayed/executed/downloaded on my private property. You seem to think that I should give control of my devices to someone else in order to consume their content. I'm unwilling to do so. As such, if someone else doesn't like that, they are free to block me from viewing their site. But I'm not "stealing" by blocking ads, rather I'm protecting my own interests. If you (or anyone else) wants me not to do that, then block me if I'm using an ad blocker. Making the claim that it's somehow "stealing" is ridiculous on its face. [0] To put a really fine point on that: Fuck that noise!
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  The problem is that that's not true in practice; ads that serve only to inform would be great, but they also essentially don't exist in the real world. Have you ever seen a black and white text billboard that says "$BRAND beer exists, and sells for $COST per bottle, has 5% ABV, and has a 87% satisfaction rating."? No, only pictures of happy people and bright lights holding a beer bottle with a logo on top. The goal is not to inform, but to manipulate.
  - User23 3y ago
    I'd love to see those two billboards A/B tested in various markets.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Do you work in advertising? Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after. Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad? There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes. Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment. Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    It doesn't help that the US allows a great deal of advertising that is completely misleading and/or inaccurate. Many terms means absolutely nothing when used in advertising and can be used by anyone, but are clearly designed to entice people to buy crap.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  Yeah, all those United Colors of Benetton ads really introduced the neat features and style of their range.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- babypuncher 3y ago
  What you present is the idealized vision of how advertising should work, from the perspective of consumers. In a perfect world, advertisements would not encourage self-destructive behaviors or gross unnecessary spending, they would simply inform potential buyers about the objective qualities (and detriments) of a given product to help the consumer make an informed decision. The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.
- retrac 3y ago
  How many people are still unfamiliar with Coca Cola? Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure. At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.
  - kjellsbells 3y ago
    Twas always thus, and is beautifully described by John Berger in his book nd tv series Ways of Seeing. In, I think, 1974? Well worth your youtube time.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      Not sure how well this captures the same information, but I found it when looking for a place to view the series: https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/
- everdrive 3y ago
  Most advertisements are annoying or emotionally manipulative. It’s usually not the case that someone is just saying “a cool screwdriver with the follow specs exists.” Usually it’s an advertisement sort of implying that you agree with some social agenda, or else implying that women would be attracted to you if you could afford a BMW, or something else. It’s similar to a lot of what makes social media terrible.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago
  If they aren't manipulative, if I actually want what they are selling, why are they inserting themselves into my attention instead of waiting for me to look for them in a catalog? The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon. If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Catalogs are also forms of advertising, but your larger point on push vs pull is correct. Something being shoved in your face is invasive and abusive while having something accessible should you decide to request or seek it out is the ideal. I've gone to some lengths to remove as many ads from my life as I can and discoverability is a real problem. There are times when I only hear about something I'm very interested in long after others have and there's likely things I'd buy, but I don't even know it exists as an option. Even with that problem, it's still worth it to me to shut out as much of that manipulation and noise as I can.
manicennui 3y ago
States such as Vermont have banned billboards.
- Arnt 3y ago
  Norway hasn't had alcohol advertising since 1970 or so. Society hasn't collapsed as a result.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    The concern in the US is always that regulation will hurt corporate profits. It took decades before we did anything about cigarettes and the tobacco companies fought it every step of the way. People literally rather die/cause other people to die than give up profits.

mr_00ff00 3y ago

How the US tackled tobacco should be a case study in how to eliminate usage of a dangerous substance. Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).

ipaddr 3y ago
You may not have been part of the cool group.
- mr_00ff00 3y ago
  Lol you may be right, but from my understanding, the older generations everyone smoked. For a while in my generation, a small minority did. Now though, everyone vapes. Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.

civilitty 3y ago

Absolutely. As a former smoker, that ban has probably done a lot more good than people realize - not just to prevent people from picking up the habit but also helping smokers quit. Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal. Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.

kedean 3y ago
> I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment. I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
- civilitty 3y ago
  > I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute. Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot. To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately. I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago

littlestymaar 3y ago

Ads for alcohol beverage are almost[1] practically banned in France, despite our massive wine ans spirit industry, which proves that it's actually doable. It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success. [1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)