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Profound. Thanks for sharing this. That really frames what I’ve been struggling to describe. Advertising isn’t some necessary lifeblood of many industries. It

Profound. Thanks for sharing this. That really frames what I’ve been struggling to describe. Advertising isn’t some necessary lifeblood of many industries. It can often be something like the endless trench warfare between Pepsi and Coke, vying for slivers of mindshare. I also think that advertising is often a crutch for incompetence. Build a good product and it can take off all on its own. People advertise for you. Or build crap and hire an industry to manipulate people into wanting your crap. Advertising is manipulation. Watch any ad and ask, “what emotion are they trying to con me into feeling?”

eloisant 3y ago
The Pespi vs Coke advertisements are not about getting marketshare from each others. It's about establishing a duopoly, tell to consumers "here is your choice" and overshadow all the other alternatives.
yafbum 3y ago
Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Do good products fail to take off on their own because advertising is an absolute necessity, or is it because advertising allows bad products to saturate the market so thoroughly? In a hypothetical world without advertising, would it still be true that good products couldn't take off on their own merits? Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry? I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.
  - cryptoz 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this comment for a few minutes and do find it interesting. But the extremes of the comments and quotes above make it clear that even displaying your product is an ad; demonstrating how it works to a crowd would be an ad; telling someone that it exists would be an ad; there seems to be no way to tell the market that your product exists without that being defined as an ad. So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product. I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even? You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.
    - gAI 3y ago
      So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        So I suppose where you are coming from is that you're using dirty tricks to convince people who don't need a product to buy it. Which is not ideal. But I've seen a lot of software engineers write code that is unreliable and causes their users a lot of suffering. Most people do a bit of harm on the margins because their job is part of messy reality instead of some imaginary pure world. On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal. "I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  > I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.
  - yafbum 3y ago
    ...until you have to buy one? Lenovo, HP, Dell are top sellers, and I'm pretty sure it's not because they have the best product.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I don't view advertising. I use ad block everywhere, no TV, download everything I watch. I still found a computer to buy. How?
  - yafbum 3y ago
    Good on you. Most other customers of your computer manufacturer aren't the same.
    - crabmusket 3y ago
      But for most customers, any brand will suit them. Getting rid of advertising wouldn't really have an adverse effect on them, they'll just buy whatever's at the store and it'll be fine. (As long as there are adequate consumer protections.)
      - yafbum 3y ago
        You might've never worked in retail I guess... Most people, if someone they trust chose for them, sure they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But also, picking a "reputable brand" is a big criterion. By which most people mean, a brand they've at least heard of, preferably in good ways.
- spamtarget 3y ago
  > Good products hardly ever take out on their own The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  So who advertised the wheel to you? The sextant? The hammer? The abacus? Good inventions stand on their own technical merits and don’t need advertising to get others to see that they are good ideas.
  - saberience 3y ago
    You just listed several items invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, it doesn’t really give you a very strong argument. If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      You are supporting my point here. You aren’t selling actual tech, you are selling your website, that goes on to describe tech. No one puts out ads for things like c, bash, python, R, whatever. There aren’t billboards for these languages on the highway. This tech stands on its own, and people are guided to one language or another based on either its own technical merits or their own comfort with the language. You could argue things like white papers describing a technology in a relevant publication might be an ad, but I disagree. Those are more or less factual reports where the authors might even test their technologies shortcomings and limitations compared to existing offerings. Hyperbole is rejected by peer review, yet its the default language of advertising. Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.
  - yafbum 3y ago
    Yeah sure wheels are a good idea. Most people aren't in the market for ideas. If you're in the market for some actual wheels to put on your car, it sure might help if the tires someone's trying to sell you are Goodyear, Michelin, Firestone, or some no-brand piece of rubber.
- Veserv 3y ago
  Advertisement meant to inform is valuable. However, almost all advertising is meant to bewilder. Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry. We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept. Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  > I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Advertising is a 0 sum game. Everyone doing it and no one doing it has roughly the same result. If your competitors do it and you don’t you lose.
  - yafbum 3y ago
    It's not. Apple advertised massively the iPhone when it came out, and while they did take share away from other phone manufacturers, they almost certainly made the pie bigger for everyone. People weren't routinely buying phones that cost close to $1000 every few years.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      The first iPhone was about $600 which wasn’t that high when you consider the price of an iPod + cell phone combined. And people were regularly buying cellphones and that trend would only ever increase. As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  Shouldn’t a doctor know the cure of their condition, why would anybody take medical advice from adverts?
  - yafbum 3y ago
    Many established doctors have their habits set after years (or decades) of practice, and aren't particularly interested in new stuff. Many young doctors are unsure of trying something outside of the norm. All are afraid of malpractice. It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
    - jsjohnst 3y ago
      > It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment. No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  I don't think I have ever seen microsoft ads in my country, not for Windows at least. They didn't make it by advertising rather that having deals to become the default because shipped in the hardware and the price baked in the price of the hardware. Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries. The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.
  - yafbum 3y ago
    There is plenty of Microsoft advertising in any country that they're in. But it may be more subtle. There's search advertising. They also subsidize partner advertising (co-marketing). > The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. ?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  I think we need to separate advertising from marketing. But I’m not sure where the line is between them.
- vic-traill 3y ago
  >I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  No, I've built my own computer from parts I've researched that were given by aggregated reviews best ratio of cost/value for me. If I ever saw an ad during that process to any of those components, I would ignore that. If it would be obnoxious enough, I would go for competition instead just because of that. Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process. Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead. I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  That’s only because everyone advertises. Kind of nuclear weapons. You gotta have them even if you believe they shouldn’t even exist. Still, many very good products take off on their own (word of mouth) though they’re not very common.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  >> Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs. Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  > I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.
chronicsonic 3y ago
example is ferrari, they are so well known that they don’t need to advertise their cars.

eloisant 3y ago

The Pespi vs Coke advertisements are not about getting marketshare from each others. It's about establishing a duopoly, tell to consumers "here is your choice" and overshadow all the other alternatives.

yafbum 3y ago

Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Advertisement is sometimes just to inform and build awareness, sometimes to build brand, but often to persuade, and sometimes it exploits unethical persuasion techniques. The gap between ethics allowed by society and your own personal ethics are very variable from place to place and person to person. For example in a lot of places it's illegal for doctors and pharma to advertise; some might consider it a good thing not to exploit hypochondriacs, but is it ethical if it results in patients not knowing about an actual cure for their condition? These things are endlessly debatable, they're very far from a black and white situation.

lolinder 3y ago
Do good products fail to take off on their own because advertising is an absolute necessity, or is it because advertising allows bad products to saturate the market so thoroughly? In a hypothetical world without advertising, would it still be true that good products couldn't take off on their own merits? Or would they spread effectively by word of mouth in the absence of the noise generated by the advertising industry? I don't have an answer to this question, it's purely hypothetical. And even if it is true that in this hypothetical world, good products would spread, we're still left with a prisoner's dilemma to resolve in the real world.
- cryptoz 3y ago
  I've been thinking about this comment for a few minutes and do find it interesting. But the extremes of the comments and quotes above make it clear that even displaying your product is an ad; demonstrating how it works to a crowd would be an ad; telling someone that it exists would be an ad; there seems to be no way to tell the market that your product exists without that being defined as an ad. So I would answer you with, given the extremes defined above, that indeed advertising is a necessity since good products would otherwise rot inside the inventor's home. It being illegal (say, for example) to have ads would mean that it is illegal to even tell anyone that you invented a product. I think there's got to be some kind of give from the anti-ad side if we want to have _things_ in the world that do stuff - because if I can't even say "I made a better product that does x,y,z" then how the heck is anyone ever gonna find out about it? Where does the word-of-mouth kick off even? You gotta _tell_ people you made something - but that's an ad.
  - gAI 3y ago
    So I've been producing ads for a couple of decades, and I agree that they're basically psychological warfare. I justify it to myself because I usually get to make ads for products that help people, but the war over mindshare is absolutely depraved. That said, there does need to be a place for people to access information about products and services. I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services, rather than something ingrained in every aspect of modern life.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      So I suppose where you are coming from is that you're using dirty tricks to convince people who don't need a product to buy it. Which is not ideal. But I've seen a lot of software engineers write code that is unreliable and causes their users a lot of suffering. Most people do a bit of harm on the margins because their job is part of messy reality instead of some imaginary pure world. On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products. It is just much easier to sell something useful with sneaky advertising than selling advertising in a vacuum. People not knowing about their options is one of the bigger problems in modern life. There are a lot of things I'd spend money on to change and I'm just not sure how to do it. As far as I can tell that is normal. "I'd just prefer it be a place that people go to intentionally learn about products and services" - when I see people doing that I'll believe it is an option. Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.
HWR_14 3y ago
> I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. What a strange example. Other than Apple products, I'm not sure if most people could tell you what computer they are using, or can recall seeing an ad for any of them. "PCs" are a generic, interchangeable object to most people.
- yafbum 3y ago
  ...until you have to buy one? Lenovo, HP, Dell are top sellers, and I'm pretty sure it's not because they have the best product.
willcipriano 3y ago
I don't view advertising. I use ad block everywhere, no TV, download everything I watch. I still found a computer to buy. How?
- yafbum 3y ago
  Good on you. Most other customers of your computer manufacturer aren't the same.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    But for most customers, any brand will suit them. Getting rid of advertising wouldn't really have an adverse effect on them, they'll just buy whatever's at the store and it'll be fine. (As long as there are adequate consumer protections.)
    - yafbum 3y ago
      You might've never worked in retail I guess... Most people, if someone they trust chose for them, sure they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But also, picking a "reputable brand" is a big criterion. By which most people mean, a brand they've at least heard of, preferably in good ways.
spamtarget 3y ago
> Good products hardly ever take out on their own The direct reason for this is the existence of advertisement. In a ideal (also pretty much only theoretical) world where there are no ads, only honest reviewers and comparison sites, bad products would fall pretty quickly, planned obsolesce would be suicide etc etc.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
So who advertised the wheel to you? The sextant? The hammer? The abacus? Good inventions stand on their own technical merits and don’t need advertising to get others to see that they are good ideas.
- saberience 3y ago
  You just listed several items invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, it doesn’t really give you a very strong argument. If I make a website tomorrow that details the best innovation in programming language technology, how is it ever going to find an audience unless I advertise somehow? At some point I have to go around and tell people about it either in person or via ads, either way I am advertising.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You are supporting my point here. You aren’t selling actual tech, you are selling your website, that goes on to describe tech. No one puts out ads for things like c, bash, python, R, whatever. There aren’t billboards for these languages on the highway. This tech stands on its own, and people are guided to one language or another based on either its own technical merits or their own comfort with the language. You could argue things like white papers describing a technology in a relevant publication might be an ad, but I disagree. Those are more or less factual reports where the authors might even test their technologies shortcomings and limitations compared to existing offerings. Hyperbole is rejected by peer review, yet its the default language of advertising. Ads on the other hand often lie by omission when it comes to the limits of a technology being advertised. They exist to get you on their product simply because the business is leveraged in it, not because its a good product, much less to share findings with potential colleagues about what you’ve discovered that might even tarnish said products initial expectations.
- yafbum 3y ago
  Yeah sure wheels are a good idea. Most people aren't in the market for ideas. If you're in the market for some actual wheels to put on your car, it sure might help if the tires someone's trying to sell you are Goodyear, Michelin, Firestone, or some no-brand piece of rubber.
Veserv 3y ago
Advertisement meant to inform is valuable. However, almost all advertising is meant to bewilder. Advertising and marketing executives spend all their time thinking up ways to say things that are technically true if construed in the most torturous way possible while implying something else. That is a pure intent to confuse and bewilder and is the lifeblood of the industry. We can fix this by requiring advertising to inform. Any implication that overstates your product should be false advertising. The test is simple, if your lawyer says: “Well technically…” you lose. You must be truthful, clear, and spend all of your time thinking about how a customer might misinterpret what you say over-positively and nip that in the bud. Obviously, this depends on the target demographic, and the expected viewers who might act on the ad, but the details seem solvable once you approach it from the stated concept. Advertising should inform, anything else should be the crime of false advertising.
vlovich123 3y ago
> I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Advertising is a 0 sum game. Everyone doing it and no one doing it has roughly the same result. If your competitors do it and you don’t you lose.
- yafbum 3y ago
  It's not. Apple advertised massively the iPhone when it came out, and while they did take share away from other phone manufacturers, they almost certainly made the pie bigger for everyone. People weren't routinely buying phones that cost close to $1000 every few years.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    The first iPhone was about $600 which wasn’t that high when you consider the price of an iPod + cell phone combined. And people were regularly buying cellphones and that trend would only ever increase. As for advertising driving consumerism, that’s undeniable but it’s unclear to me that consumerism is a net positive. We certainly can see all the negative things it creates in society. It also distorts the market in a way that funds are directed to things that may not be as important but has better advertising.
andy_ppp 3y ago
Shouldn’t a doctor know the cure of their condition, why would anybody take medical advice from adverts?
- yafbum 3y ago
  Many established doctors have their habits set after years (or decades) of practice, and aren't particularly interested in new stuff. Many young doctors are unsure of trying something outside of the norm. All are afraid of malpractice. It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment.
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    > It's very difficult for new treatments to spread in this kind of environment. No amount of drug advertisements will change that. Solve the root cause and the problem generally goes away, but keep putting lipstick on a pig and you just get more problems.
cassepipe 3y ago
I don't think I have ever seen microsoft ads in my country, not for Windows at least. They didn't make it by advertising rather that having deals to become the default because shipped in the hardware and the price baked in the price of the hardware. Advertising should be heavily taxed so companies have an incentive to innovate and make better products. All the money that goes to advertising is money that don't go to R&D and salaries. The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. It's anomally, a clever hack but should really be independant public services whose goal is to expand freedom of associtaion and peer to peer discovery and exchanges and could be funded with taxes.
- yafbum 3y ago
  There is plenty of Microsoft advertising in any country that they're in. But it may be more subtle. There's search advertising. They also subsidize partner advertising (co-marketing). > The internet business model is an exception because there ads actually fund useful services. ?? Most public information services, including newspapers, radio, and television, are funded in large part by advertising.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
I think we need to separate advertising from marketing. But I’m not sure where the line is between them.
vic-traill 3y ago
>I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise TBH, I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a Dell product.
saiya-jin 3y ago
No, I've built my own computer from parts I've researched that were given by aggregated reviews best ratio of cost/value for me. If I ever saw an ad during that process to any of those components, I would ignore that. If it would be obnoxious enough, I would go for competition instead just because of that. Computers are actually pretty bad example of this here on HN, folks here do (or at least should) understand pretty damn well what they are buying and ads should never interfere with this process. Patients shouldn't be researching cures for themselves, they should be given choices by professional doctors. If this process is broken fix that, and not justify amoral for-profit advertising instead. I literally can't agree with a single sentence you wrote, it all sounds like from person way too deep in PR business justifying their jobs.
Aerbil313 3y ago
That’s only because everyone advertises. Kind of nuclear weapons. You gotta have them even if you believe they shouldn’t even exist. Still, many very good products take off on their own (word of mouth) though they’re not very common.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> Good products hardly ever take out on their own. I'm not sure what computer you're logged on from, but to take that as an example, I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. As a counterpoint, I chose my last three laptops (Thinkpads, by Lenovo) because I was fed up with the advertisement, in particular grassroots advertisement, by Apple. Lenovo did advertise to people like me, but I was already on the market for a powerful laptop and the last thing I would buy was an Apple laptop, because of all the advertisement as I said. I went with the first thing that was shoved in my face and that looked good enough for my needs. Honestly I have no idea whose game I'm playing here. When I find the time I'll make a laptop of my own. Only of course it will end up as big as a desktop :)
Etherlord87 3y ago
> I'm pretty sure it's made by a company that would likely go under if it chose not to advertise. Isn't this the survivorship bias? If aggressively advertising companies outcompete companies not advertising or advertising less - then if advertising wasn't an option, or if the society was more negative towards ads - then perhaps the latter category of companies would be more thrive.

chronicsonic 3y ago

example is ferrari, they are so well known that they don’t need to advertise their cars.