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I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally

by neom 2y ago

I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not. From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door. Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don't usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.

Const-me 2y ago
> competition drives improvement Are you saying ads helping competition? How? > customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation. Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.
- neom 2y ago
  Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > Advertising is a PURE competitive move I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading. Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strategy is for both players to just repeatedly steal - "competing" in a sense, yet wasting time for no progress. The meta-strategy, if we as a society want to increase the number of cubes, would be to punish stealing so that players instead compete by doing useful work (creating cubes). To me the problem with marketing looks the same. It could make business sense for both Coke and Pepsi to double their marketing budgets to push flyers through every door to take each other's market share back and forth, but doing so wastes disproportionate* resources for little to no gain. Also seems as though it's one factor making it more difficult for potential new competition that has a legitimately better product but doesn't have billions to spend on ads, exclusivity deals, etc. *: There can be some value created, like slightly faster Bitcoin transactions, or people being very slightly more informed about some products. Just that the zero-sum game aspect allows resources wasted to be far in excess of the value gained (if any at all), even without externalities.
    - neom 2y ago
      Well here, I'll show you the paradox if you're curious. I do this stuff for a living right? I mean this is my world for the last 20 years, I literally teach it. But, I'm speaking out of 3 sides of my mouth? How can I say on one hand: advertising is a tool in the GTM playbook and a useful one. Say: advertising most useful as competitive tool, And also say: competition is for losers. Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, you immediately become susceptible to competition from startups, because realistically monopoly required you to have a product that is generally applicable to very many people. Your horizons and timelines at that scale are 5-10 years into the future, you can't wiggle around easily, you pre-paid $100MM of ads in airport skyways. If you rest on your laurels, you will die, apple is a good example of a business that doesn't compete it just ever-iterated itself with consumer insight, blackberry the other side of that. That is why late stage business is so complex, you're being attacked everywhere, so you need 10 product lines, 250 features, 300 geographies, localization, etc etc. Say Starbucks totally loses Canada to Tim Hortons, what do they do? Spend $500MM to outcompete Tim Hortons in a market that they can't win or just leave and focus on new markets. This is business, outside of a few lux brands who have it as a strategy, nobody is spending money just to piss people off and annoy them, people who don't want to buy have ALWAYS been annoyed by sales, but that isn't necessarily a sales thing, and it is why targeting matters.
      - Ukv 2y ago
        > Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, [...] I don't claim that advertising is an illogical move from a business's self-interest perspective, but that it involves a zero-sum game that allows the resources wasted on it to greatly exceed any value it produces for society. It's a way to "compete" without doing useful work, and as a society we'd typically want businesses to compete by doing useful work instead of, for instance, building bigger and bigger Bitcoin-mining rigs.
- danaris 2y ago
  While I dislike advertising a lot... > Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible. ...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising. This is a problem with hyperconsolidation. Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all within spitting distance of each other's overall size, however you want to measure it. Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled. You say it yourself: the problem isn't that there's advertising. It's the marketing budgets of Pepsi and Coke. Which are (probably, didn't look it up) larger than the annual budgets of some countries. That couldn't happen if they weren't utterly unchallengeable juggernauts.
  - neom 2y ago
    I still don't understand what the marketing budgets of coke or pepsi or any other business has to do with innovation or consumer choice outside of potentially spurring it? I read lots of stories of founder/entrepreneurs (like the one who wrote this blog post from my research) who can't build a business and then blame it on everything except their own failings to understand the fundamentals of business.
  - Const-me 2y ago
    > Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled. Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why. Ban ads of carbonated drinks, and pepsi/coca cola will become no different from any other manufacturer of that stuff. They do have economy of scale for their advantage, but I don’t think it will help them much. The price/weight ratio of their product is rather low, and technically pipes are way more efficient at moving water than semitrailers. Without marketing, it would make economic sense to produce these drinks locally at smaller scale. An example of similar commodity (in terms of the price/weight ratio) unaffected by ads is concrete. Roughly speaking, there’re 100 coca cola bottling facilities in US, versus 2000 concrete plants.
    - neom 2y ago
fumeux_fume 2y ago
You have a very naive conception of advertising if you think it's simply "buying knocks on doors." For online advertising, which is where most ads are display now, you buy access to people's personal information (including minors) to target them with little oversight on what you're allowed to say. And now that ads are embedded in nearly every electronic device, it's not only hundreds of knocks on your door each day, but many of those knocks you are forced to answer. We had functioning markets and innovation well before this kind of marketing apparatus was deployed. If anything, the enshitification of many products a sign that advertising gives us less choice and worse outcomes.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- neom 2y ago
  the door knock analogy isn’t meant to trivialize the craft of advertising, advertising done right is hard...it’s just a way to strip it down to its core: you’re paying for the chance to initiate a conversation with someone who might be interested in what you have to offer. Whether you’re literally knocking on a door or placing a targeted online ad, the fundamental idea remains the same, you're buying an opportunity to engage with someone for some reason (market research, sales, whatever). modern digital advertising leverages data to target audiences, that evolution doesn’t change the basic mechanics of the process. I am old enough to remember door to door sales people, my older sister worked at DNBNB in the UK in the 90s and did demographics by sitting in cars on streets. Go back even further, baby stroller/pram salesperson would pick neighborhoods where their product is most needed, they're not going to retirement homes (although maybe they are, grandkids spcecial!) - digital advertisers use data to identify and approach likely buyers. The issues raised about privacy and oversight are valid, but they’re problems of regulation and ethics, not of the underlying competitive nature of advertising. Also like I said, ads can be used for many different things, (I wonder how many woman who like blue live in this city, lets spend $250k to find out) sometimes a team will run $500k of ads into a segement to see how it responds before they run $5MM of ads for the quarter, that's when you get ads for weird stuff that makes no sense and you don't click it, someone is trying to look at your non-click as well as the clicks (the door opens or the door slams) Claim that advertising suppresses customer choice is hard when you consider the flip side: in a competitive market, effective advertising compels companies to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Yes, the massive budgets of giants like Pepsi and Coke can sometimes make it seem like smaller players are edged out, but actually that isn't what happens, it’s the pressure to capture consumer attention that drives these companies to continually refine their messaging and, by extension, their products. Competition in advertising forces all players to up their game, trust me, there is an annoying savvy 26 year old junior marketing manager out there causing problems for someone in a brand bigger than them, that is often the job in fact. Also, the more targeted you get the CHEAPER your advertising often becomes, I can't run $50MM ads a year against "men in america" because I can outspend Nike and Toyota, but I can spend $500mth on men between 18-26 who like tennis and live in the zipcode 90210. sure, the medium has chaned from literl knocking on physical doors to digital but still advertising is a tool when used effectively both informs customers and drives competition. could should and will debate the ethics and side effects of current practices but dismissing advertising as a cancer on society is silly, take aim at capitalism then. (edit: per the comment above above, I just went down to the bodega to get a drink, there are SOOO many new soda's I've never heard of before, heck I'm standing in front of a kombucha coffee infused soda, made in Canada too the advert tells me, I think I'll try it, go Canada!)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
> an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. You’ve described ads perfectly. I hate people who comes to my house to sell me stuff. As you say, advertisers are annoying scammers.

by neom 2y ago

Const-me 2y ago

> competition drives improvement Are you saying ads helping competition? How? > customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation. Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.

neom 2y ago
Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > Advertising is a PURE competitive move I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading. Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strategy is for both players to just repeatedly steal - "competing" in a sense, yet wasting time for no progress. The meta-strategy, if we as a society want to increase the number of cubes, would be to punish stealing so that players instead compete by doing useful work (creating cubes). To me the problem with marketing looks the same. It could make business sense for both Coke and Pepsi to double their marketing budgets to push flyers through every door to take each other's market share back and forth, but doing so wastes disproportionate* resources for little to no gain. Also seems as though it's one factor making it more difficult for potential new competition that has a legitimately better product but doesn't have billions to spend on ads, exclusivity deals, etc. *: There can be some value created, like slightly faster Bitcoin transactions, or people being very slightly more informed about some products. Just that the zero-sum game aspect allows resources wasted to be far in excess of the value gained (if any at all), even without externalities.
  - neom 2y ago
    Well here, I'll show you the paradox if you're curious. I do this stuff for a living right? I mean this is my world for the last 20 years, I literally teach it. But, I'm speaking out of 3 sides of my mouth? How can I say on one hand: advertising is a tool in the GTM playbook and a useful one. Say: advertising most useful as competitive tool, And also say: competition is for losers. Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, you immediately become susceptible to competition from startups, because realistically monopoly required you to have a product that is generally applicable to very many people. Your horizons and timelines at that scale are 5-10 years into the future, you can't wiggle around easily, you pre-paid $100MM of ads in airport skyways. If you rest on your laurels, you will die, apple is a good example of a business that doesn't compete it just ever-iterated itself with consumer insight, blackberry the other side of that. That is why late stage business is so complex, you're being attacked everywhere, so you need 10 product lines, 250 features, 300 geographies, localization, etc etc. Say Starbucks totally loses Canada to Tim Hortons, what do they do? Spend $500MM to outcompete Tim Hortons in a market that they can't win or just leave and focus on new markets. This is business, outside of a few lux brands who have it as a strategy, nobody is spending money just to piss people off and annoy them, people who don't want to buy have ALWAYS been annoyed by sales, but that isn't necessarily a sales thing, and it is why targeting matters.
    - Ukv 2y ago
      > Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, [...] I don't claim that advertising is an illogical move from a business's self-interest perspective, but that it involves a zero-sum game that allows the resources wasted on it to greatly exceed any value it produces for society. It's a way to "compete" without doing useful work, and as a society we'd typically want businesses to compete by doing useful work instead of, for instance, building bigger and bigger Bitcoin-mining rigs.
danaris 2y ago
While I dislike advertising a lot... > Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible. ...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising. This is a problem with hyperconsolidation. Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all within spitting distance of each other's overall size, however you want to measure it. Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled. You say it yourself: the problem isn't that there's advertising. It's the marketing budgets of Pepsi and Coke. Which are (probably, didn't look it up) larger than the annual budgets of some countries. That couldn't happen if they weren't utterly unchallengeable juggernauts.
- neom 2y ago
  I still don't understand what the marketing budgets of coke or pepsi or any other business has to do with innovation or consumer choice outside of potentially spurring it? I read lots of stories of founder/entrepreneurs (like the one who wrote this blog post from my research) who can't build a business and then blame it on everything except their own failings to understand the fundamentals of business.
- Const-me 2y ago
  > Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled. Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why. Ban ads of carbonated drinks, and pepsi/coca cola will become no different from any other manufacturer of that stuff. They do have economy of scale for their advantage, but I don’t think it will help them much. The price/weight ratio of their product is rather low, and technically pipes are way more efficient at moving water than semitrailers. Without marketing, it would make economic sense to produce these drinks locally at smaller scale. An example of similar commodity (in terms of the price/weight ratio) unaffected by ads is concrete. Roughly speaking, there’re 100 coca cola bottling facilities in US, versus 2000 concrete plants.
  - neom 2y ago

fumeux_fume 2y ago

You have a very naive conception of advertising if you think it's simply "buying knocks on doors." For online advertising, which is where most ads are display now, you buy access to people's personal information (including minors) to target them with little oversight on what you're allowed to say. And now that ads are embedded in nearly every electronic device, it's not only hundreds of knocks on your door each day, but many of those knocks you are forced to answer. We had functioning markets and innovation well before this kind of marketing apparatus was deployed. If anything, the enshitification of many products a sign that advertising gives us less choice and worse outcomes.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
neom 2y ago
the door knock analogy isn’t meant to trivialize the craft of advertising, advertising done right is hard...it’s just a way to strip it down to its core: you’re paying for the chance to initiate a conversation with someone who might be interested in what you have to offer. Whether you’re literally knocking on a door or placing a targeted online ad, the fundamental idea remains the same, you're buying an opportunity to engage with someone for some reason (market research, sales, whatever). modern digital advertising leverages data to target audiences, that evolution doesn’t change the basic mechanics of the process. I am old enough to remember door to door sales people, my older sister worked at DNBNB in the UK in the 90s and did demographics by sitting in cars on streets. Go back even further, baby stroller/pram salesperson would pick neighborhoods where their product is most needed, they're not going to retirement homes (although maybe they are, grandkids spcecial!) - digital advertisers use data to identify and approach likely buyers. The issues raised about privacy and oversight are valid, but they’re problems of regulation and ethics, not of the underlying competitive nature of advertising. Also like I said, ads can be used for many different things, (I wonder how many woman who like blue live in this city, lets spend $250k to find out) sometimes a team will run $500k of ads into a segement to see how it responds before they run $5MM of ads for the quarter, that's when you get ads for weird stuff that makes no sense and you don't click it, someone is trying to look at your non-click as well as the clicks (the door opens or the door slams) Claim that advertising suppresses customer choice is hard when you consider the flip side: in a competitive market, effective advertising compels companies to innovate and differentiate their offerings. Yes, the massive budgets of giants like Pepsi and Coke can sometimes make it seem like smaller players are edged out, but actually that isn't what happens, it’s the pressure to capture consumer attention that drives these companies to continually refine their messaging and, by extension, their products. Competition in advertising forces all players to up their game, trust me, there is an annoying savvy 26 year old junior marketing manager out there causing problems for someone in a brand bigger than them, that is often the job in fact. Also, the more targeted you get the CHEAPER your advertising often becomes, I can't run $50MM ads a year against "men in america" because I can outspend Nike and Toyota, but I can spend $500mth on men between 18-26 who like tennis and live in the zipcode 90210. sure, the medium has chaned from literl knocking on physical doors to digital but still advertising is a tool when used effectively both informs customers and drives competition. could should and will debate the ethics and side effects of current practices but dismissing advertising as a cancer on society is silly, take aim at capitalism then. (edit: per the comment above above, I just went down to the bodega to get a drink, there are SOOO many new soda's I've never heard of before, heck I'm standing in front of a kombucha coffee infused soda, made in Canada too the advert tells me, I think I'll try it, go Canada!)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago

> an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. You’ve described ads perfectly. I hate people who comes to my house to sell me stuff. As you say, advertisers are annoying scammers.