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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

As I said, particularly with web advertising, if you've made me notice your brand then I will actively try to remember not to buy from you - I dislike advertising that much.

By viewing the ad I'm not ripping anyone off, no, but a page taking money for me viewing an ad would be, as the outcome for the advertiser is getting a best neutral and likely actually negative.

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Most people do not behave as you claim to. Advertising really does work. It's rational and has well-demonstrated ROI.

You're either an outlier in terms of behavior, or you're not offering an honest representation of how you react to ads.

I'm sure it does work across populations, but I'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

As I say, I do find this and patreon interesting, and may sign up. I already get most of my tv and movies through subscriptions to streaming services where I don't have to see any ads.

>>I'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

I think you're very wrong here. I suspect only a small part of the echo-chamber techies might think this way. The general public only hates ads when they're shown as those crazy multiple pop-up windows + auto-playing flash ads with audio.

Otherwise, people do click... or tune them out(but subconsciously, the ad is in their head)

I'm pretty sure it's growing, at least on the web, if it were not we wouldn't see stories about adblockers hurting revenues.

The general public in the USA may be more inured to constant ads, I'm not sure that holds everywhere, and as ad-free services like netflix grow I think we'll see more people start to become more conscious of advertising.

Advertising only has to work on a fraction of the population for it to have a positive ROI.

Penis pill emails have a well demonstrated ROI as well.

> has well demonstrated ROI

Actually, that is not as clear cut as one might expect [1].

[1]: http://justinmrao.com/lewis_rao_nearimpossibility.pdf

That paper talks about how advertising experiments require larger-than-expected sample sizes to calculate ROI, because the signals are more diluted.

It also doesn't specify mediums of advertising, because of confidentiality agreements, but hints that it included mediums such as television and billboards which are traditionally harder to track. I don't think it's shocking that out of home media is hard to statistically track ROI on.

Having worked at and with small companies that rely on advertising to overcome obscurity and get business to their products - modern analytics tools have pretty much got this problem solved, the marketing people knew and actively tracked their ROI on a daily basis and were shuffling limited funding around between various forms of advertising to optimise sales.

Every time I see somebody claiming that advertising doesn't work, I just think that there's another person who has never tried to run a small online business.

It's not rational, it's silly. It's a tragedy of commons problem coupled with a feedback loop - companies waste ever increasing amount of money, fuel, and man power, supporting a whole bullshit job industry in oder to compete with each other over a limited pool of attention and wallets AND at the same time they turn whole Internet into a cesspool. If you look at it globally, it's insanity.

It seems like you're just saying that because you don't like them.

The ad industry is not full of idiots, it's got an impressive amount of technology and data behind it proving the ROI on every side.

You have not uncovered some kind of mass conspiracy. I'd strongly recommend you either talk to people in the industry or read up on the technology and results available.

I'm not postulating a conspiracy. I'm only pointing out the resource-wasting zero-sum game which drives most of the advertising. I'm not denying that ads have effect. Of course they have. But what matters is marginal effect, which generally stays constant, because there is only so many things one can buy, and so many attention one can spare.

Also, I worked alongside people in ad industry and I'm very happy I escaped it. I've seen how things are done and I'm not pleased. I don't think ad industry is full of idiots - it's not the smarts I am disputing, it's the morals.

For a good illustration of some of the points you make - when tobacco advertising was banned in the UK, profits went up markedly because demand remained the same and there was no longer the massive outlay.

The problem is that you, specifically, are only remembering the intrusive ads that have at one point negatively affected you.

Whenever there is a good branding ad, you're not thinking about or remembering how great of an ad experience you're having. There are exceptions, like Superbowl commercials, but it's still a cognitive bias.

Well, I don't really watch ads so it's true I'm not thinking about how great an ad experience I'm having, because I'm not having them.

As a result I find nearly all advertising, when I do come across it, to be intrusive and annoying.

That's exactly my point - you're only remembering your negative experiences as advertising experiences. You're even saying "watching", which leads me to believe that most of your negative experiences have been online or on television.

What other experiences are there? I don't listen to the radio much, and when I do it's the BBC. I don't read print publications any more (I read books, these tend to be ad-free). There are billboards I suppose.

And no, I'm not only remembering my negative experiences as advertising experiences - when one cuts advertising out of ones diet to the extent I have tried to all advertising seems incongruous and objectionable. I have successfully re-sensitised myself to it, and made my life much quieter and calmer without the constant sale-pitch.

I have noticed this in myself. Generally, I find ads terribly annoying and frequently offensive. And then on occasion I see or hear on ad for something that actually interests me. Maybe it is for a service I did not know existed. At that point, I don't think of it as an ad. I think of it as useful information I discovered. Only later do I realize that the "useful information I discovered the other day" was really an ad.

One thing I'd like to point out is that, display an ads usually doesn't make the situation worse. So neutral and negative are (mostly) the same for a brand because they don't convert to a sale, while positive does. For example, if you feel sick about a specific ad, you probably won't be interest in that brand anyway regardless if you see the ad or not. And this is the worst case, "they failed to give good impression to someone". The best case is, it might remind someone about the brand and lead to a sale in the future.

There're several technics in ad industry to minimal the negative effect. One example is frequency cap, which is the total number of times a specific ad be shown to someone. Anyone will get sick if they saw the exact same thing 10 times a day. Another example is ad rotation, means showing slight different ads about the same thing to people. If you like cars you might remember a recent ad campaign about ford focus on youtube.

Do these technics work? Well I don't think it makes a negative experience positive, but it does make some of them neutral for me.

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