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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

How can an advertisement not be bad? Ultimately it's always the goal to get someone to buy something they otherwise wouldn't. Even if you catch someone when they are already are looking to buy a product from your category you are trying to get them to buy your product instead of the competitor's. What would be helpful to the user in that moment is a product comparison that's honest and unbiased and not an advertisement. The goals of the advertiser and the consumer are inherently at odds.

I'd be genuinely excited to learn otherwise.

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I am an engineer and I love going to trade exhibitions. These shows are full of cool new tech once a year (Messe Dusselldorf, etc) and not only do you interact in a positive social way, but the people you meet you end up building long term customer-vendor relationships.

Perhaps it doesn't happen in the software but I work in Semiconductor industry. You can ask the same to anyone say in Fabrics industry or Electronics and they'll say the same. Trade shows are amazing and that's how advertising should be done - with respect, mutual interest and consent.

It depends on how useful the advertising is. It's not the tracking or privacy the regular user is most concerned about, it's the everyday experience that tells him advertising is still stupid and annoying.

Despite all the billion dollars ML systems with gazillion of factors analyzed on petabytes of data, all we've got is 'hey, you googled for a 10uA accuracy bench multimeter yesterday! now for two weeks we will show you all the $15 multimeters ever existed! (and most of them will be the same two Chinese models with different OEM labels)'.

Look at this (don't worry, it's short one-page) thread for example of how it might be instead - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/benchtop-dmm-advise-n... - and what if the message from Tek engineer that closed a deal was actually advertising? He just posted a link to relevant appnote, that's it. What if automatical advertising system showed the same link to the same appnote as an advertising to the same user?

For me, privacy and tracking is the problem. I have nothing against ads per se. I guess we should work on meaningful stats for ad billing that doesn't involve tracking to go back to content-based rather than targetted ads.

A lot of advertising is either raising awareness that a product category exists at all, or comforting potential buyers that people won't laugh at them if they buy a thing and it turns out to be a bad idea.

Consider the iPhone advertising campaign back in '07, modern smartphones would have taken another decade to take hold if Apple hadn't done such a masterful job telling people that a new category was being born.

Sometimes people will advocate 'doing your own research'. That is at odds with the fact that most people are incapable (not just disinterested in, but incapable) of evaluating all the decisions they make daily basis. Research the decisions you understand, copy someone else for the rest is the best strategy.

In that environment, even a good product needs some exposure to raise awareness that it exists. The game is more complicated than advertisers hypnotising an otherwise unwilling public.

> How can an advertisement not be bad? Ultimately it's always the goal to get someone to buy something they otherwise wouldn't.

Brand/product awareness. Sometimes you don't know what you want. And sometimes you don't know if certain product/solution exists for the problem you are facing. Believe it or not, one of my favorite apps is MyFitnessPal, I downloaded it via an ad because I was looking was health/fitness category product but never heard of MFP (few years ago before they were popular). I thought I will give it a shot and downloaded and solved my problems plus I discovered few more use cases for my health/fitness related interests.

Another example (rather misconception), "Google became famous via word of mouth". No, Google had prominent ad placement (aka powered by Google which was part of their contract) as a part of their deal with providing search on AOL/Yahoo portals. When non-tech savvy users searched on these portals they were exposed to Google and were exposed to much more superior search engine than that was available.

Your MyFitnessPal example seems more like luck to me than the norm. Ideally Google (or something similar) would naturally suggest MyFitnessPal to you based on your search history and ideally you'd get a comparison with other similar products. If Google knows you are interested in the product, why do they require payment from the vendor to tell you about the solution to your need?

Of course advertisements lead to spread of new products. That just means they work, not that they are necessarily beneficial to users. Every advertiser might believe that their product is beneficial to the user and therefore they are helping the consumer by telling them about the product. In reality that cannot be true for most advertisers.

There are a lot of products that I’ve either bought, recommended, or put up on my “list of things I’ll keep in my mind if I’m in the market” based solely on ads - mostly podcast ads:

BackBlaze - I think is s great service.

Hover: Anything is better than Godaddy.

Linode: I’ve recommended it to people who wanted cheap hosting.

Casper: recommended to a college student. His parents were happy with it.

SquareSpace - anytime someone wants a website, I recommend them first.

Ting - I recommended someone check it out.

Betterment - I did my own research but I first heard about it on a podcast.

Synology: on my list when my hard drive fills up.

Eero - I don’t need it, but if someone asked me what to get, it would be the top of mind.

> Eero - I don’t need it, but if someone asked me what to get, it would be the top of mind.

I think that illustates the OP's point well; you don't have need or experience of the product, but the psychological infiltration of ads means that you'll recommend it anyway.

What exactly do you mean by "bad" here? If you're making a moral or value judgement about ads being bad, then I don't know how to respond to that. Animals of all types are evolved to acquire resources, at any cost. And humans have taken the social aspect of resource acquisition to an extreme level. I'm not a big fan of ads either, but people do what they do. And making moral or value judgements about primate behavior is extremely one-dimensional.

I mainly copied the "bad" wording from the parent comment. However, I think my last sentence wraps it up best for me: "The goals of the advertiser and the consumer are inherently at odds".

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