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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

The biggest driver of people wanting more is peer actions or non ad entertainment (people with fancy things in movies).

So, here's a paper that explicitly discusses "Keeping up with the Joneses" and Veblen's conspicuous consumption and all, and that claims to show that more advertisement leads to less satisfaction.

You can't really just walk in and say "Well, no, guys, listen, let me tell you how it really is" and just dismiss the whole basic notion of the paper without giving sources.

I'm on mobile, but https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... is a great place to start. It summarizes hundreds of academic sources and includes them in the footnote. Certainly better research than the main study we're discussing, for reasons I've commented on elsewhere in this thread.

Thanks. I haven't read that book, but I think it is fair to say that the advertisement business has changed a lot between 1986 (when that book was published), and now.

EDIT to add: The blurb says that the author "finds much lacking in the business's importance and effectiveness and much that is problematic in advertising's social impact." (my emphasis).

It is indeed a wonderfully nuanced, in depth book.

How did you think those fancy things got into the movies? Why were those peers seen performing those actions?

To tell a story. The specific brands paid to be there, but the idea of the glamorous item is always there. This is consistent with extensive literature showing marketing can switch brand preference but is very bad at getting people to change their mind about product categories as a whole (like smoking or drinking) they've already heard of.

Then don't talk about advertising but talk about the big brother, public relations - the inventor of which played an important role in positioning smoking as a pleasant and desirable activity.

Actually, the "inventor" of public relations, Edward Bernays, illustrates my point really well. He claimed credit for getting women to smoke with his PR stunts. The data shows that the trend of women smoking started years before he did anything, and the trendline was completely unaffected when he did his stuff. He, at best, got people already smoking to switch to the brand of cigarettes he promoted.

I feel like the data might not be a slam dunk for your case at all. Bernays started his "Torches of Freedom" PR campaign in 1929. The rate of women smoking actually dropped dramatically soon after thanks to the Great Depression.

Once the Depression was over, the trend line does not appear to be unaffected, though the reasons it trended as it did aren't simple to attribute. Cigarette companies were already advertising to women before Bernays' PR campaign, but they increased their advertising afterwards as a response to it.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a2.htm#fig1

Our disagreement shows the issue with correlation studies. People will interpret them to say whatever conclusion they wanted, reducing the scientific value to nil.

If the OP study found the opposite, it wouldn't have made it to the top of HN, and if it did, every comment would mock it for using correlation and would be pointing out other explanations.

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