Comment by fromthestart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fromthestart | Hacker News Reader

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Paywalled, so I don't know how the rest of the article reads, but

>By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.

Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or anything of the like, and do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in media.

But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting, shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core. I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like I'd be directly harming society in building such technology.

In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on TV got one for Christmas.

You know how good scientists try to falsify their hypotheses?

Go to the FB ads library and look up ads from some random brands and start-ups you've heard of. They're all here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

Count what % are basically honest, neutral, or just dishonest. The ratio may surprise you.

Just like how fast food burger adds are 'honest' even though somehow, every damn time, the burger - excuse me, "sandwich" - they hand me in the restaurant never looks like the one in the ad?

> The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales.

You don't say!

> absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions.

They do communicate the existence of competing products, and are basically the only way to compete with an entrenched market leader. In this sense, advertising is rather important to keep markets fluid and allow better products to flourish.

> rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey

For someone considering themselves hyper-rational, you comment shows a surprising amount of negative emotions.

It's also rather irrationally to believe one of the largest industries is consistently wrong by not following your preferred format of notarised feature comparison spreadsheets.

Because marketing is really full of spreadsheets: those showing that people do sometimes have emotions, and that appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.

>It's also rather irrationally to believe one of the largest industries is consistently wrong by not following your preferred format of notarised feature comparison spreadsheets.

This isn't about my preferences. This is about the format of the average modern commercial, which is tantamount to clickbait.

>appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.

The industry is a fundamental conflict of interest, designed to convince people in most cases to buy things that they may not need, with the deceptive insinuation that the ad is operating in the interest of the customer, while frequently relying on totally unrelated emotional cues to influence decisions.

>For someone considering themselves hyper-rational

I'm not trying to make this about myself. However, a person who makes rational decisions can still experience and express emotions. The underhandedness of the advertisement business relies on the fact that the goal of many ads is to influence seemingly rational decisions by indirectly influencing emotions. It is an exercise in deceptiveness and manipulation, to bias people without their awareness.

Does this apply to all ads? Certainly not. But enough of the bunch is spoiled such that the whole game puts a bad taste in my mouth. And on top of all this, they're EVERYWHERE. Even if I don't consume media, simply by existing in society I'm bombarded by billboards, window TVs, and cable that I'm already paying for comes loaded with almost as much ad time as the programs themselves!

It's a race to the bottom through and through.

>The industry is a fundamental conflict of interest, designed to convince people in most cases to buy things that they may not need

Thats a bold assumption. If I have a business then I will advertise my product in the hope that people will see it and make a decision by themselves on if they need or want it, and make an informed choice to buy it.

Besides, its not about needs, but also about wants. Humans are driven by not just strict needs, but also aspirational desires, ambitions and tastes. For e.g, nowdays you don't really need a wrist watch anymore since you can tell the time from your mobile phone which most people already have, still the demand for such watches is there because it seems to fulfill some other desire that there is no longer any strict 'need' for. There are various ways you can make such watches (different price points, aesthetics, quality of materials, after sales service etc) which also appeals to different sets of humans. Ads help in getting the word out on your brand of your wrist watch in the hopes that some people out there will find it appealing enough to buy it.

Ironically, you can't read this article because they chose to not use ads to monetize.

I disagree with this cynical take. A Dell computer ad may exist to drive sales but that isnt exclusive to informing people of features and benefits of the machine. The purpose of a good ad should be to inform the viewer/listener of how what and why the product offers. Many do exactly that.

If noone advertised their computers, people would still look into the various brands of computers as long as there is a natural demand for them. If you need a computer, you can go to a website or a physical store and have the ability to relatively fairly compare the different brands. Advertising doesn't really help with this.

The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year.

Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?

You're making a lot of implicit assumptions here. If nobody advertises computers, why would people want to buy one? Why should businesses have computers in stock? Why different brands? How would people even know about computer stores? Somehow there seems to be an assumption that people just know.

People would buy them because they're useful. We can use advertising to create a demand for plenty of things that are not useful.

Overall, I do think that computers are useful, but if people are having to create an artificial demand for them, perhaps we're putting excessive amounts of labour into creating more computers instead of, for example, making them better. The vast majority of consumers aren't going to have a very good idea of what makes a computer better, so that's not usually the focus of computer advertisements.

> We can use advertising to create a demand for plenty of things that are not useful.

Who decides whats useful for not? Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them. They would need some way to tell that at scale, and ads are a way to do it.

> Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them.

I find that hard to believe. Companies do what is likely to make them profit, which sometimes involves doing things they surely know is bad for people. Cigarettes are still advertised in many countries; do you really think that the cigarette advertisers seriously think their product is useful?

If anything, I think you're more likely to get advertisements for the products that are relatively bad for people, since when your motive is to do good for people, you're less likely to oversell your product. It might be fine and well for this dynamic to resolve itself in a critical forum like HN, but when ads for random products are just thrown out to regular consumers, the rational thinking about how useful a product actually is will be minor.

How do people know computers are useful? How do people know you can buy one and what it costs? How do people know where to go when they want a computer? Without advertising there is only word of mouth, which is slow and probably doesn't reach many people at all.

So if computers are useful, shouldn't it be allowed to advertise them?

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