Internet advertising: Going up, up, up | Hacker News Reader

Internet advertising: Going up, up, up

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4 pointsgibsonf19 comments

The big advertising spender is Proctor & Gamble, which leads at $4.9 billion.

4,900,000,000 dollars to differentiate soap.

I'm surprised Newspapers are still as high as they are. It's going to look more and more like the Geritol and Gold Bond powder presents Lawrence Welk and his Champagne dancers hour. Can Geritol save the NY Times?

The more generic your product is, the more you have to spend to differentiate it.

Coke is just sugarwater. Few could tell it from Pepsi if you switched the can. Nearly all its "value" is brand.

Maybe I'm one of the few, but I can instantly spot the difference between Diet Coke, Coca Cola, and caffeine-free Diet Coke and have done when mistakenly given one for another in a glass. The difference between Coke, Pepsi, and other colas is more marked.

I suspect a lot of people that automatically reach for a Diet Coke every day would also spot the difference.

I get the impression you don't drink it?

A lot of this has to do with the quality of your palette. Some people are simply amazingly sensitive (I think Gladwell has a chapter in Blink about such people), and others are... not. I tend to group myself into the second category. Then again, I think the different between the sodas is pretty substantial, but I live in North Carolina, and apparently we lead the nation in soda consumption (55 gallons per year per capita... I quit drinking the stuff for new years :p ).

You could be right about the palette. Mine's pretty poor in terms of being a bon viveur but I was one of those annoyingly fussy eaters as a kid. However, perhaps more relevant is that I've lived in a household for some years where one member is sensitive to various airborne chemicals. Consequently, the house is kept relatively free of them, e.g. few new items, or new items are off-gassed for a while before moving into the main living areas.

Sounds crackpot, I know, but the end result has been to make me detect these now unusual items, e.g. if a newspaper is somewhere in this area of the house. I guess my tolerence levels have come down as my exposure has dropped. There's an awful lot of crap floating around these days. Perhaps that's why country folk visiting the city can take a dislike; "All the noise and commotion gave me a headache". Or what they breathed in?

Good idea to give up drinking the stuff. I'd like to but find it hard to drop the caffeine first thing in the morning. Coffee's too much of a kick and more of a slippery slope.

It would be interesting to give people who make claims like that a taste test. We sometimes see odd results from professional testers in blind tests: You know, Two-buck chuck and MCD's premium coffee winning huge competitions. Put some boone's farm in a decanter, and I'll bet your snootiest guest will like it, even if its "a little sweet".

I think I can tell the difference between caffeine and non-caffeine coke, but it might just be the label. Maybe I'll test myself sometime...

Oz Clarke, wine expert, was put to the test by Top Gear presenter James May, and did appalingly on their recent French trip IIRC.

I moved to caffeine-free Diet Coke when it was launched here from Diet Coke. I was happy to put up with the taste difference thinking I'd get used to it. However, by the end of the week I realised my consumption had more than doubled and concluded it was because I was in search of the caffeine so reverted. (I do tend to open a can and sip it over a couple of hours normally.)

You're mixing identifying which you like better with being able to differentiate.

PG used a bad example, but I think it'd be hard to argue that it's not true in general. Bottled water might be a better example.

BTW, I can quite easily tell the difference between non-caffeinated diet coke and regular diet coke. There's an unmistakable difference in smell with the non-caffeinated one. I don't even have to taste it. It gets way trickier telling the difference between the various "diet" cokes in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Here's an interesting article: Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario' A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster http://adage.com/print?article_id=45561

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