The Age of Advertising Must Come to an End | Hacker News Reader

The Age of Advertising Must Come to an End

antoniomelonio.substack.com

67 pointsvoisin105 comments

I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I know of is 40km away on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop, and the second-nearest over 100km away. (Also one road safety billboard (TAC) 45km in a different direction, but that’s at least a bit different.) None in tech or other things, either: no newspaper, radio or TV, nothing on mobile (which I barely use anyway), aggressive ad-blocker and JS disabled by default in Firefox.

Just occasionally (considerably less than once a year) I get exposed to TV (which I was not raised with). It’s awful. How does anyone ever willingly subject themselves to it? I detest televisions. They’re far too effective at stealing your attention, distracting you, et cetera, and their ads are regularly just sickening from the rapidity of transitions and visual stimuli.

Fairly regularly I go down to Melbourne (where I grew up), mostly by public transport but sometimes driving. Ugh. So many billboards, so many things trying to steal your attention (and designed to steal your attention), so many such things even actively causing safety hazards while driving (especially at night). A lot of current billboard practices should be made illegal as part of road safety laws, quite apart from anything else. Almost all of these practices, I will add, have come about in in the last ten years, mostly even in the 5½ years since I left Melbourne.

Things have objectively been getting much worse (e.g. ads inside and outside trains; and digitally-cycling ads are almost ubiquitous instead of rare, and animated ads are common rather than unknown), but I imagine there’s also a good chunk of me becoming more intolerant of these things due to no longer being acclimated to them.

I don’t like being in Melbourne very much. Escaping ads and distractingly-dynamic or too-bright digital screens everywhere wasn’t (directly) one of the reasons I left, but it certainly is now.

Yesterday I got on the subway and sat down. Two stops in I start to think, this is an oddly pleasant subway ride. Why am I in such a good mood?

Then I realize the car I’m in has been stripped of all advertising. No bright colors and sexy women and pithy slogans pulling at my attention.

Bliss.

lucky you

on my computer trains they're adding OLED video ad screens

at eyelevel, with constant movement

I still remember my gray socialist upbringing. When i started to glue my playtoy with chewing gum paper from wrigleys, because it had this green, flashy, metallic finish and it looked awesome. I like the blinking distraction.

grass is always greener =) I remember watching the movie Good Bye Lenin! (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/) and thinking how nice things would be if we had just one choice for every product in the supermarket, so I wouldn't research each one and what made them different, and decide which I wanted, only to have them disappear. I get why products made by a state enterprise with no regard to performance or consumer reception would make for a bad time, though. Store generic/"white label" brands do somewhat meet this niche. But I dig that minimalist, text or line drawing only esthetic!

He can think of a couple of examples where marketing is manipulative, therefore all marketing is manipulative and causes people to make irrational decisions.

I sell tours to interesting places. I sell them using advertising. How is that a problem?

Let’s say someone decides to open a hair salon. How does that person promote their business if not through advertising? Or is the author wanting to ban people from opening businesses?

This is a classic case of placing a binary solution on a problem of degrees.

Some advertising has harmful practises, some advertising is too much in some places. This is uncontroversial.

Where the author has erred is in his simple black and white diagnosis.

I believe the author addresses your concerns:

> Of course, capitalists will strongly oppose all of this. They will argue that advertisements serve a clear and valuable purpose: they inform us about products, assist us in deciding what to buy, and thus increase market efficiency by promoting the sale of quality products and preventing inferior ones from capturing the market. This claim is, of course, nonsense.

He ‘attempts’ to address the concern by calling it nonsense, and then offers no viable alternative, while using a long series of poorly structured arguments.

As I’ve said above; he’s applying a black and white argument to a problem of degrees.

It’s just like Goldilocks - the food can be too hot, the food can be too cold, it can also be just right. The point of these children fables is to teach us basic principles of how the world works and to encourage us to use them to recognise our own mistakes.

True, he doesn't, but there are alternatives. Back when ads weren't a huge thing yet you had phonebook entries for companies or tradespeople providing a certain service, much like one can find on google maps today. If someone needed something they'd just call a number from the list. Though one might consider those entries ads as well I suppose.

I (personally) think the problem isn't so much in the ads themselves since they're obviously useful when you're actively looking for something, it's that they're shoved in your face at every opportunity possible. And sometimes even in some impossible ones too. Given how we're bombarded with it online it may make sense to curb how much it's allowed in public spaces in real life to give people at least some breathing room.

Great. So this is actually MY point that you’re now making.

The problem is a problem of degrees. How much is too much?

And most especially in terms of outdoor advertising, this is where the topic is especially pertinent - because someone can’t consent to this.

Whereas on the internet people can, and do.

I think this is a very big systemic problem. And it's all in the way things are presented.

Think of smartphones and the rate at which "new" phones come out. The industry is based on a year by year renewal rate which is completely environmentally unsustainable and in order to sustain this speed they need big, bold advertisement. It's not at all about telling people how to differentiate between products and which products are better than the competition which in many cases it's their own smartphone from the previous year. I mean, how long has it been since we've really required our phones to be "2 times as fast as the year before", I had a pixel 5 and a pixel 7 and there's honestly very little difference whatsoever between them. But of course, there were a lot of bells and whistles for the new AI and so on that I really barely get any use out of.

Not only that, but a lot of modern improvements are software improvements that come packaged in "new" hardware. That's a ridiculous thing, I'm not saying software is not important but we don't need new hardware to benefit from it in most cases. But hey, it's much more lucrative to sell a brand new 1000 dollar phone with a 30% margin than try to get people to pay 300 dollars for new software. We value hardware but hardware is not progressing as substantially as software is, at least in areas that truly have an impact on our lives. So they need to make things a bit prettier and that's where advertisement comes in.

But is this a healthy cycle for us, is it environmentally sustainable to produce at this rate? I think the answer is no, and so you need to wonder: "then what should we do about it?". The power of advertisement that uses all the techniques of political propaganda that can get people to do insane things is a very powerful tool that we need to use more carefully, if at all.

You do ask a good question though, how do people find out about new businesses? And I believe the answer is much more systemically complex, it's something we ought to figure out and try and so on, but the first thing is to always acknowledge that there is a problem to begin with. We need a way for high quality products and new products to reach people, how do we do this in a way that's fair? Advertisement, by the way, is not really doing that. Because big companies have much more money to spend on advertisement than new companies they are much more capable of pushing inferior products to the market and still retain and gain customers based solely on their advertisement.

Imo, now a days, innovative products and high value proposition products pretty much sell themselves, as word of mouth has unparalleled power. But big companies are hijacking this process, sending free products to reviewers, flying people all over the world to "show their new innovations" and so on so that it looks like their products are the hottest stuff. Social media could be used to get genuine reviews out there but most of the time, it's flooded with paid (in one way or another) advertisement, in my experience, the best reviews out there tend to not be as visible as big names pushing big tech products. And in any case, innovation has become so expensive that it's pretty much only accessible by big tech so I think this issue of also touches on other topics like: how should we be doing innovation? This are nation-state level problems.

they promote their business by being listed, and doing a good enough job / providing a good enough experience that people recommend them and come back.

I've never gone to a salon because of an ad. As a matter of fact, I avoid businesses that advertise at me. I have a list of the worst offenders - if I see too many ads from the same business in a period of time, it's obvious that they're spending not on the product but on promotion, and I enact a personal boycott. this policy has served me well, I don't own a lot of garbage.

>by being listed

Which is advertising

>that people recommend them

Which is advertising

>I've never gone to a salon because of an ad.

How have you found salons then? If they never did any advertising it would be impossible to find them.

Before anyone says anything - signage is also advertising.

And if all advertising is prohibited; then it becomes quite literally 100% about who has the best geographic location which is the most naked form of capitalism I can imagine.

I can see we need to define terms, here. I apologize for any previous misunderstanding.

I use advertising in this context to mean: paid signage (physical, digital, mailed, etc) where the business pays a fee with the explicit and unary intent to drive business.

Listings, whether in a maps app or a phone book, do not qualify (most times - paying for preferential treatment in these places is a travesty deleterious to the integrity of the source - and why Google sucks now).

I've found salons by seeking them out on my own - in places they did not pay for preferential treatment - because that spend is either

a) detracting from spending that would make the business and service actually better

and/or

b) covering for a shortcoming in said business / service

If you're using the term advertising to mean other things, then we are speaking two different languages, or perhaps I'm simply not using the most correct term, for which I apologize.

hope that clears things up.

So in essence you’re willing to do a lot of work.

Your theories and methods do make some sense, but a business that spends a lot of money on advertising doesn’t need to be inadequate per se.

I’ve been Marketing Lead for 2 startups and have now started 3 companies.

4 of the 5 have grown through advertising.

In all 4 cases, the market wasn’t even aware that a solution like ours existed. (You can’t search for something you don’t know about.)

I doubt you would argue that advertising these products is some kind of systematic failure.

Second; let’s come back to the hair salon example. Let’s just say it’s brand new.

I doubt you’d argue that a brand new salon is making its product suffer by advertising. After all, it is suffering right now because it has zero customers.

And let’s take a third example - where word of mouth is unavailable. There are many products and services where word of mouth is simply not available as a marketing channel. This is common in B2B where the people picking a service just have no one in their networks who would be interested.

I doubt you’d begrudge them the need to advertise?

Yet a huge amount of marketing spend falls into these three buckets.

I should also add that your out of the way hair salon would never have been able to start without the assistance of advertising. You’d have to be insane to start a business in a low traffic area if you’re prohibited from promoting it.

Yeah, you do hit on a point here. There are types of business that don't benefit from the same kind of locality that a brick-and-mortar business has, and in those cases, it may be really difficult to become a known entity in a space.

I'll admit to being a little overzealous in my frustration with the advertising industry - this is because of the absolute bombardment we experience (and something that, I would think, folks like yourself would prefer to combat - as it reduces the efficacy of good advertising). Here, I mean things like relentless coupon mailers, blanket campaigns like those run by fast food chains and insurance agencies (where it becomes impossible to avoid their brand). That kinda stuff.

As for word of mouth being unavailable - well, I think we might have different ideas about the proper 'velocity' of a product. I think we move too fast in general, and it opens up a whole slew of externalities. Not in every case, but in most.

I'm not against ALL advertising, but I think we've gotten to a point where controls need to be put in place. Not just to protect delicate, wilting flowers like myself from the cesspit of aggressive marketing that is the norm, but also to protect the integrity of 'good' advertising - it's gotten to the point where I use advertising as a metric of bad business, and accept that I'm losing the marginal benefit of being informed about stuff like you're talking about in the name of not spending an inordinate amount of time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's actually a lot less work to do the research I do, because it's focused, and it would be a ton of work to:

- buy a thing because it was advertised a bunch

- realize I made a bad bet and now own a piece of crap

- NOW do the research

- deal with getting rid of the junk

- buy that thing twice

edit: formatting

Thanks for these thoughts and the interaction :) I have enjoyed it a lot.

I find basically every business with Google Maps.

There is a hierarchy of methods to get the job done (to close the production/consumption loop with exchange of information), ranked in order from evil to sublime:

* Spy on and and profile people, (mostly unawares) and push ads by finding their "buttons"

* Create (mostly false) desires across segments of society and use every surface to influence

* Push (more or less) objective catalogs for people to select what they need

* Dont push anything, simply give people tools to pull the objective facts

I think the more psychologically healthy and environmentally sustainable societies will gradually gravitate away from the worst forms of advertising

This is great. I really like this way of presenting the idea.

It’s happening more or less organically, what you’ve described. Users are spending more time in Messenger as opposed to the news feed.

Messenger groups are very hard to reach using ads.

You may be right in terms of where people are gravitating. But the irony in this is that Messenger only exists to keep people coming back to the ad platform. To me, the question is, how to we convince more people to take a position of rejecting of harmful ad platforms altogether? In this example, this might mean ditching Messenger for Signal.

At some point, we need to accept that HN is not the broader community. Most people don’t care about this problem; most don’t even see it as a problem. If they did, politicians would be talking about it all the time, and it would be a major issue, but it’s not. Sure, the privacy angle has gotten political traction and that’s fine. But it’s the privacy angle - not the overexposure to ads - that is connecting here. Just look at the penetration of ad blockers - it is not that high.

HN has a default assumption sometimes that people enjoy spending hours looking at specs and trying to figure things out. My experience is that human beings are weird, wonderful and different. Some people enjoy doing this. Most people do not.

But, in this case, the proof is in the pudding.

I'd add to this list somewhere legal, correct, but utterly dishonest marketing language meant to confuse people. This includes hidden fees.

"Up to...."

"Save ___ or more!"

"Sale! X% off" (but is always 'on sale')

"Only X left! (Where x is random number from 1-9)

If you want to open a hair salon, get it registered in a list of businesses. I used Google maps to find nearby hairshops before, and I will probably do it again.

If I was in the market for crazy travels, I would look up the destinations or search a travel agency. As it happens I am not, and I don't want your stuff to take my attention.

All advertising is harmful. If your product is not so new and exciting that it won't be featured in the relevant press/youtube channel, then I will find it when and if I need it.

Advertisement is spam and spam needs to be dealt with.

> The goal and main purpose of ads is to go beyond the narrow limits of real needs and create new ones that did not exist before.

Citation very much needed. Advertising is everything. If you own a small business, your sign is an ad. If you were a traveling cobbler in colonial America, your wagon was an ad.

Advertising only became perfidious and ubiquitous after the Soviet Union and it's glorious jihad against class exploitation ended of course, or so implies the author.

You aren’t wrong but the majority (certainly by dollars spent) of ads you see are not simply letting people know your business is in the shop or wagon associated with them - they are to manufacture desire to drive sales. You can have a directory like the Yellowpages for simply finding the contact information of someone to fulfill a need you already have, but no one looks at a directory to get ideas of things they may want.

Sure, but that doesn't define advertising. I really like useful ads, and I've gotten some very nice products that I simply hasn't heard about before through advertising.

I also dislike the modern "you already know about this beer, but drinking it will surround you with swedish bikini models" type of ad, but something like YNAB's simple "Hey, you need a budget" is awesome, because you do, indeed, need a budget.

There needs to be a special category for ads that are literally targeted to like 12 people. For example, Northup Grumman taking out a Super Bowl ad in for the B-21 stealth bomber. They might as well started it with, "This is a very special message to Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James."

https://www.military.com/video/aircraft/military-aircraft/no...

We have a lot of words to describe advertising based on what channel it uses, or what stage in an imaginary funnel the marketing might serve, but a pretty poor selection of words to differentiate marketing based on why a person might need a product being advertised. Everyone is trying so hard to convince everyone else that what they sell isn't a commodity, that navigating almost any purchase decision has become a nightmare, even for sophisticated consumers. Do I want fair trade coffee, or organic coffee, or locally roasted coffee, or cheap coffee, or coffee where the beans were previously shit out by monkeys? We're no longer trying to sell the coffee; we're trying to sell the idea that the differentiator is the most important thing. No longer is the first cobbler you see the one you choose to fix your shoes.

I strongly recommend The Century of the Self, an incredible documentary about the rise of advertising. It has its flaws, but it gives a really powerful lens for understanding how we got here.

I reviewed it briefly here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/links-for-september

Just realized: advertising is over, and has been for a few years.

How many people here see any ads? And if you watch someone without adblock or money to spend on ad-free versions of stuff, they just ignore them entirely because their attention span has already been destroyed.

The big spending ads on social media are "one weird trick" type stuff. Occasionally something breaks though and we're forced to see a subway station takeover or some other embarrassing attempt at relevance.

But overall, ads are a joke now. They're either something to be ignored as part of bottom tier "products" or they are bypassed.

So while I realize the surface of the web has been destroyed by advertising, and it's now just a kind of toxic wasteland, basically everyone has moved underground and is ok. The only thing I worry about is how it all gets paid for once companies collectively realize nobody cares about ads. Are there really enough "podiatrists hate her" gimmicks to keep paying for FAANG et al?

How can you possibly say this when google is making billions purely from advertising? One of the biggest companies in the world, whose biggest revenue stream, by an absolutely massive margin, and still growing, is ads.

I think you forget that we live in a bubble here and we do not generalise out to the rest of the population.

How many of those dollars come from mis-taps trying to back out of the growing volume of SEO hell garbage pages to get back to Google? Most people use the web on mobile, and most of them do not use ad blockers, so they experience the full power of this real phenomenon.

> Just realized: advertising is over, and has been for a few years.

> How many people here see any ads?

You're not the target audience. Advertising definitely works, though not on everyone.

Never take HN commenters as a representative sample of the general population.

Advertising and marketing absolutely work on most HN commenters. And HN commenters are 100% the target audience for ads. They are (generally) rich and they spend money. Who wouldn’t want to target them?

I'd argue that we're already being targeted by very carefully placed comments positively supporting products/services, and responses on negative articles by "leaders" at aggrieved companies when users come to social media for last ditch customer support.

Just because it's not flashy banners or near-naked women doesn't mean it's not advertising.

fixed: wrong word

Of course, both on HN and every single popular website out there. Think of how many people use reddit for "human" opinions. Marketing aren't idiots, they know people type "myquery site:reddit.com" for a lot of things these days. As a marketer, you can go to some niche subreddit, ask "I need product for y what can I do" or something along those lines, then take your string of 20 bot accounts to say "Use X" and upvote those posts. It wouldn't be too long before you've snowballed this into THE product anyone on the subreddit recommends for anyone. Maybe you've even paid a mod to put it in the sidebar. Maybe you are the mod! You end up capturing the people who think qvc is for idiots just as well as the qvc watchers.

And even if you’re not directly, maybe a database provider has been bombarding your friend or coworker with ads for weeks and now they suddenly recommend that platform to you because it’s been seared into their memory

The number of HN commenters who insist they never see ads and aren’t impacted by the ones they do see is laughably high as well.

Whenever I see that I wonder, are we reading the same HN? There's probably hundreds of accounts used by marketing that posts various stories on here, not to mention in the comments. At least they label some of these posts as Show HN.

> Advertising definitely works, though not on everyone.

It works on everyone. In fact, the people who swear "ads don't work on me" are the easiest people to advertise to, because they are hyper aware of advertisements, and even saying to yourself "I won't use X product because Y" is simply enforcing a brand choice based on... advertising.

It's hard to watch something that doesn't have a quiet (or loud) product placement. If you really haven't been seeing ads I guess you must live in the woods and wrote this post by mailing a letter to dang, and also didn't have him mail you the front page of the day or comments for these posts because that would also contain ads. Realize they are everywhere in culture. If you see something, chances are others see it too, and therefore there's opportunity to monetize that thing.

How are you avoiding paid product placement, submarine advertising, sponsorships, Etc?

Most people do not know about, much less use ad blockers. An old colleague of mine started a local pizza restaurant. The first week after she set up Facebook and Google ads her average daily customers jumped 40%. After dialing it in and perfecting the ad campaign it's up to 90%.

Ads unfortunately do work.

Targeted ads work. If I search Google for a pizza joint near me, a pizza ad is indistinguishable from the correct functioning of the search (except that it put itself at the top of the list).

Non-targeted ads? Most people have mental filters that weed them out. They're just background noise now. (But oh, the bliss when the noise stops...)

It seems more likely that you are in a bubble. Most people aren't like Hacker News commenters.

A data point: Google gets most of its revenue from selling ads and they're doing ok. Presumably, if advertising stopped working then their revenue would be going down a lot? There's an entire industry that would notice.

But that was also true 20 years ago and yet, ads are still around. I'm not sure much has changed since then. Ad blockers have become more widespread but so did mobile web browsing.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t...

>How many people here see any ads? And if you watch someone without adblock or money to spend on ad-free versions of stuff, they just ignore them entirely because their attention span has already been destroyed.

All the time on mobile. In instagram every third post is an ad. I have actually purchased some stuff on there as well. (Turns out what I bought was just drop-shipped garbage so I am less inclined to purchase in the future but the ad was compelling enough for me to pay).

Ad-free experience is the best. Desktop browsing is wonderful. (although even though I use uBlock Origin, my search terms somehow result in tailored ads on instagram anyway)

I work with Gen-Z developers. They don't even use a desktop at home, only mobile. Therefore, unless they are doing some sort of convoluted setup with things like AdGuard, they are experiencing the full ad ecosystem in their daily computing usage.

I have adguard on mobile but this stuff does not seem to work on Instagram and other apps.

My dream setup are custom mobile apps that are open source wrappers around popular apps with all the ads, tracking stripped out. After all, most apps are just some simple text/graphics that pull data from some hardcoded endpoint. Most of the binary is external libs that you don't really need such as analytics/tracking/QA)

Unfortunately this dream is a major ask that will probably not happen.

You can use adguard DNS and it'll block ads even in apps.

The only place I see overt ads now is sponsors on youtube channels. So far I've managed to avoid buying anything through those.

Sponsorblock is pretty good for avoiding those, too.

In my experience it is hit or miss. Seems to crash apps that use Certificate pinning for some reason. Its a pain to have to go back and forth to disable and re-enable it depending on the app you use, hence my dream setup that I talked about.

I just finished up a job in marketing. We sold primarily to developers and we did this primarily using online ads. The percentage of people using ad blockers (that actually work) is less than you’d think.

What is the true percentage from your experience?

That’s impossible for me to know; however it’s low enough that the company just raised $5m on a $50m Val and is growing significantly in a downturn.

> How many people here see any ads?

HN puts hiring ads for YCombinator startups in the news feed. Look for the posts that don't allow comments. I'm not say this to complain about HN (they're un-obtrusive, relevant without tracking, and a really clever way to use their forum), but there's even ads on here, even though you might not notice them.

Do you think that's what the article is really talking about though?

I know that HN is actually a big advertisement for a VC fund. But at some level, the GNU Coreutils documentation (as a random example) is a big ad for GNU coreutils (plus maybe some free software stuff). Those kind of "ads" that are more like "entailed promotion" are actually what a good searchable communication network looks like, and I dont believe are what the article is talking about. Discoverability is advertising, and good discoverability is good advertising. But that kind of advertising is not what we normally think of when we talk about "punch the monkey" style internet advertising, which is what the article is about.

"You're a horrible person. You are stupid, and you smell. People stay away from you. You're the most disgusting human in the area.....

But amazing wonderful intelligent people use this product. And it makes them smarter, and the women adore and just want you. And you'll go to bed knowing you accomplished everything you could ever want by possessing and using product."

Is very different from

"GNU coreutils does these things and has X license."

One uses a whole slew of psychological games to mentally invade the viewer, and to make them devalue themselves until they buy your product and become 'whole again'. (Adverts targeting women use this consistently - telling them they are stupid or stink and product fixes it.)

The other is just matter-of-factly 'thing does stuff'

Anecdotally, I know several people (outside the tech field) who have told me that they get value specifically out of product-based FB/Instagram targeted ads, to the point that they don't _want_ to install ad-blockers for those sites. I don't think the experience of the HN crowd resembles the experience of the average user in any way.

Stockholm Syndrome

> How many people here see any ads?

Every third FB post is an advert (mostly irrelevant, somehow as often for suspect "mushrooms" as for power packs or hotels).

Every YouTube video on the app, un-skippable for at least 5 seconds and possibly 20. (I put the phone aside for a bit for those).

Most podcasts also have them, though at least I can skip past those.

Glad I’m not the only one being targeted by obnoxious “health” mushroom drinks and such

>How many people here see any ads?

Almost everybody, day-in, day-out, Adblock or not.

Not to mention HN being an ad for YC, and featuring posts-as-ads for YC companies...

Advertising has been proven to work, over and over. Any good ad campaign includes metrics to see how effective they are, and they are in fact effective.

You too probably have been influenced by ads far more than you think. They're in all kinds of things you consume like videos and podcasts, blogs... even many frontpage HN posts are blatantly advertising a service or platform. You might think you're not falling prey because you don't see an ad for Wendys and go immediately there for dinner that night. But tons of companies are slowly exposing you to their preferred platform, building goodwill towards their brands, or otherwise subtly influencing your behavior.

Marketers are using a combination of paid ads along with HN posts and other social media posts to drive a variety of traffic to their page, and they have the data to show where everyone is coming from, what they're looking at, and how often they're converting to paid customers. I know this first hand from working with enterprise level marketing experts.

HN itself is basically a y combinator ad. You are for sure aware of y combinator by now, and if you needed startup funding you might consider applying there.

I see tons of ads, sadly. They are everywhere in the public space, stealing attention and pretending to have something valuable to offer.

The flip side is that advertisers pay for "services" that the public consumes for free, e.g. radio, free-to-air TV, most of the internet - especially search and social media.

In the early days of radio and TV - to my knowledge in England, Australia, NZ (and its colonies?), you had to pay a license fee. In those days you had like 1-2 TV stations to choose from. People hated paying those fees and in many countries they were abolished. Likewise, I doubt that people would pay to have access Google search & Gmail, Facebook etc. As long as advertisers subsidize "free services", they are likely to remain.

That’s an interesting example because people very much want to pay for TV channels and streaming channels?

TV license still exists in the UK, which you need even if you only watch iPlayer.

Similar thing exists here in Germany (or at least Berlin, I don't know all the federalisms yet) except unlike the UK you can't opt out by not having a TV or equivalent.

Presumably though we pay more for the advertised goods and services in order that they can afford the advertising to pay for the services we consume for free.

If we removed the advertising part of that then everything could be cheaper.

No, the price would be the same and the company would just pocket the money instead of spending it on advertising. If they do not get enough customers to sustain the company it will shut down.

See also the BBC documentary series, "Century of the Self".

The article starts out by basically admitting that there is some informational role that is needed: "In the early 20th century, advertisements served a clear purpose: they informed customers about the useful qualities of a product and how that product solved a specific problem or need."

And then came Freud and Bernays. The article doesn't get into it but I thought it interesting that Freud's theories found more fertile ground in the USA than Europe, in retrospect easy to see because the theory of the subconscious was so marketable.

I agree that some sort of advertising ban would be nice, but unlike the article, I don't think it will be an argument that advertising is necessary, but rather a free speech argument that advertising can't be distinguished from opinionated speech. And: "A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product." Really now?

We're already entering a third phase, where advertising is moving beyond explicitly labeled published ads, into infiltration of social networks and 'hidden advertising' in the form of faked product reviews, fake word of mouth, etc. It's easy to look back on what went wrong with advertising in the 20th c., but I'd rather figure out what to do about what seems to be coming in the 21st.

It wouldn’t take much to completely change advertising without limiting free speech. I can only assume puffery for example isn’t a free speech issue and can be dumped.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't think it will be practical and easy to regulate. How to distinguish commercial speech from other opinionated free speech? Advertising from informing? I can't think of an easy legal fix here. Are you saying that we can/should ban a concept like 'puffery'?

And all of this is trying to hit a target that is falling away in the rear view mirror. We can ban billboards and TV ads, but it's going to be harder to ban internet bribes and lies.

I am not saying we need to ban all puffery, but rather the term has stopped meaning things that are so ridiculous people don’t believe it. There’s a difference between saying you can trade Pepsi points for a military jet vs a saying like “all natural” where most consumers don’t realize it’s considered meaningless by regulators.

“Made 100% from orange juice” for example is intended to deceive people where what’s actually going on is they’re using the orange peels to make new flavor compounds which are then added back in. It doesn’t matter what the actual words mean if the goal is deceive then clearly it’s a deceive statement.

> they informed customers about the useful qualities of a product and how that product solved a specific problem or need

Yeah it’s not too hard to see how this could be abused in hindsight. What if I just make it all up?

right? And some ads did just that... case in point... all kinds of snake oil medical cures. I think the US FDA did a good job of this for food and medicine, where false claims can have really serious consequences... but I for one am not sure what more can be done about cars, clothes, and electronics. We've got safety standards for those already. Beyond that we can try to create educated consumers; maybe make psychology and behavioral economics part of high school curriculum.

> The argument that advertisements provide us with information that we would not have otherwise also appears unsubstantiated. This may have been true before the internet, but we no longer need advertisements to stay informed. A quick and easy internet search can provide us with all the information we might require about a particular product.

Uhh... what? All google search results have always been ads. Even when it's not paid search results, the network effect that causes a page to rank high is the result of marketing.

> "Only in the last century, and especially in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, has the advertising industry grown into this massive all-encompassing behemoth."

The irony that a person writes this sentence, and then illustrates his writing solely with advertisements from the early 20th and late 19th centuries.

My god we're talking only 32 years ago. Sure it's not his living memory, but come on. Talk about not even looking at the pictures in a history book, let alone reading a history book.

You can tell from this the author has not read Manufacturing Consent and if they had not read that book, I question the relevancy of their opinions on this topic.

Didn't even bother to know Mad Men existed.

> Another major method [of scheduling endless growth] is the artificial creation of previously non-existing needs and desires to extract ever-increasing rents. This is commonly referred to as advertising.

The premise of this is flawed on a few counts, but I'll just point out that what the author is referring to here is marketing, of which advertising is only a part.

Yay, an anarchist calling for more regulation.

I think the biggest issue for me has to do with the fact that, being really into technology, advertisement has taken the form of "reviews", "previous" and so on.

Although I block both ads and sponsored content (with sponsorblock) it's still impossible to escape the recommendation algorithms that just show me all the new and exciting things the market is coming up with. And this doesn't just go for technology, it's everywhere, from plants to books to phones to fountain pens. The line is completely blurred. Though it is easiest to see in tech because every tech youtuber out there is doing "non paid reviews" but what are these if not just advertisement? They get the products for free just to show them off, and it's bonanza for everyone... well, everyone but the consumer.

The most critical situation for me is that in this age, if you have a little bit of money, there's always a right product fit for you. Sure, I might not be willing to spend the 1400 dollars of this top-of-the-line smartphone but hey, here's a very similar alternative for just half the price; it's chinese but you can always get around some of the drawbacks with a bit of knowledge, now, that's exciting.

It's difficult because I really enjoy technology, ultimately, I'm a weak person with a tendency to overspend; but I've realized the grand majority of tech "reviews" out there are nothing but giving you a list of specs on a nicely presented package. What do they add, really? I mean, they barely get to use these products at all! A nice review requires time, but when time has passed then the new product is already out. It's an extremely fast paced cycle that leaves everyone behind and it's all fueled by advertisement. Though there are some reviewers out there that really do a good job and give good information; when I was trying to buy a robot vacuum cleaner there was plenty of really high quality reviews of them.

It's become really difficult to separate between people giving valuable information and people just trying to create a need to consume in you.

It seems to me that advertising is one of the main reasons people spend so much money on totally useless crap. What would be the impact on GDP is advertising didn't exist?

I am intimately involved in online advertising. 500k+ monthly revenue from Google alone (1 of several dozen partners in our stack). Advertising had been changing but the advertisers and the SSPs and the DSPs are changing with it. All is well.

https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/

I love this caption down-page:

> Humans are creative. Give them back their public spaces and let them shape them.

BUT THERE MUST BE NO ADVERTISING!

What is unclear from the article is:

- what will replace advertising while somehow not morphing into advertising

- how this brave new ad-free regime will enforce itself without resorting to tyranny

Look at the forest. Trees are companies. Canopies are their sales. Ads are the trunks.

If all trees were forced to halve the length of their trunks nothing would change but a lot of resources would be saved.

Ads are a brute force mechanism to generate consumption demand. But society in the developed world has satiated itself with consumption, maxed out on its credit etc and is not happier, arguably more stress and dissatisfied than before. On top, the environmental bills of that pointless overconsumption keep growing.

So things will change irrespective of whether "they must". People will try to find solace in other ways. Economic structures and social preferences are ever evolving - we tend to ascribe to the recent past a longevity and stability that it does not have.

The digital age may accelerate such transitions. Or supress them. It is still a toss. Surveillance capitalism was built on adtech but is somehow conditioned on the masses forever having no agency and no control over digital devices and information flows.

Are there any trends that suggest power in the digital sphere will be returning to the masses? Mobile OSes have been pretty locked down pretty much from the start of the smartphone, and the two desktop OSes that most people use have different flavors of UX control; Windows in particular has taken a nosedive in user autonomy. And that's to say nothing of the websites and social media used.

All valid (and depressing) data points.

It takes some inate optimism to think that things could be otherwise but I believe the commoditisation of digital infrastructure and the suboptimal stewardship acts against its ongoing tight control by a small entrenched minority.

The underlying zero marginal cost trend is gnawing at the foundations of the current architecture. The wave upon wave of fizzling hypes is one symptom of this.

The other headwind is expressed at the macro level as the missing IT productivity that economists puzzle over. Simply put: the tech industry, through its recurrent monopolies, adtech business models etc is holding societies and economies back. Not developing the tools that will increase welfare both on a financial and psychological scale.

The same commoditized tech deployed in a decentralized way could open up a completely new era. As has been stated many times, we live in a feudal digital system and we know for a fact that market systems are superior to feudalism.

I'll grant that perhaps the giant will eat itself, or collapse on its own weight. In a general sense, I'm inclined to believe that there will be at least a couple more decades of digital feudalism before it really breaks, and it breaking does not guarantee a return of the Internet of Yore in its aftermath. I applaud open source software and the little guy, but realistically they have to burn the candle at both ends in order to keep the dream alive for a new generation to pick up the torch.

That said, I'm pessimistic and cynical, and I find myself seeing every new "advancement" as portentous of a grim future.

"maxed out on its credit etc and is not happier"

I came to the conclusion that sustaining the status quo, and even growing modestly, doesn't require a huge amount of effort on average (relative to history, of course).

But doing new things does require huge effort. Inventions, discoveries, traveling, new engineering challenges, etc., all seem to take a lot of resources, and the relative share of that consumption seems to be increasing.

Lots of people complain about America, and with good reason. But America also does a lot of stuff and there's no denying that. America was heavily involved in almost any invention or advancement that comes to mind from the last hundred years. America is the dominant force in NATO, which seems to have a renewed sense of purpose after a non-NATO country was invaded. And America absorbs huge numbers of migrants for all kinds of reasons, and many of them turn out to be a lot more productive once here.

It's hard to imagine all of that happening if everyone was maximizing for happiness. I'm not saying that it's better than happiness, just that it seems America is maximizing something else.

(Disclaimer: of course resources are still wasted in pursuit of these other things, and there are externalities.)

There are many complicating factors but arguably there were never more people around with the means to sort out the wheat from the chaff if they had the right incentives.

Happiness is obviously intertwined with techological development as anybody wearing glasses or cured from a nasty disease would happily testify.

On the other hand much of the planet is nowhere near saturating its consumption appetite and it is actually physically imposible for this to happen to US standards - a permanent destabilizing force.

Inventing 'sustainable consumption' is growth in itself but there is a raging debate about whether it can substitute for current practices.

With regards to the title, the age of advertising as it is today is likely going to have to change. Some of the largest companies in the world have advertising as their main revenue, and this is a growing trend. Another growing trend is users’ rights over their data, as well as their awareness of the situation and their willingness to exercise those rights.

To me, it feels that there’s a natural limit, and a natural instability built in to the entire model: ad revenue depends on users, users don’t like ads. But there’s a third factor at play: their reputation. Ad revenue makes companies so much money that they try to branch out with ridiculous things that end up costing them users (Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Meta - all have shifted towards dumb ideas in the last couple of years and their reputations are all in the gutter because of it). As a result, their risky Skynet-wannabe (or in the case of Meta, Lawnmower-Man-wannabe) investments are hurting their core income stream, and they’re resorting to faux-austerity as a result. It’s embarrassing to watch.

However, I disagree with the article for a variety of reasons. The main one is “capitalism bad” has never been a viable mechanism for something to cease existing, and while companies make money from it, they’ll do it. Government isn’t incentivised to intervene too strongly because people buying things turns out to be good for the economy and good for the tax man, even if those things are the result of irrational decisions (and even if the aforementioned companies pay so little in tax anyway that it barely scratches the surface).

> The concept of endless growth is a key ideological component of capitalism. Despite its devastating environmental and social consequences, growth for the sake of growth remains one of the main drivers of the global economy. Without it, the entire system comes crashing down like a gigantic house of cards.

I hear this a lot, but is it even true? Yes, our current system incentivizes increased consumption as a primary driver of growth. However, with the internet-era advent of 0-marginal cost goods/services, with extremely sublinear real-world resource usage (ie. electricity), aren't productivity increases just as valid a mode of growth as consumption increases? If we appropriately tax the consumptive inputs that feed an enterprise (eg. Carbon) isn't it reasonable to say that the growth of capital is not necessarily permanently hitched to the cart of otherwise limited real-world consumption?

This is a key part of my perspective that degrowth is not the only path forward. Innovation can yield us a carbon-neutral future. In the same vein, can't invention yield us an economy with fewer "devastating environmental and social consequences"?

It's incumbent upon us to price the negative externalities of consumption, not to abolish consumption entirely.

IANAEconomist, so I'd welcome critique on these points.

Oh they would love to make you "need" all kinds of virtual expenses. But why not both?

Because consumption feeds the machine that ultimately increases the availability of resources which deliver basic human needs to people around the world [1]. Food, water, and shelter are important.

From another perspective: global GDP seems to be in the ballpark of $100T. If we grow at 3% for 100 years, we get 100T*(1.03)^100, almost 2000T global GDP. If we cut off 1% of that growth and use it to feed and house people worldwide, it becomes 100T*(1.02)^100 = 725T, plus 1% of global GDP per year in assistance (1T per year now, 7T in 2123, summing to 35T over 100 years [2]).

I think the utilitarian question is whether an additional 1200T in global wealth outweighs 35T of targeted assistance to the most vulnerable people in the world. If we look at the wealth distribution [3], the bottom 53% have 1.4% of the wealth. If that holds (which isn't necessarily a safe assumption, it could get worse), the bottom 53% would get 16T. Doesn't look so great compared to that 35T (probably targeted at the very bottom of that 53%), I admit. If we extend out to 200 years though, even these lines cross (if we make it that far :).

I think this tells me the most beneficial path forward is to maximize GDP growth while minimizing inequality to ensure that the fruits of that labor/growth help the vulnerable get food, not the rich buy another boat. That said, I think cutting global wealth by a factor of 3 in 100 years is not a great outcome. It would be like global wealth in 2020 being reverted back to that of 1980ish [4]. Life wasn't so different in the developed world then, but it was quite different outside of it (see [1]).

There is a valid criticism that perhaps the world doesn't need more wealth than that which can house, clothe, and feed everyone on earth. And we already produce that much wealth, it's just not distributed evenly enough to meet those needs. OTOH, what luxuries would you forgo to deliver those benefits? AC? Your laundry machine? Availability and quality of healthcare? We also need to motivate 8B people to continue working and producing the goods/services that yield a good life for everyone.

In the face of these questions, I don't find capitalism to be as evil as I once did when I was a bit younger. I don't mean to blindly support the invisible hand. The Keynesian approach balances government intervention ("distributions", above) with capital investment. My point is just that the trade-offs are not as simple as I once thought they were, and that growth is not the unmitigated evil many are eager to make it out to be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo... [2]: https://imgur.com/a/rEneaxK [3]: https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyr... [4]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

Have you noticed that when the economy isn't constantly growing, people start freaking out about it totally collapsing?

Not sure I fully follow the critique (if it is one?). Productivity increases can yield GDP growth without additional resource consumption.

As you quoted (skeptically): The concept of endless growth is a key ideological component of capitalism.

What people (shareholders) want is more. Next quarter's profit ought to be more than last quarter's profit, forever. Why? Because more is better. More is the be all, end all. More, more, more.

"Productivity increases" cannot keep this going... forever.

Growth is the natural consequence of capitalism. More humans solving more problems means that we have more choices. Instead of going to your local post office for sending a telegram we now have smartphones. It's a choice that people did, to stop using paper letters to communicate.

Consumption is the basic principle of any modern economy because that's how you create jobs. Otherwise we have BS jobs, where what people have useless jobs they don't solve any problems.

For every thing you produce, someone has to buy it, and for every thing you buy someone has to make it.

In the USSR they didn't understand this concept and they just had jobs for the sake of jobs. Then you'll end up with warehouses full of useless products that none buy. Just to create jobs.

One example from the book Basic Economics of Sowell: the Ushanka hat where the skin of some animal would be used to make those typical Russian hats. The government would pay you for each individual animal skin you hunt. But there was a disconnect between animal skins killed, and hats sold. It's easier to hunt the animal than to sell the hat , and they'll end up with warehouses full of dead animals that would rot and never be used for hats.

What has growth to do with it? Capitalism would tell you to stop killing animals and do something else instead. The same thing that happened with sending paper letters and instead using smartphones. That's growth.

> A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed some extraordinary facts: 90% of all American CEOs believed that selling a new product without advertisements would be impossible; 85% were convinced that advertisements persuade people into buying things they don’t need, and 51% — a majority — believed that advertisements persuaded people into buying things they don’t even want.¹

Uhh. So, this point to a book called Less is More — How Degrowth Will Save the World. In that book this statement is indeed made, and as a source it points to "Andre Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1994).". But in that book I can't find any reference to it. Was is completely made up?

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