Hacker News Reader

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

How? Take the examples from above about selling beauty products to teenagers, where is the ad saying "you're perfect as you are, no need to drop hundreds of dollars on any of this bullshit"? All the ads in existence will try to extract money from them by playing up body image issues, so the noise WILL NOT cancel out on their own.

> Most people sit there until told to do something. Even when doing the thing is in their own interests.

To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves... Tell me, are you an advertising professional? Because your thought process is just as obnoxious.

> To think that you know what's better for people than they know for themselves...

Easy mistake, I suppose. But if you read closely, you'll notice that isn't what I said or implied.

People often know what is in their own best interests, they just don't act on it. Consider, for example, how hard it is for most people to get to the gym even after taking out gym membership. I had a running buddy once solely because the gentleman knew he wouldn't go running unless he had someone else to remind him.

People usually need a little push before they do the sensible thing. That is one of the things advertisers tap in to and why they are so valuable to a business.

Advertisers never push people to do the sensible thing though. There's a reason that "vice" advertising has so much money poured into it.

The gym advertising its memberships would rather you never set foot on their premises.

Beauty products want you to feel good about yourself, but only while you're wearing their products.

McDonalds and Coca Cola do not want you to eat healthier, or enjoy their products only occasionally.

It's actually shocking to see someone frame advertisers as pushing people towards making good decisions for themselves, when we've had to explicitly ban tobacco companies from advertising how sexy and popular smoking would make you.

I agree that way more advertising is aimed at encouraging poor decisions for profit. There's just more money in it. But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves. Profit is still made, but the exchange is much more equitable (or there's no better option).

> But there absolutely are ads (not just PSAs) that try to get people to help themselves.

Name three.

Local news stations are one of the last bastions of investigative journalism, (generally) reliable and actionable information, and platforms for local non-profits. They're a net benefit to a community, and they only maintain that capacity through promotion.

There are a lot of medical devices that help people with relatively minor or uncommon issues. Even doctors don’t always know about them. The companies that make them can’t usually afford to advertise on larger platforms, but they target ads to try and reach those affected.

Local consumer-facing businesses in general need local advertising to survive. This works better for some industries than others, but keeping a competitive space healthy requires some assistance getting a newer/smaller competitor’s message out.

iPhone advertising back in 2007-era revolutionised computing and managed to convince a lot of people to pa for quality phones instead of putting up with the usual cheap product that most companies produce. It was a two-for-one.

AWS advertising generally has been a major contributor to the success of at least two companies I worked at.

I get reminded from time to time that I could saved quite a bit on my retirement fund if I switched to one with lower fees. One day an ad will probably hit me at the right moment and I'll actually do it.

It's not so much about any particular ad or product, but the attention that ads steal. Most peoples' heads are FULL of ad jingles they never wanted there.

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

That, in general sense, violates second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, it also feels like going against some physical law with Shannon's signature on it, though its formulation escapes me.

Point being: even in cases where this "cancelling out" happens, it's not a free process. It uses energy, it uses natural resources, it uses victims' attention, it generates entropy. The more advertisers scale it, the more waste it creates.

As for "made based on the quality and usefulness of the products", that's actually the first victim of advertising - all real information gets lost in the sea of lies, while victims' attention is saturated, so they have very little headspace to evaluate competing offers.

> On average the amount of trickery in advertising will cancel out and decisions still get made based on the quality and usefulness of the products.

Sorry, what? This sounds like wishful thinking not grounded in reality or data…