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Comment by Molitor5901 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I am a pessimist but I think most advertising, 90+% of it, is absolutely wasted and pointless. Adults, IMO, ignore advertising and have trained their brands to block it out, and dismiss it immediately. Some of us are even petty enough to mute them, or look away; I may be guilty of this too.

What is very interesting to me, however, is how much online advertising works on kids. We know advertising works on kids, you can get them to become excited and demand to buy just about anything. But I am curious if the kids of today, technically sophisticated, are not also learning how to block out ads.

When I was a kid I got ads from the tv, and while I could walk away, I had to wait for my programing to resume. Today kids can swipe away, look away, dual screen, etc. so I am curious if advertising works on kids today and how well..

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Let’s say you’re correct, that only 10% of ads are effective.

How many ads do you see a day?

If you use social media or read articles online (without an ad blocker) I’d bet it approaches triple digits.

For children it’s even worse as most children content are, themselves, ads for toys and games. Many mobile games aimed at children are commonly vehicles for micro transactions too and thus laden with ads

Hell, the only reason I know of raid shadow legends or nord vpn is the insane number of YouTube ads they buy.

Ads work… it’s why they keep getting purchased.

> Let’s say you’re correct, that only 10% of ads are effective.

You know, the biggest financial disasters in history have happened because of this reasoning. This is not how complex systems behave, and humans are very complex systems. Those turns out to be much closer to fixed points processes, which implies a very different:

Either ads are 0% effective, or they're 100% effective. Very little exists in between and events can cause even the very same ads to flip between 0% and 100%, and even the time when it flips will be very short (and won't be a simple linear 0% -> 100% move, but a fast, wild, oscillating process that at times looks small and controllable but is utterly unstoppable)

Which would imply the GP is right: for the vast majority of ads, it makes no sense to show them to anyone. It's just annoying and wastes everyone's time.

Oh and the reason it doesn't have effectiveness measures is that normal distribution requires independence. Whether I respond to or ignore an ad must be independent of whether you do, for all factors not taking into the calculation. Meaning even if I am your twin and we live together it must be independent. Otherwise, because things like average are really a way to refer to normally distributed events, it doesn't even make sense to say an ad is "10% effective". There is no mathematical meaning behind that, and it's no different from saying "Orange tomatoes shot Joe".

> Either ads are 0% effective, or they're 100% effective.

I think one of us are maybe confused. I don’t think this has anything to do with what I was saying.

I was saying that even if only 10% of all ads you see in a day stick with you, that’s still quite a few ads.

If you see 100 ads in a day, a certain amount of them will stick with you and a certain amount won’t.

That’s not to say anything about the percentage effectiveness of any given ad or whatever.

What I'm saying is that the idea that quantity will work where quality fails does not work on complex systems, like humans. If you present me 10, or 100, or 1000 wrong solutions to my problems I will ignore 100% of those ads.

Not 90%. Not 99%. Not 99.9%. Not 99.99%.

Every last one.

And this behavior is the same for complex systems in general. They "lock" to a particular solution, and you can perturb their behavior, but not for long. It will go back to whatever the individual thinks is the best solution. The only thing an ad can hope to accomplish is to present a new solution, nothing more. It cannot hope to change preferences.

> If you present me 10, or 100, or 1000 wrong solutions to my problems I will ignore 100% of those ads.

I don’t think this is true. If you’re watching something and the “HeadOn apply directly to the forehead” add plays 1000 times, even if you try to ignore it, it’ll stick.

That’s why so many people know “HeadOn apply directly to the forehead” even though it’s a product that did literally nothing.

What’s more, most ads don’t even seek to explain how a product solves a problem (like in the 50s) they just try getting you to notice the ad.

Regardless, I was talking about the percentages of all the ads you see in a day. Not the times you saw one kind of ad.

Speaking about the percentage of all ads you say throughout the day is not the same as the percentage of retention of a single ad.

You're sidestepping the argument. Complex systems have "fixed point" behavior. This is true for the climate, animal nesting and breeding habits, ... everything that isn't based on chance. I'm going out on a limb here and say that includes humans.

That means there are a number of fixed solutions, and that complex beings or systems keep going back to those solutions. You can give them a little push and their behavior will change for a very short while (by the way: chaotically, in other words, impossible to control. In other words, making an ad for pepsi makes people try cola alternatives, it doesn't even make them go for pepsi), returning to either the previous solutions (the fixed point) or, if the new product is actually better, to a new solution (which is also a fixed point in that case). If you want behavior to change for a reasonable period you need to either take away the previous product or you need to make an actual better product.

Plus you do read about that promoting an inferior product with ads just does not work. It has an effect for a while, and then stops. Agencies will of course happily try this, but it does not work. This is exactly how fixed points behave and not at all how a normal distribution behaves.

But you're assuming facts not in evidence, that people a) watch ads, b) that there is a quantiy of ads that can be quantified as being seen, and really c) that 10% of all ads are effective. You're making suppositions based on your own experience that have little to do with the central discussion.

Speaking for my own experiences... I have no idea how many ads I see in a day. I ignore them, with a vegence. I use ad blockers on everything, and I block ads on social media.

You don't know that ads work, you only think they do because you can't ignore them and are effected in some way; you remembered them. That wasn't the argument I was making. The argument is that 90%+ doesn't work because people ignore them.

either it works on customers, or it works on business people - by duping them into spending alot of money ever since Edward Bernays. projected to be a trillion a year 2025

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