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Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew about from a TV commercial.

And I realized after become aggressive about skipping all commercials that I'm no longer seeing movies other than the most mainstream franchise ones that it's impossible not to learn about. I used to come across trailers for movies and now I never do.

As with all things, the far extremist take (advertising is a cancer) is misguided.

Advertising is information. We're smart adults and can separate the facts (a new pizza place opened in town) from the bias (it's the best pizza place in town!)

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"Advertising is a cancer" is the moderate position, in that it assumes the patient can be saved. My personal view is that art that has been infected by advertising should be taken out back and shot.

I'm glad you enjoyed the show! Again, my personal opinion is that we gather more enjoyment out of these things if we spend a modicum of effort to curate our experiences rather than being spoon-fed the slop with the largest marketing budget.

As for "we're smart adults": The research on cognitive biases wrt advertising is settled. No, we're really really really not smrt.

Edit: I realized I am criticizing without offering a solution to my 2nd para. Think about the art (music / games / movies / comics) you like. Find those artists on the internet and see what art they recommend, and then consume that.

Nightmares on Wax doesn't have a huge marketing budget, but okay.

There is nothing remotely moderate about saying “advertising is a cancer”. It removes a massive industry from relevance, and condemns a whole lot of performance artists to unemployment. Advertising creates space for artists and sponsored performance spaces are the only performance spaces in many cities.

This reads like elitism. There is amazing art being made with a zero dollar ad budgets and amazing art being made with massive budgets. Those of us in small cities only get to see art because of advertising.

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