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Comment by FranOntanaya | Hacker News Reader

Always puzzled me how much money can possibly be in trying to optimize sales by some low digit percentage points, versus how much is sacrificed for it.

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The problem is that advertising works! I hate that it works!

Marketing and advertising aren't the same thing but I swear both sides of that coin have devolved via some process of carcinization where their claws emerge from the darkness everywhere people gather. Especially places where those claws are inappropriate and unwanted and yet it still works.

Yeah, people in our line of work tend to look down on it and don't understand it because we discover things more manually. But that's not the case with the vast majority of people. Advertising works and it works really, really well.

We do not "discover things more manually", whatever that means. Statistically, the more someone thinks they're not affected by advertising, the more they're actually affected by advertising in reality.

I hear this all the time, but my detailed book-keeping says otherwise.

I don't think it actually works very well at the rate the big companies use it.

I think for a Mom & Pop trying to build some form of brand recognition in their small community, it gets people informed.

But persuasive convincing, the mind control target that marketers claim to be able to drive? Nah.

It works in the same way that the mafia prevents your store from being wrecked.

It works only to a point and only if the product has not degraded/enshittified. Retention is often terrible for bad products/service. Humans are not robots. Most people think about what they are purchasing and no amount of ads can fix it if the product/service is bad.

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