
The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age (2018) - amelius
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-obsolescence-of-advertising-in-the-information-age
======
Animats
Oh, that's a hardline position. It's a good argument for taxing advertising.
In a society that's spent out, with a low savings rate, advertising just moves
demand around. It doesn't generate it.

(One could write an article about the Web titled "The obsolescence of
information in the advertising age." Cover the decline of actual info provided
on web sites, vs. the giant sucking sound of the onboarding funnel. You know,
the sites which have nothing but stock photos and a form for entering in your
email address.)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _advertising just moves demand around. It doesn 't generate it_

I’ve seen ads for products I would have never bought, because I never knew
they existed, and wound up better for it.

~~~
Razengan
> _I’ve seen ads for products I would have never bought, because I never knew
> they existed, and wound up better for it._

Such as?

I can't recall myself purchasing anything [just] because of an ad, or knowing
anyone else who did, or even seeing an ad for something I was interested in.

Everything that I've spent money on, has been discovered through manual
search, word of mouth (on online forums), voluntarily subscribed
newsletters/feeds (like a favorite developer announcing a new game or app) or
random recommendations algorithms (like these clips of Mortal Engines and
Ultimate Chicken Horse that I just saw on YouTube, or featured spots on the
App Store, Steam, iTunes etc.) which I guess may count as a form of
advertisement but they show me what a product is actually like.

~~~
ericzawo
Oh really? How much of your time has been spent on what brand of salt is in
your pantry right now? What informs your type of shampoo in your bathroom? How
much weight would you say your friends or colleagues experience with a car
brand has influenced the decision you made to purchase one auto manufacturer's
model over another? Advertising works and if it didn't it wouldn't exist.
While I do understand and am with you on your philosophy of making an informed
decision, so much of our impulses as we purchase the things required to live
daily are influenced by ads whether we're aware of them or not.

~~~
Xelbair
>salt

cheapest one available from nearby stores

> shampoo

tested many brands, found one that works well for me.

>car brand

Absolutely none, unless they are car maniac.

> While I do understand and am with you on your philosophy of making an
> informed decision, so much of our impulses as we purchase the things
> required to live daily are influenced by ads whether we're aware of them or
> not.

I do not dispute that, but isn't this paper arguing that ads aren't fulfilling
their informative purpose(the only reason they were allowed to get so
prevalent)?

to quote the paper

>In the information age, the only remaining nonredundant use of most forms of
advertising is persuasion. To the extent that enforcers wish to return to the
mid-twentieth-century view that persuasive advertising is fundamentally
manipulative, they may now do so without concern that prohibiting advertising
might deprive consumers of the information they need to make purchase
decisions

~~~
goatinaboat
_Absolutely none, unless they are car maniac._

That simply isn’t true. Other than those extremely cash-constrained choice of
car is a very personal thing, as much as style of clothing.

 _the only remaining nonredundant use of most forms of advertising is
persuasion_

Ads are obsolete where brands are obsolete in a world where everything is made
in the same factory in China and merely gets a different sticker on the case.
Basically any electronics now for example.

~~~
mcswell
About car buying: I think you missed his point. (Or else I'm missing your
point.) He's not saying that his choice of car as not personal, he's saying
(as would I) that the kind of car your "friends or colleagues" buy has nothing
to do with the kind of car he (or I) buys.

Speaking for myself, I bought cars based on what I valued, which was often
different from what friends and colleagues valued--which is exactly the
meaning of "personal."

~~~
goatinaboat
_the kind of car your "friends or colleagues" buy has nothing to do with the
kind of car he (or I) buys._

I get what you’re saying but lots of people _do_ do that. Certain demographics
flock to BMWs for example. Within a pretty narrow range you could guess a BMW
driver’s occupation, and you would almost certainly be correct about their
personality. Another demographic loves their Subarus. Or Porsche, classic
choice of the male midlife crisis.

But pretty much everyone who can afford to, buys a car that they feel reflects
their lifestyle or the lifestyle they aspire to.

------
sandworm101
>> The view of advertising as fundamentally manipulative succumbed in the
1970s to the view that prevails today: that advertising does no more than
convey useful product information to consumers.

There is a line by Jude Law in 'The New Pope' about harvard being ossified and
in decline. The above line is exactly that. They are working on a dated
understanding of advertising. Advertising today includes a vast array of
activities. The above statement only applies to old fashioned billboard-type
ads, which are basically meaningless in the modern context. Those online
reviews that are making "ads" less influential? Those ARE modern
advertisement. They are purchased. That great review on YouTube, also
purchased. Those white ear bud designed to be seen across a busy street? Part
of an advertising campaign. That music crafted to be that little bit louder
when played. Advertising.

>>Persuasive advertising should be subject to per se condemnation because
advertising is, like price fixing, harmful to consumers in all cases,
requiring no case-specific inquiry to determine net effects. Persuasive
advertising makes consumers willing to pay more for the advertised product for
reasons that, because of the principle of innovation primacy, must be assumed
to involve no gain in consumer welfare.

Lol. That is the entire fashion industry. Fashion advertising is about adding
perceived value to otherwise identical products. "Consumer welfare" is also an
outdated concept. Anti-features are deliberately engineered to weaken
products. The goal of a producer is not to increase 'consumer welfare'. It is
to SELL product. If that means damaging the consumer with a product designed
to fall apart, then so be it. The advertising is there to convince the
consumer to re-purchase the nearly identical product by attaching perceived
value. Modern advertising even convinces consumers to throw away perfectly
functional products by creating false perceptions of inadequacy or danger. The
above line in effect condemns modern consumerism. Good luck with that fight.

~~~
ardy42
> "Consumer welfare" is also an outdated concept. Anti-features are
> deliberately engineered to weaken products. The goal of a producer is not to
> increase 'consumer welfare'. It is to SELL product. If that means damaging
> the consumer with a product designed to fall apart, then so be it. The
> advertising is there to convince the consumer to re-purchase the nearly
> identical product by attaching perceived value. Modern advertising even
> convinces consumers to throw away perfectly functional products by creating
> false perceptions of inadequacy or danger.

So basically, "modern" advertising is as beneficial as a viral infection, so
it really ought to be criminalized or regulated into nonexistence.

------
parenthesis
Tobacco gives an interesting case study on advertising.

In many developed nations all tobacco advertising and marketing is banned. I
would argue that this is actually good for the tobacco companies: they save
billions of dollars a year and no new competitor to them can emerge, as it
would have no way of telling smokers it exists.

This example makes me think that advertising of mass market consumer goods is
like nuclear weapons: if your competitors are doing it, you'd be too scared of
losing market share not to do it too. But in aggregate, all that really
happens is that consumer prices are higher, and the ad industry gets rich.

But actually, if none of the companies advertise, consumers still find what
they need through retailers, word of mouth, or simply continuing to buy what
they already buy.

~~~
jasode
_> But actually, if none of the companies advertise, consumers still find what
they need through retailers_

I don't know how it works in the UK but in USA, advertising also happens
_inside the retailers ' locations_:

\- endcaps displays of products via promotional payments are a form of
advertising [0][1]. A related concept is "slotting fees"

\- instant tear off coupons on the aisle shelves is a form of advertising

\- workers giving out free food samples (e.g. blue uniform contractors at
Costco) is advertising

\- informational videos mounted on displays in the aisles is advertising

 _> , word of mouth,_

The _first_ person in the word of mouth chain was often a recipient of
advertising.

 _> or simply continuing to buy what they already buy._

But a lot of consumers don't want to always buy what they already buy. They
want to buy new and improved products. In my case, I saw an advertisement for
_Oatly_ in a magazine which is a new brand of non-dairy milk. I used to use
soy milk which didn't taste great but it was better than drinking black
coffee. The new oatmeal-based milk tastes much better and I would have never
found it by going to the same regular retail grocery store I normally shopped
at. I had to go out of my way to find a different retailer that carried it.

Although 99% of advertising is terrible and irrelevant, it sometimes exposes
me to new products that make me happier.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endcap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endcap)

[1]
[http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/retail/raleys.php](http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/retail/raleys.php)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I think the 'Armitage Shanks' Advertising principle applies here - I similarly
drink a brand of Swedish Oat Milk - i even pay extra for the Barrista version
(added chalk for whiteness) because i saw people in my hipster coffee house
making it with _that very brand_ so when I saw the brand in the local
supermarket i swapped away from soya.

They did not need to 'advertise' in the traditional sense - they just needed
to logo-ise their packaging in a recogniseable way.

Armitage Shanks for those not of a certain age in the UK is a brand of toilet
bowl manufacturer - they simply put the name of their company visibly on the
bowl of every toilet I used for probably 30 years. I doubt they ever spent a
penny (!) on billboards.

------
friendlybus
This article could be better, particularly for kentucky college.

Their article attempts to pigeon hole advertising down to one function,
informing existence and facts of a product. There’s a lot to argue against
(modelling behaviour, ads as art, ads as culture, line between art and ads,
short term v long term memory), it’s quite reductive but I’ll pose this
question instead of a laundry list of counter arguments.

Take a teenager learning to skateboard, he is destined for many hard knocks
and scrapes. He sees Nike shoes in his price range that are physically okay
and some Adidas shoes that have more padding. He buys the Nike’s because he
wants to live the dream of athletic achievement that he saw in many Nike ads.
Every time he falls over he is still in the spirit of winning, shoes equipped.

Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad
making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse
product?

Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany
him on his self selected journey and help his own desires and achieve his
goals?

~~~
elefanten
>Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad
making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse
product?

In your example, yes.

>Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany
him on his self selected journey and help his own desires?

No.

One shoe is better for its purpose, the other has stronger associations with
positive ideas and feelings.

The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it
will perform.

Conversely, the brand you buy from is not necessary to having certain
thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, etc.

The notion that buying X product with Y association in some way supports Y is
exactly the deception. Flowery language about buying access/hope/a way of life
is romanticizing the deception.

~~~
masona
>The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it
will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed.
Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the
shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface
directly with the human body.

~~~
elefanten
Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the
_shoe_ performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of
the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that
anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has
measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any _unique_
benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation
and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the
presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be
replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.

------
hirundo
> The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online
> search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product
> information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for
> persuading consumers to purchase advertised products.

This contradicts my own experience. I have discovered products I ended up
buying many times through advertising. I often use ads, e.g. Amazon's product
pages, as a starting point to learn about a product.

To some extent advertising works on me, as a learning channel as well as a
sales channel. I'm a weirdo in several ways but doubt this is one of them.

~~~
firecall
Indeed.

Also, I find it odd that all the ads I see on Facebook are for scammy products
- never big brands for things I actually buy.

FWIW I work in Advertising/Marketing.

~~~
asperous
Advertising online is extremely expensive, for big brands with small margins
they likely wouldn't make money. It only makes sense for "scams" that make
more money per sale then the ads cost, or startups that are willing to loose
money per item for exposure and growth.

Big brands from what I've seen also try and build a following via content
marketing. This has more upfront cost but no cost per view.

------
AtlasBarfed
This mirrors the idealism of the early internet:

"Oh we'll have so much good information at our fingertips!"

Reality:

A torrent of misinformation drowning out the actually good information.

~~~
downshun
Try searching anything fitness or nutrition for example .

~~~
cjlars
SEO being broken does not mean that advertising as a whole is broken.

------
andrepd
Indeed. When the excuse of "discoverability" or "providing information" is
stripped away, advertising is purely and simply unethical. It's manipulation,
often on an immensely massive, immensely sophisticated way. Our mammal brains
stand no chance.

------
masona
The paper uses the word 'information' throughout as some kind of agnostic
store of pure facts, as if you could break down any product into a black and
white description of its fundamental reality and/or benefits.

I spent several years at a respected branding firm whose primary methodology
boiled down to '16 ways to poke the lizard brain.' Even if your mind
mistakenly believes that it makes rational choices, there's a section of that
methodology that knows just how to appeal to you.

Someone said it better than me - human psychology can't handle how good we've
become at manipulating it. Advertising is the primary driver behind this, but
it only exists because reality unfolds through an array of complex sensory
inputs that are mostly made up of subconscious impulses.

~~~
Super_Jambo
"human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it."

I'm curious if you think there's any way we can fix this.

------
jeena
I wish advertising would be pull not push, I feel we're closing on to the 2rd
episode of Black Mirror where the protagonist isn't allowed to close their
eyes during an ad on TV.

~~~
Viliam1234
Yes. All people who defend advertising as "providing useful information to
customers" are missing the point. I also think they are completely wrong, but
even assuming the advertising would magically restrict itself to providing
true, non-misleading, and useful facts, there is still one issue I have with
it...

I didn't consent to it.

Imagine someone following you on the street, screaming random true facts at
you. I would hate it and wish to be left alone. And if someone would defend
this practice saying "but, you know, true facts are useful; actully once in a
few years I hear a fact that is somehow useful to me", I would be like, yeah,
okay, whatever, good for you, but leave me out of it.

I prefer not be distracted. Screaming at me on the street is not okay. Sending
me spam is not okay. (Please don't explain me how one person in a million
might find spam useful. My point is: I don't.) Pushing advertising everywhere
is not okay. You will keep doing it anyway (both the spammers and the
advertisers) because there is money in it for you, I get it. I still do not
consent. No, I don't care that in your opinion, it is actually good for me. In
my opinion, it is not, and I prefer my own opinion about my preferences over
your adsplaining.

------
jdietrich
High-quality advertising is _more_ important in the information age, not less.
I still buy magazines every month, in large part because of the advertising.
Skimming through the ads gives me a quick overview of trends in the market,
but it also provides a sense of which companies are serious players. A single
advert might just be a pack of lies, but multiple full-page adverts every
month for several years is a costly signal that the company is playing the
long game. Such a large investment in advertising is only viable if you're
selling a lot of product and you're confident in the quality of your product;
if you're selling vast quantities of total crap, word gets out very quickly
and you don't stay around for long.

Targeted ads and online reviews don't provide this signalling value, precisely
because they're relatively cheap and efficient from the seller's perspective.
Any two-bit operator can cheaply buy a bunch of five star reviews on Amazon,
then relaunch under a new brand name when the real one star reviews start
flooding in. If I see a lot of targeted ads from the same company, they might
be engaging in a hugely expensive media blitz or I might have been identified
by their algorithm as a total sucker. Untargeted mass advertising tells me
that a) the company is heavily invested in their product and b) all my peers
are seeing the same adverts.

------
cryptica
This is a very good argument and many people (myself included) have
independently come to the same conclusion that advertising adds very little
value for the customer but takes away a lot of value by distracting them away
from better alternatives.

Then there is the problem that big companies get bulk discounts for
advertising and show up higher in the listings (in spite of paying less per-
ad); this gives them unfair competitive advantage.

Most small projects these days understand how difficult it is to compete for
attention and convey information. This is mostly because big corporations and
startups backed by big VC funds have monopolized the media.

Technology has progressed greatly in the past few years but most people don't
know it yet. Technological progress has been hidden away, drowned out in
noise.

For example, there are some very interesting and radical things happening in
the blockchain space but these projects are not visible because they cannot
get any attention. Instead, what all people know about blockchain are the
scammy mainstream projects - These mainstream projects are in fact
discrediting the entire industry and hiding real progress. But it's the same
thing with startups; that's why there hasn't been any major new unicorn since
WhatsApp.

------
wayanon
YouTube Premium has been worth every penny for me. I also use an ad blocker
online and Spotify premium. The only ads I see are outdoors and on
Instagram/Twitter.

~~~
titzer
ublock origin crushes YouTube ads.

~~~
Majestic121
It certainly does, and I never turn off UBO, but I still pay for Youtube
Premium because I'm glad the possibility exists.

The whole system will be an eternal war between ad pushers and ad blockers,
until we provide a third way, and I think the 'free with ads, pay a
subscription to take ads off' is a fair solution to the issue of 'How do
websites get paid for their services without relying on selling user-data and
bombarding us with ads, while also keeping their website accessible for most'.

I'm sure there are other, but choosing the 'don't pay and don't watch' when
they at least try to provide a solution to get out of ads is counter-
productive in the long term.

------
Nevermark
The entire premise of this article seems naive at a level I find hard to
understand.

Advertising can never be obsolete. Among other things it does these useful
things:

\- Informs or reminds customers of potential solutions to problems they have,
may encounter in the future, or of benefits they need or desire.

\- Informs customers of improvements.

\- Build's brand awareness that a source of a product type stands behind the
product's benefits with resources and their reputation on the line.

\- At its best, does this in a way that is informative, entertaining and/or
uplifting even to non-customers.

The problems of advertising to me all seem preventable and unnecessary at
least at the individual companies' level.

Show respect for all viewers, customers or not, and your brand is going to
build a great reputation: No cluttered ugly, psychologically manipulative,
advertising. Nothing that mucked up people's lives with more dreck.

Keeping advertising constructive for everyone is a brand enhancing
opportunity.

------
jp555
The second sentence makes an error. "Advertising remains useful to firms only
as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products." is not
true at all. Only ~10% of advertising dollars are spent on Direct Response
advertising.

~90% of the ~$500B/year spent globally on advertising is Brand advertising.

------
twomoretime
>The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online
search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product
informatio

First line is untrue. Beyond computer parts there's generally very little I
can find in the way of differentiating information for just about anything.
Just recently I was shopping for power tools on home depot and it really came
down to trusting price as in indicator of quality.

But it isn't entirely home depot's fault, although in order to make the UIs
simple enough to be written once and minimally managed they have to genericize
product information substantially, but the real issue is that the average
consumer is too ignorant and/or lazy to care.

For a long time I assumed all modern consumer power tools were Chinese junk.
Then I watched AvE tear down some tools and describe differences in design,
materials, and tooling that you can't find anywhere.

When you optimize away every penny and design for the broadest, laziest,
and/or dumbest common denominator, you cripple the capable among us and all of
society is worse off for it.

------
projektfu
In _The New Industrial State_ , Galbraith identified advertising as the engine
that kept the system running by persuading people they needed more things than
they would have in the absence of advertising. I think the rest of the
analysis quickly stopped being true in the 90s by this fact of advertising
persists.

------
awinter-py
> Today, consumers can get more product information by reading “add to cart”
> pages on Amazon, or online product reviews on any number of platforms, than
> they can get from viewing advertisements

Not sure review sites are neutral information either, but cool scotus history.

In 2020 ad-supported platforms are the channels through which the product
information is made available to consumers; that's not a but-for argument
(something else would spring up in their absence), but the separation between
ads & product info isn't as total as the article wants to make it.

Banning ads wouldn't make the information environment any less hostile.

~~~
Super_Jambo
If you banned ads in such a way as to stop the economically powerful funding
disinformation it would.

How do you fund the google replacement if you're not allowed to sell adverts?
You'd have to charge people who want to use the search engine. How do you fund
your magazine or news site? You'd have to charge the viewer.

In a world where you have to actually _pay the cost_ for all this stuff
everyone would be much more discriminating on what they bought.

------
pembrook
The problem with this entire piece is, it’s based off the premise that
consumers:

A) have unlimited time and memory to research every decision they make and
store all that information

and

B) will make rational decisions based on said information

Both are so obviously wrong it makes me wonder if the author has ulterior
motives.

Being published under the brand of _Yale Law Journal_ gives the words more
authority than they deserve.

The author clearly doesn’t understand how modern search engines nor modern
advertising work. The positioning of the information you see on Google (SEO)
_is_ advertising.

------
smolder
The linked abstract offers online searches as an alternative to low-
information persuasive advertising, and yet it is difficult to find
trustworthy information on many subjects on the web. It's filled to the brim
with attempts to persuade and exploit.

I personally think that simple algorithms for searching web content have been
undermined so badly by malicious/exploitative content that curated search or
web directories are needed for it to continue living up to its potential as a
medium in terms of social value.

------
alexashka
The author should skip ahead to the punchline - the obsolescence of human
beings in the information age.

Most people in USA and Europe consume more than they produce and there is no
reversing of this trend - the average IQ is 100 and we can pretty much
automate most things we can train a 100 IQ person to do and at the same time
we can't train them into not acting like self destructive idiots, so, we've
got a bit of a problem :)

~~~
wolco
We can't automate as much as you think.

And no the average US person produces more than any other country and spends
slightly less of their budget. Here is a visualization:

[https://howmuch.net/articles/breakdown-average-american-
spen...](https://howmuch.net/articles/breakdown-average-american-spending)

~~~
alexashka
Most people living in the USA are idiots compared to most people who
read/comment on HackerNews.

Similarly, most people consume more than they produce. Because non-idiots are
so amazing, they enable idiots to have an amazing lifestyle in developed
countries.

This is patently obvious by the fact that these countries have borders - those
borders are there to protect idiots, not neuro-surgeons, from immigrants
destroying their cushy government-sponsored way of life.

Neuro-surgeons would only benefit from open borders and abolishment of minimum
wage laws - they'd each immediately hire a dozen servants, which is what
already happens in countries like India.

------
dhruvkar
>> Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers
to purchase advertised products.

Wow, didn't realize this was NOT the only use of advertising (the other stated
intent was provide consumers information, according to article).

------
avalys
Man, some people really think they're entitled to dictate how the world must
be.

The argument that easy access to product information online eliminates any
consumer benefit of advertising misses a key point.

 _I only do research online for products that I care deeply about._

I am never going to bother to seek out information online to figure out what
kind of laundry detergent to buy. It's just way, way down on my priority list.
So I'm perfectly happy to passively consume the advertising and let that shape
my decisions, for the 20 seconds of thought I give this topic as I walk
through that aisle in the grocery store.

What information does advertising convey to me, as a rational consumer?

1) How successful the company is [inferred from how much money they seem to be
spending on advertising].

2) What characteristics they think matter the most - price? Stain removal?
Efficiency? Sometimes a company will emphasize something I don't care about -
which lets me know I'm probably not the target market for their product, and I
should look elsewhere.

3) Whether they have any new products I haven't tried.

I once tried a detergent brand I had never heard of - Persil - because I saw a
TV ad for it. Probably somewhere out there there's a laundry detergent
enthusiast forum that already knew about it, and they have strong opinions
about Persil, and debate whether it was reformulated in 2016, or whether's
it's really the same in the US vs. Germany. I don't know, because I don't
care! But I liked the smell and I'd buy it again.

Conversely, advertising for cars is totally ineffective on me, because I'm a
car nut and I know about every model coming out 2 years before they would ever
be advertised in any medium. But, there are plenty of people in the world who
think about cars in the same way I think about laundry detergent - and might
go to the Honda dealer and check out a minivan because of the ad they saw that
showed it had a built-in vacuum cleaner in the trunk.

I've mentioned on HN before that I bought a Casper mattress largely because of
the incessant ads for it on my favorite podcasts, which I heard long before I
actually needed one. Without those ads, when the time came, I probably
would've just driven to the mattress store and tried out what they had in
stock. It never would've occurred to me to search the web to see if someone
had revolutionized the mattress business - this was a chore, I wanted it over
as soon as possible, and I didn't want to spend my mental energy doing
research on fucking _mattresses_.

But because of the ads, I knew that there was an established company that had
come up with what they claimed was a better product in this space. I checked
out a few reviews to make sure people actually liked the mattress - then I
ordered one, it showed up in 3 days, and I love it! Thanks, advertising.

~~~
vl
> and I didn't want to spend my mental energy doing research on fucking
> mattresses

Ironically it should be reverse: you send a lot of time on the mattress, it
directly affects quality of your sleep and consequently health and quality of
life.

~~~
alexmingoia
Does it? Humans sleep on a wide variety of surfaces, from bamboo mats to
memory foam, and if sleep quality is taken to be “does not wake up” then
observably mattresses don’t really affect the quality of sleep in general.

Are you sure ”mattresses are important for your health” isn’t largely a
product of advertising? That would be ironic.

------
soared
It’s an interesting argument but it’s tautological. Advertising features (or
branding) is a form of disseminating information. If it’s true that consumers
know everything about every single product, then advertising would cease to
exist. You simply can’t say that every single business in the world is in
efficiently spending ad dollars right now.

Consumers especially don’t have access to all product information. You
literally can not compare a good chunk of products because I do is gated or
not shared on purpose.

\- I’ve only read the abstract so far, will edit if skimming other sections
provides answers.

~~~
textblockchain
Right, advertising is a form of disseminating information, but the issue is
that there are limited resources to process all this information in the world.
What ads do is forcibly take my attention and direct my resources towards
processing their content without my permission. Sure, I can look away but I
need to exert effort (even if it is the slightest bit). Processing what they
want to tell me makes me more informed about their product (as opposed to
their competitors) which, if their ad wasn't terrible, will make me less
uncertain about it. This easily makes a number of people more likely to buy it
since it will feel familiar, thus making this company better off even if their
competitor had a better, but at first more unfamiliar product.

~~~
soared
Do you equally dislike everything in the header, right rail, left rail, and
footer on every single webpage? Does processing the top bar of hn take away
from your pool of mental resources?

I don’t want to be a dick but this argument lacks weight. Does your brain work
less effectively when it’s cloudy, since it takes mental resources to see
clouds rather than clear sky?

~~~
elefanten
All the things you reference serve a purpose for the user. There's a whole
field about how to design them, etc.

Ads are not designed or deployed to serve the user. Are you seriously saying
the average ad you see is optimized to provide you useful information? When
did you last see a Tide commercial cite the studies that showed it cleans the
best?

Ads are designed, bought, placed and engineered to interrupt your thought
process and direct it elsewhere, then present information that's optimized to
make you remember and select that product. Sometimes (in proportion, rarely)
that information happens to be useful, but it was still presented in via
psychosocial dark patterns.

