
Advertising may make people miserable, but it still has its uses - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/06/06/advertising-may-make-people-miserable-but-it-still-has-its-uses
======
JulianMorrison
Advertising for me measures on 3 orthogonal axes

1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's
better, or how it's suited to a particular niche.

2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.

3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth,
pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse
if they actually are being clever.

Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is
kind of harmless but much overdone.

Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted
mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make
money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.

~~~
quicklime
What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain
(3)?

To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand
with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company
has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they
might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only
care about cost cutting.

Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression
that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind,
or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting
Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
_2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.

3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth,
pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse
if they actually are being clever._

Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the
road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know
something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of
other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised
to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is
real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they
let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending
as much thought to do so.

But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving
"morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that
toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically
true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current
example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical
condition!" when there is no science behind it.

------
cm2012
I post all the time in HN ad threads that _most_ companies grow very slowly if
at all from word of mouth, and need to use ads to grow (beyond a local level).

Say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber
used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It
cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you
need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no
way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the
spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to
help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a
snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100
other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely
valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow
without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies
with similar situations.

Here's a real life example:

I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently
has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is
nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly
fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.

Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just
doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two
months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.

Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

~~~
Barrin92
I'm not sure all these needs require advertisement in the socially detrimental
sense that the article talks about. If we simply want information about
services to go to users we have discovery platforms for plumbers were people
can search and find them, see them rated by customers and evaluated in an
objective fashion and so on.

Advertisements don't fill the niche any more of informing people in factual
manner about products. The modern advertisement is the 'axe effect' or
instagram influencing, which is purely emotional, tying personal success or
celebrity culture to products in an attempt to manipulate audiences. Creating
'stories' about products that personalise them or as the article points out,
signal social status and class segregation.

~~~
cm2012
Probably 5% of ad spend is for axe effect type stuff. I am on mobile but you
can google industry ad breakdown.

------
rossdavidh
Direct link to the research that the Economist article is talking about:
[https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-
dis...](https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-
dissatisfaction) Of note, is they make not firm conclusions about _why_
advertising makes people less happy in a society, only that it does, and that
this is true even when controlling for economic growth and other normally
understood factors that influence this.

In fact, for a given country, looking at the growth in ad spending in one
year, is apparently a good way to predict if people will be more or less happy
a few years from now.

It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds up over time.

------
ducttape12
If I'm in the market for a product, if a company makes a decent product
chances are I'll find out about it by reading reviews, etc. I don't need ads
for that.

Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.

~~~
delish
One of the standard seemingly-counterintuitive examples of uses of advertising
is car ads. Very few people see TV ads for a Mercedes and walk into a
dealership and buy one. So why does Mercedes-Benz run TV ads? The standard
explanation is, MB's ads are for the end of the month, when you see (1) your
car payment and (2) Toyota's ads claiming a car payment 1/3 what you're
paying.

So the ads are intended to help you avoid post-purchase guilt. Hence their
emotional appeal: you're a certain kind of person etc. That keeps you buying
MBs on a scale of decades, rather than jump ship to a lower prestige, lower
cost brand.

The larger point is there are many reasons to run ads, not just to attract
leads.

~~~
SerLava
Wow that explanation of luxury car ads kinda blew my mind there. I'm going to
be looking for that pattern everywhere now.

------
GlennS
There's been talk of a "banker's oath", because behaviour that is a little bit
slimy or reckless - but not criminally so, nor perhaps even unambiguously
unethical - can hurt a lot of people when your job involves looking after lots
of money.

I wonder if people working in marketing, advertising and journalism should
have to swear an oath in which they promise not to manipulate or deceive
people.

Lying or deliberately misleading is obviously not criminal in general, but
perhaps it should be punishable in certain professional settings?

I appreciate that this is very delicate, and needs a bit more thought on how
to avoid it becoming a potential tool of government or corporate oppression.

Of course, this is pie in the sky. Most people in advertising and marketing
seem to believe that what they are doing is fine.

------
rolltiide
I actually like Hulu ads, primarily from knowing when it will end. 60 or 90
seconds of ads. It makes it so much more tolerable and I am glad that I find
out about things. I'm not sure how much targeting they do, but I expect them
too and it feels like great customer attentiveness. Seeing an ad with the same
actor as the show I'm currently watching, and its like yes I did want to know
about that.

~~~
bulditand
That's great and I'm glad you find joy in this. Me, I spent nights going to a
show named "Nuit des Publivores" and loved it.

But like every pleasure in life, it needs to be consensual.

------
goodmachine
Everyone hates advertising, until they have something to advertise.

~~~
xtracerx
Everywhere I have ever worked has relied on advertising for its existence,
especially the ones that aren't household names. I understand how annoying
some ads can be but, in general, the concept of advertising is essential to
all of us having jobs.

~~~
anoncake
Doing work that ultimately neither makes anyone happier or healthier nor
furthers progress in any other way is essential to all of us having (full-
time) jobs. So you aren't _wrong_.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/U69lk](http://archive.is/U69lk)

------
egoisticalgoat
I've been thinking about this for a while, what would a world look like if we
only had about purely informational ads without any connection to companies?
Like, purely informing you that a product exists and is helpful, without ever
mentioning any particular brand?

------
mindcrime
I'm not the _biggest_ fan of advertising in the world, and I make a
distinction between "levels of annoyingness" and "levels of usefulness" of
ads. But even at their worst, I have a pretty hard time justifying the phrase
"makes people miserable" in regards to ads. Unless this article is talking
about a kind of ad that I've never encountered. Blipverts[1] maybe?

For my money, if I could _just_ get rid of any in-browser ad that starts
playing audio without prompting, I'd be mostly OK with the state of ads. Note
that, in this context, I'm not including any concerns about ad tracking
networks, etc. I'm just talking about the actual ads themselves.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_\(TV_series\))

~~~
the_pwner224
Back when I started reading HN I saw a comment mentioning that that person
always muted TV ads. I started requesting my family members to mute TV ads,
and once you start doing it, hearing the occasional 'unblocked' TV ad in the
background becomes extremely annoying. It is really no different from someone
coming into your house and camping in your living room - their sound volume
and jingles are intentionally meant to make you pay attention and distract
you.

~~~
mindcrime
Sure, no argument there. But to me, there is a huge gap between "annoying" and
"makes people miserable". Miserable, to me, is the excruciating pain I had for
a week after shoulder surgery. Being annoyed by a jingle is barely on the same
spectrum in my book.

~~~
AlexandrB
I think the “miserable” here is in the Buddhist sense of a bottomless pit of
desire that leaves your life feeling perpetually unfulfilled. Ads are like a
backhoe for making that pit deeper.

------
sologoub
The research into emotional well-being this article cites interestingly
appears to be in favor of highly targeted advertising, as a means of showing
only highly relevant offers and not making one feel inadequate by showing
offers way out of the price range.

That said, I don’t know if such a system, if it was possible to be 100%
accurate, would also have unintended consequences of denying people that are
not as well off some important deals, such as a lower APR, because they are
less profitable overall.

Still, this is an interesting concept to ponder - if advertising was as
relevant as possible and goods attainable without undue stress, people would
likely feel better about themselves.

------
perfunctory
Gotta love that "but" after "make people miserable"

~~~
buboard
Dentists make people miserable, but they still have their uses

~~~
anoncake
That's why people voluntarily visit dentists. They don't voluntarily view ads.

------
fromthestart
Paywalled, so I don't know how the rest of the article reads, but

>By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads
improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms
and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.

Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming
majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They
communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or
anything of the like, and do _absolutely nothing_ to improve the quality of
purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder
if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing
has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in
media.

But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting,
shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of
effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the
notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core.
I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like
I'd be directly harming society in building such technology.

In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can
communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing
your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally
consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where
a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is
supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust
over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on
TV got one for Christmas.

~~~
cm2012
You know how good scientists try to falsify their hypotheses?

Go to the FB ads library and look up ads from some random brands and start-ups
you've heard of. They're all here:
[https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/)

Count what % are basically honest, neutral, or just dishonest. The ratio may
surprise you.

~~~
JudgeWapner
Just like how fast food burger adds are 'honest' even though somehow, every
damn time, the burger - excuse me, "sandwich" \- they hand me in the
restaurant never looks like the one in the ad?

