
The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age (2018) [pdf] - skanderbm
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9304&context=ylj
======
tifadg1
I block all ads everywhere. I'm not opposed to paying for services I really
need, but so far I've found nothing I couldn't do without.

Ads really made a mess of the internet - content farms, keyword farms, most of
google results are paid for, sponsored for, or came from farms. We've really
gone full-circle if I have to prepend reddit or stackexchange to get something
that's not crap. Be it a question about daily life, or a product review, or a
tech related thing.

Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse
into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities
potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.

But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

~~~
etempleton
I think you and many others block ads because on many websites they are
implemented so aggressively that it renders the website near unusable. This
aggressive implementation is, in a way, a manipulation of the intention of ad
tech and ruins how well results can be measured. Pop-up ads create false
clicks, numerous ads on a page lessen the value of any given ad impression,
etc.

The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally
what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price,
which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising
platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be
sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be
seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are
added to websites just to break even.

~~~
potta_coffee
My unpopular opinion: I would rather see content disappear than ever see an ad
of any kind. I used to be tolerant of ads but I'm never going back, ads of any
kind are repulsive. I even think that billboards on the highway should be
banned, they're eyesores.

~~~
gordaco
You are not alone. I'm also like this. Ads are horrible both in concept and in
execution; their existence causes all kind of troubling incentives (for
example: all those discussions about youtube radicalising young people because
their algorithm prioritises polarising content? Remove the incentive to
increase engagement at all costs, which is caused first and foremost by
advertising, and the problem it's gone); and the worse of it is that we know
there are a lot of very smart people out there, with a good grasp of how a
human mind works, whose job is to insert tricks into advertising to manipulate
you (by the way, this is not just about dark patterns, which is another can of
worms of its own, but about neuromarketing and similar concepts). And then
there are astroturfing campaings, which by design are even more dishonest than
standard advertising.

I really, really despise advertising. It can't disappear soon enough.

To make this comment a bit less ranty, I'd like to add something: some people
believe that ads don't work on them. I very much disagree. Ads DO work. That's
exactly why I don't want anywhere near me.

~~~
potta_coffee
I agree. About your last point, I can feel how ads affect me emotionally now
and that's why I find them repulsive. My household is a "no-ads" household and
I don't allow my children to view ads.

------
etempleton
"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 on bill-boards or television, or
through the advertising links placed by Facebook in its feeds and Google at
points all across the web."

This creates its own set of problems. Companies looking to sell directly to
consumers through their own website lose a powerful way of promoting their
product to consumers giving entrenched retailers more power and more control
over what is sold to consumers.

Does Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. not promote certain types of products over
other, either subtly or overtly? What constitutes advertising?

I don't think anyone likes misleading or intrusive advertising, but to say
that advertising is obsolete is either incredibly naive or put forth in
intellectual bad faith.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That quote made me laugh hard.

To everyone around me, I keep advocating a simple principle: _never use
e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation_.

Reviews are thoroughly gamed, and have been for many years now. That applies
both to vendor-owned stores, where you can assume they're all heavily
moderated or fake by default, as well as marketplaces like E-bay, where
bribing customers to remove negative reviews or give better ratings is a
standard business practice for sellers.

Product descriptions - those are always purposefully misleading. Hyping up the
positives, hiding negatives, avoiding to provide useful metrics, and doing
everything possible to prevent you from comparing between alternatives.

The best way I've found so far is to look for communities of people using a
given product category, and read up opinions. Not review sites - these are,
with few exceptions, just ads in sheep's clothing. But smaller, purpose-
oriented communities are much harder to game thoroughly. So personally, unless
the product category I'm exploring has a recent review on WireCutter (in which
case I just buy one of their top picks; never been burned this way), the first
thing I do is googling "<product category> site:reddit.com" and do my research
there.

~~~
jasode
_> , I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for
product discovery and evaluation._

That strategy works better for some products. E.g. especially high-value
products such as digital cameras where one can go to photography discussion
communities to learn of real-world opinions on Canon vs Nikon vs Sony, etc
_before_ visiting amazon.com

However, for many other products, that doesn't work. E.g. I was searching for
a small square pictures frames and large photo albums for some family
pictures. None of the online communities[1] talking about picture frames are
useful for this because they focus on _custom frames_ instead of commodity
items. In this case, just browsing amazon.com's "virtual shelves" or driving
to a brick&morter store to see what they actually stock is the easiest way.

Another example of using amazon.com's reviews (even if they're gamed) was
buying a temporary guest bed. (My previous comment.[2]) As far as I can tell,
there really isn't focal point of online discussion for folding beds because
no strong _recognizable brand names_ emerge to converge lots of opinions on.
Because folding beds don't attract discussions like Canon/Nikon cameras, it
turns out most of the opinions are at Amazon.

[1] one example search of discussion forums:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+frames+discussion+fo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+frames+discussion+forum)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197305)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fair enough.

What I do for the product categories you mention - cheap commodity items - is
I first decide how important are they for me. If I don't really care about
quality (or it's a product that's almost impossible to make in bad quality),
I'll order from the cheapest seller that doesn't seem fly-by-night (which I
determine by metrics like "how old is the account/offer", "how many positive
reviews the offer page has" and "what special site-specific markings the
seller has". It's not bullet-proof, but the goal here is just to avoid dealing
with fraudsters.

If I do care about quality, it depends on whether or not I can afford losing
money and time on a bad item. If yes, GOTO previous paragraph. If not, I'll
find a brand - any brand - that sells the item and order from them.

Also not mentioned: for a good chunk of such purchases I rely on word-of-
mouth. If someone I know has a product in the category I'm interested in and
they're happy with their purchase, I'll just buy the same thing they did,
preferably from the same place they did.

The main heuristic I use: sellers are incentivized to lie, cheat and steal
from you. Degree to which it happens depends, in general, on how much they can
get away with. So I expect the official Nikon store to lie to me (deceptive
marketing, bullshit specs, purposefully making it hard to compare across
product category). I expect an e-commerce platform seller to lie and possibly
cheat (that's entirely based on personal experience). Reviews are too easy to
fake and bribe (I've personally know people who did it and I've been asked to
participate many times, so I know how this works and how widespread it is).

------
blakesterz
This paper is from 2018.

They argue the FTC needs to put the hammer down in different ways now that
advertising has changed so much.

"Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC
should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all
advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is
available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of
the Sherman Act."

------
ChaitanyaSai
Interesting argument. Worth keeping in mind that Bloomberg spent over half a
Billion dollars to win American Samoa. People seem to give advertising undue
credit (like with the Russian election influence idea). Advertising can only
burnish your product, not change the story entirely. And perhaps, there's a
case to be made that the ad itself is a product designed to make you feel
better by being part of tribe of consumers. If the argument is that this is
unduly influential, then you'd have to start by banning religious evangelism

~~~
jonahbenton
>> Advertising can only burnish your product, not change the story entirely

With respect, it is completely the opposite. Advertising IS storytelling and
adtech has created the opportunity to tell, retell and invent new stories at a
rate and with an impact that has no precedent.

 _Any_ set of facts (or non-facts), and any storyline- especially false ones
which "spread" much more quickly- are promulgated by digital ad campaigns of
infinite variety and infinite precision, and create the social disintegration
the US especially is experiencing.

Advertising is asymmetric, and all it takes is one quip, one framing, and the
mind of one person is changed. The cost of finding that one effective
personalized message has never been so low. Products- physical, digital, and
"people"\- have their stories- in the minds of specific target individuals-
changed (nudged) in a moment. One thinks they are immune to this insidious
storytelling, but just observe the nudging over time, and in months see how
far the view has shifted.

The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely successful
operation, operating at the tectonic plate level.

Similarly, Bloomberg's spend should not be evaluated on what it failed to do,
but on what it succeeded at.

And I agree (implied) that banning advertising is implausible.

Best wishes.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Absolutely agree; advertising is storytelling. And storytelling is what makes
the object of storytelling memorable.

>> One thinks they are immune to this insidious storytelling, but just observe
the nudging over time, and in months see how far the view has shifted.

I am skeptical. The only cases I can think of where it has worked (religions
and cults) are ones where resonant storytelling is all there is. The power of
collective belief and shared meaning outweighs any contradictory facts. In
extreme cases, the facts themselves are denied (the fossil evidence is a lie).
In most cases, memorable storytelling nudges you to pick one of out
essentially similar choices (from coffees to smartphones).

>>The Russian story is an extremely useful case study of an extremely
successful operation, operating at the tectonic plate level.

This is an interesting point. I'd love to see some objective study looking at
who actually changed their beliefs after coming across these hyper-
personalized political ads. Getting the already disaffected to reinforce their
beliefs is one thing, and getting people to actually shift their beliefs to
the other camp is another.

~~~
jonahbenton
Appreciate engagement, much more complicated story than can be told here, but
short version for both (IMO, of course) is:

1\. Decision making is much more of a "Thinking Fast And Slow" behavioral
model than a monolithic intellectual logical process (the Slow part of
Thinking Fast and Slow).

2\. The small messaging nudges have a huge and impossible-to-prevent impact on
the Fast part, which drives the majority of micro decision making.

3\. Rationalization (how the Slow part retroactively justifies Fast micro
decision making) plus authority dynamics (Trump enshrining bullying behavior
at the leadership level) mean:

 _Beliefs_ may not have changed but _behavior_ contradicts beliefs.

This is especially critical- and tragic- when that behavior is self-
destructive, and beliefs/denial are an obstacle to using communication for
harm reduction.

Hope that makes sense.

Best wishes.

------
scribu
The paper proposes a ban on almost all advertising:

> It is hard to believe that as late as the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission
> (FTC) viewed non-false, non-misleading advertising as anticompetitive
> conduct capable of violating the antitrust laws.

> Advertising has the power, through repetition and brand image creation, to
> induce consumers to buy things that they do not really want, to the
> disadvantage of competitors selling the things that consumers would
> otherwise buy.

~~~
glial
Great. To those ringing their hands about the death of capitalism they fear
will follow: if capitalism is premised on buying things you don’t need,
destroying the planet in the process, maybe we can do better?

~~~
mas3god
Maybe it wouldnt be a problem if we didnt have a central bank which makes it
irrational to save money.

------
libertine
I honestly think this is a bit of a naive proposition, and an "obsolete" point
of view, specially when you factor in the most obvious thing:

Advertisement, per definition, is self evident. You have way more "less
obvious" marketing tools, like product placement, but even those that are
subtle, are in set in a context - like a movie or a tv show.

I think it's way more troublesome the obscure parts of what the paper claims
to be "product information" \- that is where true deception and manipulation
occurs. This is where your defenses and your guard are down. You don't know
you're being manipulated, even if it's a simple paid 5 star review with no
review text, it's a deceptive bias. Another example, is undisclosed paid
promotions/reviews from influencers.

People would be better off acknowledging that advertising works, and that it
is present in media, and we should be critical of it, which I believe in 2020,
we're aware of it. Else if you're going that path, then you can start make
monopolies on media and information distribution that arguably serve any
agenda - even if that agenda is to gather more share/views/audiences, and you
end up banning media.

Because that's the truth - the majority of endeavors that are distributed in
media have an agenda, and try to manipulated the audiences in some way.

With this said, I'm not saying that all advertising is fine, in fact, this is
probably the hardest times for authorities and regulators to control, and
fine, abuses. You just need to log on Facebook and see illegal claims being
made in advertising, things that would never be allowed on TV/Radio/Outdoors.
Yet they generate massive amounts of reach.

~~~
jariel
The most 'deceptive' aspect of marketing is not even remotely 'product
information'.

The paper is so out of touch with the reality of marketing to even suppose
that.

Very little marketing is done on the basis of information, it's emotional,
life style aspiration.

Does Nike put ads showing the technical aspects of their shoes in Times
Square?

Or does the 'Big Spend' go on Kapaernick's lofty quasi-political statements?

Literally turn on your TV and watch 10 commercials and listen carefully and
look at the imagery: "This truck is rugged, tough, reliable, I can haul a
bigger load than anyone else on the road, look how impressive I am to the
other guys on the site" \- this is an example 'utilitarian aspiration' i.e.
when they sell utility as an aspiration because said utility is not very
necessary.

~~~
libertine
>The most 'deceptive' aspect of marketing is not even remotely 'product
information'.

Arguably, these days, I think it is.

>Very little marketing is done on the basis of information, it's emotional,
life style aspiration. >Does Nike put ads showing the technical aspects of
their shoes in Times Square?

You're missing the point - I said that Nike stance, claims, ads, brand, is
self evident.

Manipulated reviews, high ranking on Google, and influencers promoting
products, it's dissimulated. People are not aware those variables are being
manipulated.

Even if some people buy Nike for the sake of Nike, if they are presented with
a 150$ pair of shoes that has 3,5 reviews on Amazon, or has Kanye West saying
"this shoes are shit", makes a huge difference these days.

------
jariel
I like reading these by my gosh man, they are always written by people with
seeming no material insight into either the practical, strategic or
aspirational aspects of branding and marketing. It's pretty hard to take any
of it very seriously.

What's just as shocking is how naive most of the tech world is in terms of
their understanding of what marketing even is, let alone advertising.
Similarity for finance and financial concepts.

Advertising and Marketing is a complicated thing, but it's part of the
structure of business and it's far from irrelevant.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Just because something is complicated, doesn't mean it's ethical. And in fact,
pointing out to how complicated and deep the domain of marketing is serves
only to distract from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and
immoral, and has disastrous consequences for society.

~~~
jariel
" from the core issue: as practiced today, it's malicious and immoral, and has
disastrous consequences for society."

This is absurdly false.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I believe it's true. I have a pretty extensive list of reasons here:
[http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-
cancer.html](http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html).

------
kwhitefoot
> the view that prevails today: that advertising does no more than convey
> useful product information to consumers.

Prevails in which part of society? The vast majority of the few ads that I see
at least attempt to be at least mildly misleading by at giving the impression
that the product is somehow quite different from competing products but
without actually spelling out what the difference really is or whether there
really is a difference.

------
ArtWomb
>>> an age in which 2 of the 5 largest tech firms in the US earn 90% of
revenue by selling advertising

I feel as if we are right on the cusp of alternatives to ad-sponsered free
internet. Web Crypto Mining being one of the more obvious methods to harvest
spare compute cycles of peer meshes.

~~~
ben_w
One thing I’ve never ever understood about crypto mining is: why it can’t do
something productive with all the CPU cycles, instead of just finding inputs
to hash functions such that they give round-number outputs? Like running
quantum chemistry simulations to find new superconductors or treatments for
illnesses? It’s not like cloud computing is a zero-cost resource, and things
like SETI@home _predate_ Bitcoin.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Somebody else will need to fill in details, but I do recall reading there's a
general argument that if your proof-of-work compute provides something else of
value as a side effect (e.g. "quantum chemistry simulations"), it stops being
a good proof-of-work scheme.

I can also imagine that anything non-random is vulnerable to a discovery of a
more efficient method of computing the same thing, and the first person to
exploit such a method could take over the chain.

~~~
rabuse
This is correct. Without the brute-forcing nature of finding a solution for a
block, it becomes trivial to game. There may be a hybrid approach to it (PoS),
but they haven't proven themselves yet in a large scale.

