
Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence - howard941
https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dissatisfaction
======
deepakkarki
Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward
Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

From the video description -

"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew,
Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s
and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He
showed American corporations how they could make people want things they
didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious
desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-
consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement
and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading
them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays
was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It
was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner
irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy
and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's
world."

~~~
HNLurker2
Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think
what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph
his father)

~~~
anewhnaccount2
Wow. And I suppose they managed to eroticise Netflix itself via "Netflix and
chill". Pretty brazen stuff when you think about it.

------
enlyth
To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising
as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in
funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's
attention and use it to generate profit.

We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us
down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.

~~~
maerF0x0
Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll
stop.

I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from
people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news,
being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If
someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4
years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or
worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...

~~~
JohnFen
> Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

Here's the thing...

I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among
the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all
others:

Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment
that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that
they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of
all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?)
and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

~~~
Mirioron
> _Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment
> that it 's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim
> that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect._

Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and
again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been
guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything
else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been
swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from
this I think.

> _Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list
> of all the advertising you 're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it
> all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list._

But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the
advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the
advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.

~~~
wastedhours
There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being
nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being
nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0]
(although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).

[0] [https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-
effect](https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-effect)

~~~
Mirioron
I don't doubt the effects I'd advertising. What I wonder is whether
advertising affects everyone. Studies can show that it affects people on
average, but it doesn't mean it affects everyone.

~~~
JohnFen
Advertising does affect everyone in the broad picture. Specific advertising
campaigns don't affect everyone, though. Also, different people are affected
by different approaches. What works for one set of people doesn't for another.

This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be
effective (given names like "the bandwagon" \-- which covers the group of
people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into
something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same
thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they
affect.

By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually
taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of
guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive,
unabashed, and to-the-point.

------
perfunctory
What can I say

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can
buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose
or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a
spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on
television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods,
and rock stars, but we won't."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_\(film\))

~~~
kaybe
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against
destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it
has turned out to be ineffective so far.)

If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against
climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and
biodiversity loss.

~~~
fourthark
What's a war without killing people?

~~~
kaybe
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor)

Even though that was meant tongue in cheek, I fear there will be innumerable
deaths before this is over. We can discuss who killed them then.

edit: A war-economy-level effort is needed, with the same dedication of all
participants, so there is another similar line of though.

~~~
fwn
Here's another take on the war metaphor in international relations:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(internationa...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_\(international_relations\))

> an extreme version of politicization that enables extraordinary means to be
> used in the name of security

~~~
skrebbel
Wow, nice term, I hadn't heard of it yet.

Too many people in the EU don't know that our many decades of peace (longer
than _ever_ before!) is due to how the EU effectively did some reverse
securitization. Basically, after WWII, any discussion of foreign countries was
heavily securitized. "Germany" wasn't considered a major indutrial competitor,
but a threat. And who knows, maybe France would be the next aggressor? Better
be prepared.

The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (the EU's predecessor)
transformed the _language_ in which politicians discussed neighbouring
countries. Right now, it is unimaginable to have war within the EU.

When people (rightfully) complain about how, say, Germany abuses their
position of power, or how the EU is un-democratic, or how too many MEPs are
corrupt fucks, then it always strikes me how _ridiculously successful_ the EU
has been at preventing war among its member states. I mean, if there was any
grounded reason to fear war, the last thing people would worry about is some
MEP spending public funds in a strip club.

------
seasoup
I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it
incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their
attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value.
Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers
more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are
in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.

~~~
eswat
It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current
growth capitalism towards one of real utility.

~~~
erentz
While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth
capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there
is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of
advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards
in parts of the world show the way.

We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data.
Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up
until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some
websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription
based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a
small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.

~~~
mayniac
I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban
advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]).
Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram
content, all internet ads, everything.

One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a
meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their
competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts
that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell
competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines
capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a
meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have
gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry
entirely.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0)

~~~
zdragnar
Unfortunately, I think your solution would effectively destroy democracy at
any level other than mayor and dog-catcher in tiny cities.

Televised presidential debates? Those are advertising for party-sponsored
candidates to the disadvantage of write-in candidates. If all publicity is
good publicity, then the same holds true for all news articles about
candidates running for any office. How is a newspaper editorial proclaiming
that "Elected official X is bad for Y!" any different than a campaign ad in
the same newspaper that "Elected official X is great for Y!"?

In one case, the newspaper makes money to put the content to be there, in the
other, the newspaper makes money because the content is there.

The same goes for books: how is publishing a biography of someone not a form
of advertisement for or against that person?

If I'm not mistaken, that happens to also be the heart of (at least one of the
justices' deliberations on) the Citizens United case that declared corporate
spending on elections to be covered under free speech.

~~~
A2017U1
All democracy should be grassroots. I find the concept that you simply can't
win an election or a candidacy without a large warchest to be abhorrent.

We live in an age where media dissemination costs essentially zero. All
politicians should have volunteers and not be able to raise donations nor
spend a cent on advertising. Easier said than done yes, but still a far better
outcome for democracy.

Let the best ideas flourish by themselves.

------
jandrese
Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to
convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your
current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to
convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can
buy that will increase your happiness.

You're basically being negged by advertisers.

~~~
lordnacho
Well like it says there's two kinds.

One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the
tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in
stock".

The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will
desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not
included."

Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective for a lot of things.
Not only that, there are no scruples at all with appealing to people in this
kind of way. It's not lying in the normal sense, but it is manipulation, or an
attempt at it. Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take
the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate
organ.

~~~
deogeo
> One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the
> tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in
> stock".

I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is
usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.

~~~
howard941
Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription
medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you
called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select
chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune
remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are
particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.

~~~
asdff
I don't know what you even do with that information. Are you supposed to ask
your doctor to put you on medication? "Uhh, sir you don't even have that
disease."

------
lwb
The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad
blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to
sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to
watch.

I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the
thing, just let me watch it!

It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy
(play different games).

I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of
adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more
concentrated metro area I might feel differently.

~~~
asdff
Cable TV used to be ad free when it first came out. The whole reason people
were willing to pay for it was to not see ads like they got on the free
broadcasts. Then once telecoms got their market share the ads trickled in, as
was originally planned I'm sure.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I used to watch cable tv when it was ad free. Then ads came about and I was
really baffled why anyone would pay to watch ads. That was the end of cable
for me many many years ago.

Also, I’ll never forget the first day I saw and ad in the movie theatre. That
was mostly the end of theatres for me except on some occasions.

------
cm2012
Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would
apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact
on happiness even if this analysis is true.

I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says
from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy.
They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other
things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More
globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find
advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political
election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be
huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend
numbers with it), etc.

It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with
advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into
actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good
primer:
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-
Uneasy-Persuasion-Dubious-
American/dp/0465000800&ved=2ahUKEwihqqSaj7_iAhXyRd8KHY3YCIYQFjAAegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw0KfSud7yAwUmzwvRqc9Jye)

~~~
anoncake
Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible
if there is no trade-off.

~~~
cm2012
Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did,
there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any
endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an
industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of
most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow
because of ads.

~~~
anoncake
I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those
endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness.

Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That
doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist.

The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other
mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expand but
advertising isn't free either. In any case, an independent press is much more
suitable to actually inform people than the ad industry which at best informs
people by accident while trying to convince people to buy $PRODUCT.

Ads are like military: It's mostly necessary because it exists.

~~~
cm2012
Okay. So 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.

~~~
cwkoss
This is fallacious thinking. If you had an app that would increase plumber
productivity by 50%, plumbers would be lining up to get into the Beta. Find
any plumbing supplier or trade group, and if the effects are actually that
good, they'll tell their members at no-charge because that knowledge would be
a service to them. Plumbers would be cold-calling other plumbers trying to get
a beta invite. All you need is a marginally competent sales person.

Advertising is a waste money for quality products, only makes sense for
inferior ones.

~~~
taffer
> If you had an app that would increase plumber productivity by 50%, plumbers
> would be lining up to get into the Beta.

How would plumbers know about the app without advertising?

> Find any plumbing supplier [...] they'll tell their members at no-charge

In other words: They would advertise it.

~~~
anoncake
> In other words: They would advertise it.

It's quite clear we are talking about paid advertising, not the broader
concept of people saying things.

------
deogeo
Advertising is necessary to stave off the greatest threat against Western
civilization:
[https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsi...](https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsizerender.jpg)

------
sesteel
I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human
experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where
there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing
philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children,
but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the
time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep
your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to
suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd
have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your
birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it
with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial
freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.

~~~
quickthrower2
It's good advice, but I find it ironic.

Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google,
Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other
people's products.

To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to
start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the
giants, that you have ethical control over.

It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc.
though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple
advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising
based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.

~~~
davnicwil
On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly
it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather
just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means.

Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' \- an honest business looking to do real
valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's
the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.

To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better
if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely
to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some
multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads.
Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay
for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser
and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that
genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore
likely more cheaply.

The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform
itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential
negative externalities might that have.

It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases
like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of
the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way
to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative
ads _per se_ , I think the more important difference for the majority of ads
is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of
tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both
advertiser and customer.

~~~
amelius
But if someone needs a painter, they could just use an unbiased search engine,
right? There is no need to bother anyone with ads.

~~~
davnicwil
You're right, but that's a very customer centric viewpoint - from the point of
view of the advertiser this is not so great.

This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you,
when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you
choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area.

It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this
service and not having to do the search yourself is a bonus, all things being
equal (price and service level is in line with the local market etc).

~~~
amelius
> It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative.

I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now
everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the
painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the
best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the
client (the client pays for being manipulated).

------
noir_lord
One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts.

I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast
tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web.

So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work).

I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t
mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running
ublock origin now after I suggested it.

~~~
hindsightbias
The perfect VR app would be a visual ad blocker. IEMs have taken care of my
ears (at least until iTunes or audible have ads).

~~~
asdff
Plenty of people are probably chomping at the bit to get AR ads rolling . I
can't wait for the youtube ads to pause and wait for my eyes to re center on
them before they continue.

------
nullandvoid
I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting
any form of advertisements due to it being abused.

Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to
lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care
about

~~~
deogeo
> necessary evil

Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned
billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.

~~~
chc
How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?

~~~
livueta
Does Wikipedia count as a big content website? n=1 and all that, but I think
it's a decent example of how things that are actually useful do just fine[1]
without ads.

This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with
any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't
exist. The 20xx equivalent of checkout aisle gossip mags going quietly into
that good night is a feature, not a bug.

Beyond that, think about how many of the ills of the modern internet can be
traced back to advertising profit motive. Shitty clickbait journalism? Yep.
Engagement-optimized filter bubbles and radicalization machines? Check. Fake
news (of the traditional definition)? Practically the poster child.
Indiscriminate data collection? Of course. I admit that I'm far from a typical
internet user, but from my point of view the death of ad-supported services is
an unalloyed good.

\---

[1] Much of the funding from Wikipedia drives goes to other efforts of the
foundation. The frequency and tone of drives might imply some precariousness,
but taken alone Wikipedia is fairly firmly in the green.

~~~
chc
> _This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something
> with any currency they don 't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it
> shouldn't exist._

That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with
billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination. This stance seems pretty
closely similar in effect to "The only things that should exist are the
interests of the rich."

I agree there are a lot of societal illnesses (even beyond those mentioned in
the OP) that trace back to ad-supported websites, but ads have been the main
reason information has been available to average people for literally decades
now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century. I think if
we want to replace them, we need to be thoughtful about how to do better.

~~~
livueta
> _That 's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with
> billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination._

I guess if you're feeling optimistic an argument could be made that the public
broadcasting services of various nations provide a counterexample, although
their political independence/status as maybe-not-propoganda is frequently
contentious. The emergence of various low-budget OSINT-type outfits like
Bellingcat is another indication that the future of investigative reporting
doesn't necessarily have to exist within the current framework of media as ad-
driven profit engine. Mass connectivity cuts both ways: obtaining and
synthesizing relevant info is a lot easier when you can go pull videos of war
crimes off of Twitter instead of shipping out an expensive war correspondent.
Of course, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of thing will ever be a
complete replacement for old-fashioned professional journalism.

> _ads have been the main reason information has been available to average
> people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media
> in the 20th century._

One significant difference between then and now is that the cost of
distribution of information is approaching zero. In the 20th century, much of
what your newspaper's ads were funding was the physical newspaper itself.
Broadcasting equipment was prohibitively expensive and you had to go through
the FCC (and hope you were one of the ~epsilon sanctioned outlets) to not get
shut down. Today, any CDN will happily sell you the bandwidth for millions of
page views for a song. This definitely doesn't mean that good journalism is
free to produce, but there's a lot of overhead that was being supported by the
ad model that doesn't necessarily apply these days.

I agree that some form of revenue replacement is in order, but I hope that
these and similar considerations mean that the gap that needs filling is
smaller than a naive "well, ads made this much in FY 2018, better spin up
micropayments for 100% of that" analysis would suggest.

------
hristov
There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main
character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that
his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you
convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the
new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.

------
xfitm3
Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into
compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.

~~~
bediger4000
That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers
only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience
of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.

~~~
xfitm3
Youtube proves otherwise.

------
FabHK
The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate
profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its
practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value.

It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement
(Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously
remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)

[1] [https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-
econom...](https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-
economy-26428.html)

~~~
clairity
i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would
argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is
basically buying more stuff).

but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods
constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious
economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to
continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of
access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th
century unlocked it.

the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with
our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which
they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-
down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people
here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested
in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't
care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really
need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those
products).

in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our
money where our mouths are.

------
oregontechninja
I view any and all non-obiective advertising as literally evil. There is
absolutely no good reason for advertising to exist it's current state.

Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising?
I've heard some governments outlaw advertising to children.

~~~
bediger4000
I could not agree more. I have gone out of my way to teach my children that
advertising is lies. Literally. That's what I told them, and demonstrated to
them.

I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript in browsers I control,
plus my own DNS-based advertising domain blocklist.

~~~
inetknght
If only lies were illegal

------
codeulike
When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts
that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by
children.

~~~
inetknght
That actually sounds like a pretty damn awesome suggestion.

------
clevep
This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes
products and services cheaper.

That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes
because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying
something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.

There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the
fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see
those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service,
so you get to pay some of your attention instead.

Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising
expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like
to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all
relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position
to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising
ratio as a slider.

That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit
maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising
encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so
difficult to find a genuinely ad free service.

in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another
income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers
away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand
advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in
marginal revenue from the consumer base.

In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of
advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising.

while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account
for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate
positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that
advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be
rid of ads.

~~~
clevep
Hah, perhaps I was not clear enough in my original comment because I agree
with everything you wrote after the first paragraph.

I strongly agree with this sentence: "in short, these platforms work to
maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they
don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term
interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain
equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base."

That is 100% accurate. However, that doesn't mean that ads do not affect the
price of goods and services.

Businesses are always looking to find the sweet spot to maximize profits by
pulling on different levers. These levers could represent price increases,
advertising, lowering production costs, etc. Businesses will always be looking
for the most efficient lever to pull. And I guarantee you that if you somehow
figure out how to take the advertising lever away, they will pull a different
lever. This could result in a higher price, a lower quality product, or
something else, but ultimately something has to give.

This explains why advertising is likely to encroach on all platforms, because
as users become more accustomed to it there is a higher likelihood that it is
the most efficient lever to pull.

And of course I agree that it is generally not the case that you could pay 5%
more to be rid of ads. The Hulu example was just a good illustration of how to
think about the relative value of advertising to Hulu / the consumer.

------
wow425
Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as
rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere,
are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and
converted into revenue. Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores
social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a
lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst
of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are
economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to
work, grow food in a home garden, and don’t smoke

------
40acres
I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge
fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung
here.

"Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is?
Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard
on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing
is okay. You are okay."

------
makecheck
Imagine having a person _constantly_ walking too-close next to you, picking
_just_ the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before _every_ little thing you
try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can
finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for
everything! It isn’t exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for
pretty much everyone.

------
plg
my kids only watch netflix and shows/movies we buy on iTunes

so basically they see virtually no ads, SO unlike my experience growing up
watching network TV where every 12 minutes there was a series of 5 or 6
30-second ads

~~~
jacquesm
And what do you think Netflix's ranking is if not advertising?

'movies we recommend based on other movies you've seen' and so on.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
assuming he's like me (ad blockers, limited tv, etc), I have a Netflix
account, and I don't even honestly know what 'Netflix ranking' is.

Assumimg it is something like Netflix's recommendation service, well, this
might come back to an difference in philosophy: I don't need/want to be
recommended shows to watch, and I don't use recommender/suggestions.

One does not have a need/desire to consume media as an abstract concept, so
the idea that one has a problem of "I want to watch something but i don't know
what" is a literal nonsensical statement/problem.

~~~
funkymike
How do you decide what to watch?

How do you become aware of new shows you would be interested in?

For me this is one of the benefits of Netflix's recommendation service. While
I feel like the quality of the recommendations has gone down over the years,
it still has value. I tend to watch 1-2 shows at a time until I have watched
the entirely of them. When I finish one I want to find another to watch, but
don't always know what I want to watch next. So for me "I want to watch
something but i don't know what" is the exact problem I have on a regular
basis.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
well, presumably the same method I use to figure out how to read books I
haven't read yet, listen to music when I don't have a radio: organically or
through picking some out from good reviews or subject matter sharing/experts.

An actual benefit to this in my eyes is that marketing and fads tend to have
short attention spans, so if you're interested in quality as opposed to
'riding the social wave', most fads won't hold their quality/appeal after a
few years.

And besides, we're so overwhelmed with media, the desire to 'get more' is
about the definition of an anti- problem... we actually need to find ways to
consume less...

------
Nursie
I think there's (at least) another factor not investigated here - advertising
as a stress inducing, unnecessary noise in life.

People are trying to bombard you, through every possible avenue, with
advertising. They want your eyes and your mind and they won't waste a second
or a flat surface when trying to get at them.

I find it abusive and exhausting.

------
User23
Advertising is inherently predatory. I'm well aware of the arguments like
"we're providing customers with useful information about things they might
like to buy," but that's a lie. It's using propaganda and persuasion
techniques that were discovered in the early 20th century and have been
increasingly perfected. And that's just the first order effect. The higher
order effects of advertising are even more pernicious. Advertising has
destroyed far more lives than guns ever have. That's not hyperbole, the opioid
epidemic is the result of predatory advertising and lobbying by pharmaceutical
companies such as Purdue Pharma.

------
mlinksva
I don't see a link or reference to it, but I guess this is a slightly
condensed version of
[https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019Easte...](https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf)

Tax ads!

Added: actually it's in the reference list as:

> Michel C, M Sovinsky, E Proto, A J Oswald (forthcoming), "Advertising as a
> Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One
> Million Europeans", to be published in 2019 in a volume in honor of Richard
> Easterlin.

------
adamwong246
Real luxury is being able to pay for the content you want, to watch how and
when you want, without subsidizing the experience with attention-sucking ads.
I refuse to hook up our cable box for this reason.

------
50656E6973
Big Advertising is a root cause not only for mass mental dissatisfaction, but
also mass health epidemics (i.e. obesity in the US), and ecological
destruction/climate change.

~~~
cwkoss
Advertising is a cancer on our society. Every time you see an ad, make an
effort to to make that impression net-negative ROI. Tweet about how the brand
causes horrible health problems, makes customers look like idiots, has
disgusting business practices etc. Who care's if it's true, most ads (or
tweets for that matter) are not either!

------
andrei_says_
Why would people buy anything if they are content?

Combine this with the need for constant growth encoded in management
incentives and the push to remove content from everyone is pretty powerful.

------
okr
I remember developing an App. And then we have talked about, how can we be
seen. And then all my grudges on advertising disappeared. Thank god, that it
exists.

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
Probably your app is not that special then.

You know: build it, and they’ll come.*

* If it’s worth it.

~~~
cm2012
Definitely not. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730).

------
chronogram
This URL was blocked by a content blocker. Hm!
[https://outline.com/KrV9Pw](https://outline.com/KrV9Pw)

------
jasonhansel
I really want a study to show what percentage of online ads are downright
deceptive (or at least highly misleading). I suspect it's well over 60-70%.

------
l33tbro
I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I
think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to
succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues.

If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely
insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.

------
vertline3
There is a documentary from BBC about the history of philosophy of happiness
that was on YouTube, in the documentary it is mentioned that the Greek
Philosphers had discussed advertising as lowering our happiness in order to
replace the hole with their product. I think it was epicurus but I am not
certain. the narrator is Alain de Botton

------
hi41
Our economy is dependent on advertising so that revenue increases every
quarter. Any curtailing of advertising would also have a impact on revenue and
then result in job loses. We need to arrive at solutions that is able to
reduce such impact on individuals and families.

------
bigbadgoose
"Advertising exists to make you feel bad about yourself, then inserts product
as solution"

------
RickJWagner
This has been a problem since Mick Jagger sang about it, last century.

[https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-
satisfac...](https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-
lyrics)

------
anoncake
> Easterlin (1974) found early evidence suggesting that society does not
> become happier as it grows richer.

This is why equality is important. A society becoming less equal is a problem,
even if everyone gets richer.

------
ehmish
I've wondered if the reason governments haven't passed legislation taxing or
otherwise outlawing advertising is that they rely on advertising companies to
get elected (election advertising)

------
cfarm
It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product
without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this
finding still hold true?

------
bcherny
I read over the page twice, and didn’t see an actual study linked. Does
someone have a link to the PDF? And was this actually published in a peer
reviewed journal?

------
lars512
If there's big negative externalities to advertising, wouldn't you ideally tax
it and use the funds for initiatives to improve subjective well-being?

------
walrus01
I wish that there were some easy way to integrate the general philosophical
concept of ublock origin into the rest of my life, outside a web browser.

------
brentm
Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater
dissatisfaction with lack of income?

~~~
netsharc
It seems like it's the gospel of capitalism (or neo-liberalism?) that has
fooled of us that we need more money to be more happy.

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-
ideology-problem-george-monbiot)

As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I
thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a
social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a good
group of friends improves your health so much as you grow older.

Admiteddly we were sitting in a restaurant, where the food and drink cost
money.

~~~
funkymike
Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part
as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can
realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which
means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and
spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.

------
bayouborne
"The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure
would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half
the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or
approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being
unemployed."

Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect
on life satisfaction?

~~~
djtriptych
I think they say "absolute size" to mean absolute value. e.g. 3% drop is half
the absolute size of a 6% rise.

~~~
bayouborne
ah, thank you.

------
phkahler
"They Live" should be classic shown in every 5th grade classroom.

------
amelius
I suspect the root of the problem is with the way we view our economy. Instead
of measuring happiness we use e.g. GDP as a metric, but I wouldn't be
surprised if a high GDP correlates with and causes unhappiness and on top of
that it certainly also negatively impacts the environment.

Also, capitalism/the free market seems like a very unfair system (no need to
provide examples I hope), and unfairness is also a known cause of unhappiness.

But meanwhile, instead of addressing these problems, our brightest minds are
trying to make people click more ads ...

~~~
tim333
Well there are some people trying to measure happiness now eg
[https://worldhappiness.report/](https://worldhappiness.report/) and there
seems a trend in that direction, may it continue.

------
Toine
Mimetic theory explains why

------
burntoutcase
I'm not surprised. Advertising is nothing but private-sector psyops.

------
throwayEngineer
I can't help but imagine there are worse companies than others for this.

Between Apple and Samsung, these are companies that advertise Average products
but charge luxury pricing.

I find this incredibly unethical. But my non Engineering counterparts believe
that Sales are necessary.

------
return1
> Germany after 1989,

Convenient. I think they should include DDR which had no advertising at all.

~~~
jacquesm
That is not correct. Over the highways there were all kinds of signs back in
the day, mostly insurance.

------
return1
Ironically, advertising your position against advertising is also a form of
advertising. I dont think it's right to view advertising as inherently
unethical. Communication and signaling are parts of human nature

~~~
FabHK
Rape and murder are parts of human nature, too. Still inherently unethical.

~~~
return1
you think communicating with you is unethical?

~~~
FabHK
I'm objecting to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore,
good (the "appeal to nature" fallacy).

~~~
return1
"not inherently evil" != "good"

~~~
FabHK
I'm objecting furthermore to the argument that things that are natural are,
therefore, not inherently evil.

