

Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse (2007) - azeirah
http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/

======
ChuckMcM
One could argue that Marx himself felt he was witnessing the apocalypse, and
yet here we are.

My biggest issue with this particular take on it is this, _" The consumer
vision that is pushed by advertising and which is conquering the world is
based fundamentally, as I argued before, on a notion of economic growth."_

Advertising is not based on growth, it is based on consumption. There is a
difference. Let me see if this analogy helps; Survival requires spending
money, there is only so much money in the world, once we run out society as we
know it will collapse. The fallacy there is two fold, it presupposes that once
spent money is destroyed, and secondly that without money society could not
operate.

People are, for lack of a better term, actors in a large interconnected
system, they both charge the system with work and drain the system with
consumption. The 'value' of this system, its GDP, sloshes around from place to
place, concentrating at times and dispersing at times. Without its motion, the
system stops. Advertising is a means by which actors in the system attempt to
get a bit of GDP to slosh their way. They spend some to get some as it were.
Sometimes the actors follow along, sometimes they don't. I feel that the
effect of advertising on the sloshing around of GDP is a second order effect
at best.

Back when my kids were younger the topic of the richest person in the whole
world came up. And the obvious kid question, "What would happen if one person
got all of the money in the world?" and the answer is we'd switch to barter,
instead of buying groceries with dollars we might buy them with traded
services. GDP or "production" isn't money, it is something more fundamental
than that. Money is merely a convenient accounting system which works well
enough for many cultures.

------
eevilspock
The article makes a case for the immense social cost of advertising. If that
argument is too radical for you, let me make another one that looks at the
true costs of "free" ad-supported web content and services.

In short, it's a lie that ads give people content and services for free:

1\. The advertisers who pay web providers get their money from us, added to
the prices of other things we consume. There is no free lunch.

2\. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.

3\. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first
because ad-supported web providers live or die by giving advertisers what they
want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the
cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that
optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, they are using us as
products more than treating us as their paying customers. Let me restate to be
extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to their
finance department.

4\. We pay for all the collateral damage of advertising, such as the
tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely
incentivizes.

5\. We pay the social costs. Whether or not you agree with the social costs
laid out in the above article, I'm sure most can agree democracy and the free
market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and
reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2].
Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe the
social costs are the most expensive.

Added together, we end users are paying a lot more for "free" product than if
we could just straight up pay for it. And even we non-users are paying the
social costs and collateral damage.

Ads are simply a sneaky and dishonest way to get at end users' money without
them realizing it.

-

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that
I made here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773)]

[1] Do you really need a link for this one? We all know that money often
overwhelmingly decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who
wins, and influences what legislation they introduce, support or fight.

[2] [http://www.chaosisgood.com/2013/03/how-advertising-
undermine...](http://www.chaosisgood.com/2013/03/how-advertising-undermines-
freemarket.html?m=1)

~~~
capex
> Ads are simply a sneaky and dishonest way to get at end users' money without
> them realizing it.

Really? If I make a living by selling shoes, and put a banner outside my shop
advertising it, what's sneaky about it?

~~~
eevilspock
I could have worded that final sentence more clearly, but it seems to me you
ignored the previous 8 paragraphs and cherry picked the one sentence open to
misinterpretion (but only if you ignored the previous 8 paragraphs!)

My entire comment is about the fact that _" it's a lie that ads give people
content and services for free."_

To use your example: You hand out shoes sponsored by Chrysler. You tell
everyone the shoes are "free". The shoes have the Chrysler logo, and you
collect personal information that Chrysler pays you to use to send targeted
Chrysler flyers. Chrysler pays you enough to cover the cost of the shoes, the
added logo, and the personal information collection and targeting system. But
Chrysler adds the amount they are paying you (plus what they pay other parties
involved in the ads ecosystem) to the price of their cars. So as I explained
above, your shoe customers are still paying you, only they do it via the
hidden markup on the cars they buy, a markup significantly higher than what
the straight up price of the shoes would be. They just don't realize this. And
the feeling of "free" keeps them coming to you rather than your competitor who
sells shoes straight up, with no logos, 100% designed to please the wearer
instead of Chrysler, at a straight up price.

That is what I mean by _" sneaky and dishonest way to get at end users' money
without them realizing it."_

