"Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one."
But I am happy I actually DO give information... My job consists of finding what people need (not want, but literally need), and tell them we can provide it.
Usually people that call the company where I work, thank us for having the product and the ads, sometimes they say they searched for days and then found our ads.
That said... we sell industrial parts, mostly for the maintenance of existing machines, so it is easy to not have any ethical trap... But it is not THAT profitable either... (just for comparison: I know a guy that works filming TV ads, and he said politicians pay for 30 second ads to his company, the same income my company has for several months summed...)
Thank you, this kind of advertisement is the one kind that is actually useful and needed. Search engines etc are a surprisingly bad way to find these kind of products (if you even realize it exists and can describe it).
Hilarious, when advertisements provide so incredibly little information, except how the product looks when held by attractive people, or driven by them along empty roads. And what little information they do provide, comes in tiny font after an asterisk at the bottom of the ad, that they were legally forced to include.
I guess I just think it's funny that we need scientific studies for blatantly disingenuous claims: "their task is to simply provide information and in that way they raise human well-being."
It's like doing a scientific study on the common claim of advertisers that "the internet would not exist without advertising".
The research wasn't done to test a "blatantly disingenuous" claim, it was done to determine the effect of advertising on mood.
They're able to quantify how much of an effect it has on happiness as well.
"Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That’s about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed."
That's a pretty significant amount, and if confirmed could certainly be used as an argument to regulate advertising, or a way for therapists to help improve the lives of their patients, or in many additional ways I haven't thought of in the 30 seconds I've spent thinking about it.
I wouldn't be so quick to be dismissive of "blatantly obvious" scientific studies.
"Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one."