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>It doesn't offer any value to the consumer (at least Tobacco offers some temporary pleasure), it must be taxed harshly. I'm quite sure I've received value fro

• Certhas 9y ago
  They are legitimately useful, but they are also legitimately harmful by creating needs that you didn't have. They are categorically not just about informing people. And saying you received value from ad-supported stuff strikes me as very backwards. You still pay, but you pay through being manipulated into buying stuff you don't need.
  • beaconstudios 9y ago
    how do they create needs you didn't have? Your language removes agency from the consumer - no-one is forced to buy something they saw in an ad.
    • th4dv 9y ago
      > how do they create needs you didn't have? They use all kinds of sophisticated socio-psychological techniques to do so. Unfortunately, most people (including yourself) don't even realise this, hence they become more prone to such techniques.
      • beaconstudios 9y ago
        I'm well aware of the techniques they use, but my point is that no matter how much an advertiser tries to influence you into buying their product the final decision and action is always your own. You could argue that people with poor impulse control should be protected from advertisers, and I would agree with you to an extent, but that's a separate issue.
        • th4dv 9y ago
          It's not only about poor impulse control. A lot of those techniques work in such a way that people don't even realise that something is trying to influence their behaviour. Usually, these techniques "catch" people when they are off guard. There is a lot of psychological literature describing how unreasonable people behave for the most of the time. Sadly, when it comes to manipulation, human kind has already lost this battle.
          • beaconstudios 9y ago
            I think you overestimate the power of these techniques. They don't add up to making people buy things they don't want. They just change the perception of the goods' value or cost. No matter how many ads I get shown, I'm not going to buy a McDonalds unless I'm hungry and want something quick and cheap that I don't have to cook. They just use adverts to position themselves as a good choice in that situation, or to improve the public impression of the meat they use (and such claims are legally required to be true so they can't just say "we use great beef" and cook you up a rat burger).
            • vmateixeira 9y ago
              Underestimating their power just makes you a better target.
            • th4dv 9y ago
              Ever seen an ad saying "All shoes 50% off, offer ends by the end of this week" ? Now think about why these ads always have such a short deadline. > improve the public impression Someone trying to influence your impression IS manipulating you.
      • saiya-jin 9y ago
        FFS, it's not some dark ancient magic, these things are generally well known in more educated crowds like here. Man up, take responsibility of your life and your own decisions. If you can't resist a burger just because you see an add on it, problem is not in advertising but purely in your weakness. You are not a puppet without your own free will, so don't act like one.
      • arjie 9y ago
        I can't believe so many of you people are happy to use rhetorical techniques to convince (read: manipulate) people's opinions and yet, you object to others doing so. Look at you, relying on attempts to place yourself as an informed authority talking to the uninformed masses, and using an imprecise description of awesome powers wielded by hidden agents to people's detriment. Unbelievable hypocrisy. In contrast to your comment, an ad for Viagra is straightforward.
        • th4dv 9y ago
          > relying on attempts to place yourself as an informed authority I've spent 5 years studying psychology at uni so even though I don't consider myself as an authority, I think I've got enough knowledge to know what I'm talking about. I don't give a flying fuck if the person reading my comment will be convinced or not. With that said, if they at least do a research on the subject, we'll all be better off. > In contrast to your comment, an ad for Viagra is straightforward Care to elaborate a bit? How discussing with someone anonymously on the internet compares with a situation where a company is using all kinds of techniques to trick people into spending money on their product?
      • snomad 9y ago
        Social networks / smart phone makers do too, see this recent 60 minutes piece http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hooked-on-phones/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hooked-on-phones/
    • Kequc 9y ago
      You overestimate the consumer's agency, something cannot be taken away that they did not have to begin with. The reason why ads are profitable is that a surprising portion of the general population will buy something if it's put in their faces. If it was something they didn't need before, they bought it anyway. That is what I think was meant by the comment above yours. When I rip on the agency of consumers please consider that with any small amount of agency they would search for the best product to suit their needs and advertising would be worthless. In fact advertising makes the product more expensive. Entire product lines are sold on advertising alone despite the existence of better cheaper alternatives.
      • beaconstudios 9y ago
        what kinds of ads are you thinking of when you say "If it was something they didn't need before, they bought it anyway"? There are different types of goods, some with clearer reasons for purchase than others. An ad for a mountain bike is clearly only going to attract people who saw the ad and thought "I want a mountain bike". For luxury goods that rely almost entirely on perception (eg. Tag Heuer watches), people choose to buy something that they think will make others see them in a different light. Classic "bad guy" advertisers like McDonalds are trying to influence customers to pick them over Burger King or KFC when they fancy an easy meal on the go. None of these decisions are forced by the advertiser, and "influence" as a concept is pretty plain on the face of it. The psychological hacks that advertisers use are mainly restricted to trying to make you under-price or over-value a product in your head, or in the case of late-night shopping channels, to get you to impulse-buy things (which I would consider to be fairly exploitative but is in the minority in terms of advertisers). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a good book on the subject. > When I rip on the agency of consumers please consider that with any small amount of agency they would search for the best product to suit their needs and advertising would be worthless. I think you're conflating agency and rationality here. A rational agent would indeed shop around, but any old agent can choose to buy or not buy something based on whether they think it has value to them.
        • vmateixeira 9y ago
          If someone hits your animalistic self, you'll buy everything they're selling, unless you're aware of that. They just need to get to your not so gone weaknesses.
    • Super_Jambo 9y ago
      At any time in your life has someone been close enough to you to influence you? I don't think anyone can answer no to this honestly, if they could I'd think them quite unfortunate! Really it's nice to have friends and partners who understand what makes us tick. Obviously we would hope these people are trustworthy only using this influence for our own good. But to suggest that a wife, husband or parent cannot influence our choices is naive. Even if we were perfectly rational actors these people have far too much insight into our inner mind and too much control over what information we observe. Surveillance capitalism of the type google and facebook are currently trying to engineer is about putting this level of understanding & control over information sources in the hands of people with a massive incentive for you to make bad economic decisions. With machine learning & big enough data sets it would be surprising if their ability to manipulate you wasn't eventually orders of magnitude better than the average partner or parent. You think playing Go against a top ranked player is harder than feeding lies to your average rube?
    • Certhas 9y ago
      Did I say they are forced? Do you claim that everyone always needed what they are enticed to buy by advertising? Because I'm pretty sure there's a boatload of psychology research that says otherwise. Put yet another way, if ads weren't effective at making people buy shit, then why would companies make Google and Facebook obscenely rich? If people would merely be informed by ads about the existence and benefits of products, why would the ads have such strong emotional messaging and be so free from actual solid information? If you want to get informed you don't read the ads, do you? Ads have one primary purpose: To make people make more irrational decisions.
      • beaconstudios 9y ago
        ads are great at increasing the likelihood that you'll pick their product over the competition, and they might encourage people to impulse buy in the future. But there's no way an ad can get you to buy something you genuinely don't want. That's nonsense.
        • Certhas 9y ago
          And you're shifting the goalpost. I never said they get you to buy something you (genuinely) don't want, I said they create needs. Seems like you don't seriously disagree with that either, just over-interpreted my original statement. I would also argue the idea of "genuine" needs is a fallacy. Unfortunately one that is common in economic thinking. There is not fixed hierarchy of external needs that we want to satisfy one after the other. That's a really bad model for human consumption behaviour. If all your friends start having something most people will find that they start wanting it, too.
  • AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
    Jesus people, the medium is the message. Advertising is not a scourge on society because of what it does to convince viewers. Rather, it's the precedents set by advertising that are so awful: using repetition and other cheap psychosensory tricks to induce brand recognition; relying more heavily on ads than making a good product; using sleazy, mathematically unsound data and fooling execs everywhere into believing the figures; and don't forget the music - the horrible, monotonous music that plagues the modern ear everywhere it goes. Advertising does work, but it works by instilling maddening mediocrity in many simultaneous forms to arrive there. I believe that society could be worth more than what the ad industry thinks of us, but today they do treat us like the easily fooled buffoons that comprise the majority of our culture. Until we stop being such low effort creatures, we should expect ads to continue to contribute to our increasing global media fatigue.
    • Super_Jambo 9y ago
      I agree with this but think you've missed what I think of as 2nd and 3rd order effects. So 1st order problem: Adverts are harmful in that they distort markets increasing the effort required by consumers to make good decisions & increasing poor decision making. But they also create a whole bunch of activity that is now not a buyer / seller interaction. Why do you get click bait and fake news? If the viewers had to choose to pay for it then this would never occur but with advertising the viewer is the product. So you get content that is compelling but worthless. Fake news & clickbait. You even get HSBC dictating content to the Telegraph [1]. I honestly think Google originally had good intentions "Don't be evil" but their business model is fundamentally at odds with the wellbeing of their users. If you have a market optimizing for user manipulation you will evolve effective manipulators. So the 2nd order problems of advertising are that advert supported activity doesn't have it's interests aligned with it's users. Even if the people in these industries want to do good the market will eventually evolve corporations that harm their users since the more efficient the harm the greater the profit. But the biggest problem in my mind is the 3rd order effect of wasted human capital. Much like the biggest problem with wall street is all our gifted peers who ended up doing zero sum bullshit for banks. Advertising, regulatory capture and other corporate innovation that isn't making a better product signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...
• jondubois 9y ago
  But maybe if you didn't see that ad, you would have come across a different product/service which is actually better quality. Maybe your expectations of quality have slowly eroded over time (because of advertising). For example, in the old days, most items of clothing would last a lifetime. These days most items of clothing tend to fall apart after a few years. Also, many kinds of food items used to be better quality (I've read many articles about how low the quality of farmed vegetables like Tomatoes have become). I think that even Mcdonalds' used to be much better quality 20 years ago. At first I thought it was just because my memory was fuzzy but I later found out from someone who worked at McDonalds that one day, they suddenly swapped the buns of the Quarter Pounder burger to smaller buns but no one noticed except the employees. Also big Pizza chains in some countries have been making the pizzas smaller and smaller over time in order to maintain the low prices. Advertising allows big companies to keep pulling back on real quality whilst replacing it with an illusion of quality.