[Certhas]

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.

[AndrewUnmuted]

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]

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-t...

[AndrewUnmuted]

I really loved reading your reply. It was well thought out and very respectful. I am not used to such things on the internet anymore. Cheers to that. :)

You correctly point out that the human waste caused by ads, like our banking industry, is monumental. What fascinates me about your view, though, is that I have always viewed the cause for US banks' human waste factor to be the absurd regulatory environment and the close ties it maintains to the upper echelons of government.

Media/Advertising, on the other hand, feels much more sparsely regulated at the government level, but it does maintain its own absurd regulatory environment in the private sector, and its own ties to the upper echelons of government. I think it's hard to deny that this industry's self-regulatory environment is as ineffective and chaotic as the politically-instituted regulatory environment enjoyed by the banks. But little research has been done into the impact of the media industry's self-regulation. Makes me wonder what exciting secrets may be out there to uncover.

[bicubic]

The other second order effect is that advertising will influence you even if you opted out of everything you could and lived under a rock. As long as you have friends who are exposed to advertising, you are exposed to advertising through them.

Car manufacturers specifically optimize for this effect, which is why car ads are targeted at people who already own said car, not potential new buyers.

[beaconstudios]

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.

[Kequc]

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]

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.

[barrkel]

"None of these decisions are forced by the advertiser"

Pavements don't force you to walk on them, but I'd bet you tend not to stray off them. Pathways through the park don't force you to stay on them, but most people tend to stick to them.

By escalating the bar that advertising needs to reach to influence agents to "force", you're proposing a binary relation where there is a continuum. I think it's disingenuous.

[beaconstudios]

> 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.

This was the ancestor comment I was responding about. This person is suggesting that an advertiser can make you buy things you wouldn't otherwise want. My point is that it isn't true - you have to want the product at some level to be interested. If you'd read my comment you'd realise that I agree that they can influence your decision, but not if you weren't at least mildly interested in the product in the first place.

[vmateixeira]

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.

[beaconstudios]

we have the capacity for higher reasoning, you know - we can override our instincts by making a conscious choice.

[barrkel]

If you walk into a shop, and you see three items on the shelf, you're far more likely to buy one of the items on the shelf, than the one that's hidden behind the counter that you have to ask for.

It's not force, but almost nobody will ask for the thing behind the counter. It's the effect that matters.

[vmateixeira]

Up to a specific level, yes. A simple example of that is the loss of reasoning upon a lifethreatening situation.

The extent of the grey area differs for each individual.

[th4dv]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

Underestimating their power just makes you a better target.

[th4dv]

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.

[snomad]

Social networks / smart phone makers do too, see this recent 60 minutes piece http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hooked-on-phones/

[Super_Jambo]

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]

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]

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]

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.