[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.