[jklinger410]

>It is lying on a massive scale.

What is marketing? Your local farmer's co-op overproduced corn and is having a sale, they want everyone to know.

How do they tell you? Run an ad! But ads are marketing. This means they are lying?

Your perception of marketing seems really narrow and confused.

[psetq]

You're cherry-picking examples here. The "local farmer's co-op" is not a good representation of the advertising industry in general, and not likely to be very interested in utm tracking like that discussed in this thread.

Using "evil" like the upstream comments is a bit strong imo, but it's certainly not known for being a particularly "honest" industry.

[nailer]

The upstream comment said marketing is evil - a broad ranging statement. The comment you're responding to picked an example of marketing - not an unusual instance, just a common example of the thing the parent called evil. This seems like a reasonable response.

[WaxProlix]

"Everyone passed the test" is generally understood, in the context of a classroom, to mean "the members of the salient set [students in class] passed the test".

Saying "marketing is evil" in the context of a comment thread about GA stripping, replying to someone defending a specific brand of tracking-marketing, can reasonably be taken to refer to that variety of marketing: the contextually salient variety of marketing, which this submission and the current thread are about.

[nerfhammer]

this is the motte and bailey argument technique: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

[WaxProlix]

Interesting in this case that you could maybe apply it to both situations:

Motte 1: Marketing is valuable and helps people spread information. Bailey 1: Tracking your every move against your will is fine and also profitable.

Motte 2: Tracking my every move is unacceptable and evil. Bailey 2: All marketing - even writing a blog post or website copy about products or approaches to problem solving - is inherently evil.

I don't know which you were referring to, and I kind of like it this way.

[nailer]

'Everyone' in a classroom meaning 'everyone in the class' is reasonable.

'marketing is evil' meaning 'tracking based retargeting is evil' is not.

[WaxProlix]

You can feel that way if you want, but moving the goalposts when OP was talking about tracking tokens and cookies so that you can interpret their responder as being opposed to eg graphic design on webpages or post-conference conversations is dishonest in my mind. The kinds of 'marketing' you would try to defend are probably not the kinds of things they were calling evil.

[nailer]

You can feel that interpreting

> 'marketing is evil'

as

> 'marketing, in general, is evil'

is "moving the goalposts".

But I'd suggest you're putting a spin of your own on things here.

[jklinger410]

>not likely to be very interested in utm tracking like that discussed in this thread.

I am a digital advertiser that works direct with large and small clients. I use UTMs on every ad campaign I run.

Everything we do to hurt these big companies in online advertising also hurts the small ones. They all use the same technologies.

[AlexandrB]

This is so disingenuous. It’s like comparing an organic family farm to stuff like industrial hog production[1]. At some point a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind. For example - no farming coop in the world employs psychologists to help them better manipulate human weaknesses[2].

[1] https://boingboing.net/2007/01/20/big-factory-pig-farm.html

[2] http://www.psychologist-license.com/articles/marketing-psych...

[mediocrejoker]

The comment you're replying to was, in turn, replying to a comment with the blanket statement that all marketing is evil, with no further explanation. Why do you say it's disingenuous?

[systoll]

You added 'all' — he didn't say that. It was a generalisation, but not a universal statement.

And there was further explanation.

[throwaway2048]

Many marketing people want to pretend the vast majority of ads are pure statements of factual information like that, when the vast majority of ads are about targeted surveylance, manipulation, factual misrepresentation, omission, or just outright lying and trying to make people feel inadequate so they buy some crap, especially online.