[xabotage]

I find myself generally unaffected by advertising and would normally fall into the "waste of money" camp, until I started hanging out more with non-engineering types. Seeing them made me realize A) advertising does work, at least for a critical mass of people, and B) advertising doesn't take away their ability to judge a product, no matter how well targeted it is. I've even found they have a superior ability to judge products and services than I do at times because they intuitively jive with the marketing in a way that my engineering brain doesn't (they can piece together subjective qualities about a product/service being marketed to them, and I just think "show me the specs and price." Both approaches have benefits and downsides).

[codexon]

Sometimes it isn't as nefarious as convincing people to buy a product they wouldn't normally buy, and simply just showing the right people that your product exists.

[roywiggins]

I bought precisely one item from a Facebook ad, because it was the exact kind of item I had been looking for and failed to find. I was really pleased.

But it happened one time. Now I get ads for chicken feet sellers on Alibaba.

[scarface74]

I find podcast advertising be very effective and targeted without being scammy. I would have never heard about Backblaze, Hover (instead of GoDaddy), Warby Parker, SquareSpace, Linode, Eero, or probably SquareTrade if it weren’t for podcast ads. I’ve used or recommended all of those services.

I also find Overcast (podcast player) ads very useful and have discovered a lot of great podcasts because of it. Marco Arment creates his own ad network so he could control both the content and he wouldn’t have any mystery meat binary blob advertising SDK.

[missedthecue]

I think a lot of people proudly claim that advertising doesn't work on them because an advertisement has never compelled them to go out and buy that product immediately. What they don't realize is that that isn't the goal of marketing at all. The goal is brand association. Charlie Munger famously says that 3/4 of all advertising works on pure Pavlovian conditioning.

[timClicks]

What's interesting in that statement to me is that you don't consider the spec sheet to be advertising. Therefore, you feel that you're "unaffected" by it.