[marketerinland]

He can think of a couple of examples where marketing is manipulative, therefore all marketing is manipulative and causes people to make irrational decisions.

I sell tours to interesting places. I sell them using advertising. How is that a problem?

Let’s say someone decides to open a hair salon. How does that person promote their business if not through advertising? Or is the author wanting to ban people from opening businesses?

This is a classic case of placing a binary solution on a problem of degrees.

Some advertising has harmful practises, some advertising is too much in some places. This is uncontroversial.

Where the author has erred is in his simple black and white diagnosis.

[college_physics]

There is a hierarchy of methods to get the job done (to close the production/consumption loop with exchange of information), ranked in order from evil to sublime:

* Spy on and and profile people, (mostly unawares) and push ads by finding their "buttons"

* Create (mostly false) desires across segments of society and use every surface to influence

* Push (more or less) objective catalogs for people to select what they need

* Dont push anything, simply give people tools to pull the objective facts

I think the more psychologically healthy and environmentally sustainable societies will gradually gravitate away from the worst forms of advertising

[threatofrain]

I'd add to this list somewhere legal, correct, but utterly dishonest marketing language meant to confuse people. This includes hidden fees.

[tarotuser]

"Up to...."

"Save ___ or more!"

"Sale! X% off" (but is always 'on sale')

"Only X left! (Where x is random number from 1-9)

[marketerinland]

This is great. I really like this way of presenting the idea.

It’s happening more or less organically, what you’ve described. Users are spending more time in Messenger as opposed to the news feed.

Messenger groups are very hard to reach using ads.

[jehb]

You may be right in terms of where people are gravitating. But the irony in this is that Messenger only exists to keep people coming back to the ad platform. To me, the question is, how to we convince more people to take a position of rejecting of harmful ad platforms altogether? In this example, this might mean ditching Messenger for Signal.

[marketerinland]

At some point, we need to accept that HN is not the broader community. Most people don’t care about this problem; most don’t even see it as a problem. If they did, politicians would be talking about it all the time, and it would be a major issue, but it’s not. Sure, the privacy angle has gotten political traction and that’s fine. But it’s the privacy angle - not the overexposure to ads - that is connecting here. Just look at the penetration of ad blockers - it is not that high.

HN has a default assumption sometimes that people enjoy spending hours looking at specs and trying to figure things out. My experience is that human beings are weird, wonderful and different. Some people enjoy doing this. Most people do not.

But, in this case, the proof is in the pudding.

[pksebben]

they promote their business by being listed, and doing a good enough job / providing a good enough experience that people recommend them and come back.

I've never gone to a salon because of an ad. As a matter of fact, I avoid businesses that advertise at me. I have a list of the worst offenders - if I see too many ads from the same business in a period of time, it's obvious that they're spending not on the product but on promotion, and I enact a personal boycott. this policy has served me well, I don't own a lot of garbage.

[charcircuit]

>by being listed

Which is advertising

>that people recommend them

Which is advertising

>I've never gone to a salon because of an ad.

How have you found salons then? If they never did any advertising it would be impossible to find them.

[pksebben]

I can see we need to define terms, here. I apologize for any previous misunderstanding.

I use advertising in this context to mean: paid signage (physical, digital, mailed, etc) where the business pays a fee with the explicit and unary intent to drive business.

Listings, whether in a maps app or a phone book, do not qualify (most times - paying for preferential treatment in these places is a travesty deleterious to the integrity of the source - and why Google sucks now).

I've found salons by seeking them out on my own - in places they did not pay for preferential treatment - because that spend is either

a) detracting from spending that would make the business and service actually better

and/or

b) covering for a shortcoming in said business / service

If you're using the term advertising to mean other things, then we are speaking two different languages, or perhaps I'm simply not using the most correct term, for which I apologize.

hope that clears things up.

[marketerinland]

So in essence you’re willing to do a lot of work.

Your theories and methods do make some sense, but a business that spends a lot of money on advertising doesn’t need to be inadequate per se.

I’ve been Marketing Lead for 2 startups and have now started 3 companies.

4 of the 5 have grown through advertising.

In all 4 cases, the market wasn’t even aware that a solution like ours existed. (You can’t search for something you don’t know about.)

I doubt you would argue that advertising these products is some kind of systematic failure.

Second; let’s come back to the hair salon example. Let’s just say it’s brand new.

I doubt you’d argue that a brand new salon is making its product suffer by advertising. After all, it is suffering right now because it has zero customers.

And let’s take a third example - where word of mouth is unavailable. There are many products and services where word of mouth is simply not available as a marketing channel. This is common in B2B where the people picking a service just have no one in their networks who would be interested.

I doubt you’d begrudge them the need to advertise?

Yet a huge amount of marketing spend falls into these three buckets.

I should also add that your out of the way hair salon would never have been able to start without the assistance of advertising. You’d have to be insane to start a business in a low traffic area if you’re prohibited from promoting it.

[pksebben]

Yeah, you do hit on a point here. There are types of business that don't benefit from the same kind of locality that a brick-and-mortar business has, and in those cases, it may be really difficult to become a known entity in a space.

I'll admit to being a little overzealous in my frustration with the advertising industry - this is because of the absolute bombardment we experience (and something that, I would think, folks like yourself would prefer to combat - as it reduces the efficacy of good advertising). Here, I mean things like relentless coupon mailers, blanket campaigns like those run by fast food chains and insurance agencies (where it becomes impossible to avoid their brand). That kinda stuff.

As for word of mouth being unavailable - well, I think we might have different ideas about the proper 'velocity' of a product. I think we move too fast in general, and it opens up a whole slew of externalities. Not in every case, but in most.

I'm not against ALL advertising, but I think we've gotten to a point where controls need to be put in place. Not just to protect delicate, wilting flowers like myself from the cesspit of aggressive marketing that is the norm, but also to protect the integrity of 'good' advertising - it's gotten to the point where I use advertising as a metric of bad business, and accept that I'm losing the marginal benefit of being informed about stuff like you're talking about in the name of not spending an inordinate amount of time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's actually a lot less work to do the research I do, because it's focused, and it would be a ton of work to:

- buy a thing because it was advertised a bunch

- realize I made a bad bet and now own a piece of crap

- NOW do the research

- deal with getting rid of the junk

- buy that thing twice

edit: formatting

[marketerinland]

Thanks for these thoughts and the interaction :) I have enjoyed it a lot.

[beej71]

I find basically every business with Google Maps.

[marketerinland]

Before anyone says anything - signage is also advertising.

And if all advertising is prohibited; then it becomes quite literally 100% about who has the best geographic location which is the most naked form of capitalism I can imagine.

[tomjen3]

If you want to open a hair salon, get it registered in a list of businesses. I used Google maps to find nearby hairshops before, and I will probably do it again.

If I was in the market for crazy travels, I would look up the destinations or search a travel agency. As it happens I am not, and I don't want your stuff to take my attention.

All advertising is harmful. If your product is not so new and exciting that it won't be featured in the relevant press/youtube channel, then I will find it when and if I need it.

Advertisement is spam and spam needs to be dealt with.

[moffkalast]

I believe the author addresses your concerns:

> Of course, capitalists will strongly oppose all of this. They will argue that advertisements serve a clear and valuable purpose: they inform us about products, assist us in deciding what to buy, and thus increase market efficiency by promoting the sale of quality products and preventing inferior ones from capturing the market. This claim is, of course, nonsense.

[marketerinland]

He ‘attempts’ to address the concern by calling it nonsense, and then offers no viable alternative, while using a long series of poorly structured arguments.

As I’ve said above; he’s applying a black and white argument to a problem of degrees.

It’s just like Goldilocks - the food can be too hot, the food can be too cold, it can also be just right. The point of these children fables is to teach us basic principles of how the world works and to encourage us to use them to recognise our own mistakes.

[moffkalast]

True, he doesn't, but there are alternatives. Back when ads weren't a huge thing yet you had phonebook entries for companies or tradespeople providing a certain service, much like one can find on google maps today. If someone needed something they'd just call a number from the list. Though one might consider those entries ads as well I suppose.

I (personally) think the problem isn't so much in the ads themselves since they're obviously useful when you're actively looking for something, it's that they're shoved in your face at every opportunity possible. And sometimes even in some impossible ones too. Given how we're bombarded with it online it may make sense to curb how much it's allowed in public spaces in real life to give people at least some breathing room.

[marketerinland]

Great. So this is actually MY point that you’re now making.

The problem is a problem of degrees. How much is too much?

And most especially in terms of outdoor advertising, this is where the topic is especially pertinent - because someone can’t consent to this.

Whereas on the internet people can, and do.

[jerojero]

I think this is a very big systemic problem. And it's all in the way things are presented.

Think of smartphones and the rate at which "new" phones come out. The industry is based on a year by year renewal rate which is completely environmentally unsustainable and in order to sustain this speed they need big, bold advertisement. It's not at all about telling people how to differentiate between products and which products are better than the competition which in many cases it's their own smartphone from the previous year. I mean, how long has it been since we've really required our phones to be "2 times as fast as the year before", I had a pixel 5 and a pixel 7 and there's honestly very little difference whatsoever between them. But of course, there were a lot of bells and whistles for the new AI and so on that I really barely get any use out of.

Not only that, but a lot of modern improvements are software improvements that come packaged in "new" hardware. That's a ridiculous thing, I'm not saying software is not important but we don't need new hardware to benefit from it in most cases. But hey, it's much more lucrative to sell a brand new 1000 dollar phone with a 30% margin than try to get people to pay 300 dollars for new software. We value hardware but hardware is not progressing as substantially as software is, at least in areas that truly have an impact on our lives. So they need to make things a bit prettier and that's where advertisement comes in.

But is this a healthy cycle for us, is it environmentally sustainable to produce at this rate? I think the answer is no, and so you need to wonder: "then what should we do about it?". The power of advertisement that uses all the techniques of political propaganda that can get people to do insane things is a very powerful tool that we need to use more carefully, if at all.

You do ask a good question though, how do people find out about new businesses? And I believe the answer is much more systemically complex, it's something we ought to figure out and try and so on, but the first thing is to always acknowledge that there is a problem to begin with. We need a way for high quality products and new products to reach people, how do we do this in a way that's fair? Advertisement, by the way, is not really doing that. Because big companies have much more money to spend on advertisement than new companies they are much more capable of pushing inferior products to the market and still retain and gain customers based solely on their advertisement.

Imo, now a days, innovative products and high value proposition products pretty much sell themselves, as word of mouth has unparalleled power. But big companies are hijacking this process, sending free products to reviewers, flying people all over the world to "show their new innovations" and so on so that it looks like their products are the hottest stuff. Social media could be used to get genuine reviews out there but most of the time, it's flooded with paid (in one way or another) advertisement, in my experience, the best reviews out there tend to not be as visible as big names pushing big tech products. And in any case, innovation has become so expensive that it's pretty much only accessible by big tech so I think this issue of also touches on other topics like: how should we be doing innovation? This are nation-state level problems.