[nj5rq]

> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.

Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

[richardreeze]

It's as simple as "if ads didn't work, YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al wouldn't exist"

[drdaeman]

If ads would have actually worked as preached by the industry, ad blockers wouldn't exist. ;)

But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.

What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.

Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.

Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

[nj5rq]

> I (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.

I agree with that, but precisely because of how effective they are on manipulating people into consuming and wasting their time.

[satvikpendem]

Have you actually ran any Google or Facebook ads? I have, for my target market, and I made more money in return than I spent on ads, so obviously it works, by definition of these companies existing, independent of whatever the companies say themselves.

[drdaeman]

Of course it does. Advertisements, as a general concept, have an effect of driving customers to sales (simply because it creates awareness about the product, when there was none) - I'm not arguing it doesn't.

But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.

I think, I need to think it more through.

[autoexec]

> Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

My guess is that those people are the most susceptible to their influence. Even when you know the tricks being employed to manipulate you, it doesn't always make the manipulation less effective. It's like an optical illusion where you know what you're seeing is wrong, but you still can't stop seeing it.

It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.

Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.

[shiroiushi]

>Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising

This isn't true. Some ads really are about education and product awareness. If a new product comes to the market, how is anyone going to find out about it if there's zero advertising? Word-of-mouth can be useful at times, but that only works when someone's already bought and tried the thing, so how did they find out about it?

But yes, for many, many products and services (like Coca-Cola), everyone who hasn't been living under a rock already knows about it, so that advertising isn't strictly necessary. The point of Coca-Cola ads isn't to make you aware of it, it's to keep it in your brain, and to establish some kind of emotional connection in your brain when you hear or see Coca-Cola, to make you more likely to buy it when you have a choice. Basically, that type of advertising could accurately be called "brainwashing", or "psychological conditioning".

I think it's entire reasonable to be disgusted by the latter form of advertising, while not being completely opposed to the former. An ad that says "hey look! We just invented this handy new gadget that'll make it much easier to fix your bicycle when it breaks on a long ride! Click here to see how it works." isn't so objectionable to me, unlike most other ads.

The problem, however, is most ads are total BS, and there's really no practical way to filter out only the ones that 1) aren't brainwashing, 2) aren't for crap I don't need and would never need or want, 3) aren't for something that's really a scam, and 4) aren't plainly obnoxious and irritating, so I have to resort to using ad-blockers, which block all ads.

I really kinda miss the old Google search, where they used to put some small, text-only ads on the side, that were directly related to whatever you were searching for. Those were actually useful: search for "fix bike chain" and you might see an ad for a tool to fix bike chains, for instance. Sometimes you'd find something new and useful that way. And if you didn't, it was just some easily-ignored additional text on the side, not flashing colors, videos, pop-ups, or other attention-stealing BS.