[yunyu]

Advertising enables innovation-producing firms to drive awareness of their services in a cost effective manner, and for less informed consumers to understand what is available on the market. Your typical physician might not be fully caught up on what is the state of the art in arthritis treatments, but advertising enables this to happen.

[blargey]

Advertising as a source of consumer information is a market for lemons in and of itself. Everyone is free to claim innovation and deliver trash, and internet brands are a dime a dozen. Even just keeping out overt fraud/scams or propaganda campaigns is apparently a losing battle for platforms.

Reviewers/Influencers/interest-publications are often just a half-step above banner ads, but at least has more incentives than just "loudly capture attention" and "publish anything that pays the algorithmic sticker price".

[ben_w]

> in a cost effective manner

Facebook is currently showing me these ads:

Lady's earrings (see my name), Pixel 10 (I'm theoretically an iPhone developer), cat food (I don't own any pet let alone a cat), special offers from a supermarket I would have been shopping at anyway even if they had not told me about the offers, a sponsored government message because apparently the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit don't have a better method of contacting German residents than by buying ads from a US social network (I have previously seen such from the British government telling me that some breed of dog was now banned even though I don't own a dog and also live in Germany)…

… but none of that's what's importantly wrong.

Cost effective? It's an auction, each ad in isolation may be fair (but there's reason even then to be suspicious), but in aggregate the ad sector is an all-pay auction.

There's a massive over-supply of solutions because all the startups chase the same ideas at about the same times, and the only one of them to get big is the one that pays enough to the gatekeepers of eyeballs to win the all-pay auction bidding for mindshare.

If everyone stopped advertising, the knowledge of solutions would still diffuse, the winner would be so by word of mouth. The difference is that the 1200 "trusted partners" on all the GDPR popups wouldn't collect rent on advising people on the best strategy for selling their user's privacy and battery life and mobile data allowance for money that those users never get to see, and the people buying those eyeballs wouldn't be wasting their VC runway making something other than the product.

[yunyu]

The fact that your Facebook ads are worse is probably because you're in the EU. I'm in the US, and I am getting fairly relevant ads for Broadway shows, data infrastructure products, discounted hotel packages, and climbing gym subscriptions - things that I am actually considering purchasing. And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search).

Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.

[ben_w]

> And we haven't even brought up intent-based ads (Google search).

OK, those also suck, for different reasons.

If I search for a thing, a search engine's entire job is to show me about that thing. That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse. It's worse when the ad is not correct for obvious reasons, but it's also worse when the ad is also the best thing to show me, because in that condition it was already at the top and shouldn't have needed to pay to get there.

> Word of mouth benefits incumbents.

Ads generally (but not always) benefit whoever is richest, which is usually (but not always) the incumbent. This is why Coca Cola spends so much money on ads, even when those ads say nothing about the product itself e.g. the current GenAI Christmas ad.

> Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.

How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it?

The Google search engine itself, I heard about from word of mouth back in the 90s when all of us were using AltaVista, which I also only knew about from word of mouth. Firefox, word of mouth. LiveJournal and then Dreamwidth, word of mouth. Facebook, word of mouth. Skype, Telegram, AeroPress, Huel, these are all things I learned about from word of mouth.

If I understand correctly, "word of mouth" is also known in marketing-speak as "going viral".

[yunyu]

You are talking about consumer marketing. I am talking about B2B marketing for prescription medications, enterprise SaaS, etc. These are separate markets and the analogies don't quite hold here - the scam problem etc is practically nonexistent for high-LTV goods with high bid costs, and newcomers are typically well funded enough to periodically outbid incumbents (or implement better targeting). The big-ticket B2B products that one hears of from word-of-mouth are usually the worse ones, since there is rarely any "going viral" to speak of.

> That the engine's website puts a different thing that whatever the search algorithm thought was the best thing at the top because an advertiser paid for it to be so, is strictly worse.

This is not clearly worse than the result being selected by the whims of some arbitrary Google engineer, or being easily gamed by SEO blogspam bots. At least the advertiser stands to lose something if they bid incorrectly.

>How long had ChatGPT been out before OpenAI's first ad for it?

Just because some products were able to grow organically doesn't imply that paid marketing never benefits startups. This is a false equivalence.

I also find it funny that the vast majority of your example products (everything except Huel or Aeropress?) make a lot of money from advertising. Maybe consider why they still exist.

[wat10000]

The only way this should happen is if it’s a fake arthritis treatment meant to detect doctors who learn about treatments from advertising instead of legitimate sources, so they can be prevented from practicing medicine.

[yunyu]

What are legitimate sources in your definition? Should physicians be expected to spend all their free time reading every single study in every medical journal or conference, even for niche areas that they don't usually encounter? Should the average diabetic/arthritic patient need to obsessively pore over academic reports to stay informed about their condition? Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences? This is an extremely ill informed line of reasoning.

[michaelt]

Doctors should learn about new drugs the traditional way - physically attractive drug company reps taking them out for expensive dinners and gifting them branded golf equipment.

[yunyu]

My favorite form of definitely-not-advertising :)

[wat10000]

I don’t know what counts as legitimate sources. I’ll let the professionals figure that one out.

> Should advertisers be banned from sponsoring journals or conferences?

It baffles me that you apparently think this is some kind of zinger. Yes!

[ghaff]

Journals less commonly but pretty much every conference out there of any scope is sponsored by companies. In fact, absent sponsors, very few conferences would exist other than small volunteer-run ones.

[wat10000]

If attendees aren’t willing to pay the full cost then maybe the conference isn’t providing enough value and we’re better off without it.

[ghaff]

People (and their companies in many cases) have limited budgets. I do pay out of my pocket for some conferences, and conference organizers and (previously) employers in other cases. You're probably not going to convince me that I'm better off sitting at a desk than getting out and collaborating with people at an event from time to time. For that matter, why should companies sponsor open source projects? If they're that valuable, individuals should just pay for them I guess.

[yunyu]

Got it. So you want attention to be controlled by the whims of academic/government/publishing bureaucrats or black-box ranking algorithms who are the arbitrators of legitimacy. I can't say I agree with that opinion, but different strokes for different folks.

[wat10000]

I’m very confused. Why would “black-box ranking algorithms” be on the no advertising side?

Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell. I fail to see how advertising contributes to this in any way. Banning advertising is the opposite of controlling attention.

I’d like a total ban on all advertising, but I at least see some merits in the discovery argument for consumer goods even if I don’t agree with it. But saying advertisement is necessary so doctors can find out about new treatments? I hope this is just subtle satire, because, what?

[yunyu]

> Medicine has a pretty good system for getting knowledge out to doctors as far as I can tell.

Yes, it does - it’s called advertising. In the US, the average promotional spend per physician exceeds $20k/yr. As a result, a lot more patients are able to quickly benefit from new medications like Dupixent or Ozempic as a result of wider awareness.

Suppose we banned Google ads and you are searching for a plumber. You are now entirely at the whims of whoever designs the ranking algorithm on Google/the Yellow Pages, who has nothing at stake here. Meanwhile, advertisers have to bid for your attention - making them at least somewhat aligned with your buying intent.

The same applies for doctors searching for state of the art diabetes treatments. It’s hard to say that relying on a fuzzy notion of “legitimacy” (or entrenched status-quo cliques) is a more fair system.