[aluhut]

Really? If I buy a car magazine I buy it for the content not for the ads. I assume that there is at least some useful information in the articles and if I want to buy a car, I also go rather for the content in the articles (tests, introductions of new cars with pros and cons) then for the ads which are all pro, hyping and probably also misleading.

How are the ads useful to you?

[stevesearer]

Ads are useful to my readers because they don't have unlimited time to research 10,000 types of side chairs for use in their office projects. If they see a chair they like in an ad, they'll meet with a furniture dealer to check it out, and then maybe use it in a future project.

How is that bad?

Many people like advertisements though - just pick up a September issue of Vogue and you'll see over 500 pages of a 900 page magazine filled with ads. And people go out of their way to buy it because they love the ads.

[aluhut]

But isn't it you job to have those pictures as part of your content? It's not like the ads have these 10000 types also. They also have only a few. Sometimes an ad even takes 2 pages for one item because they payed more. In the worst case the ad is misleading telling you: "this is the best chair for your because it has XY" and even if you don't belive it in the first place (which is self-evident already. You just don't belive what they tell you because everyone has the same claim of truth. Think about it: we got used to it!) but at the point where you make a decision, maybe far in the future, some subconcious connections that have been manipulated by the ad make you chose the product. This is actually what advertisers aim for. I see it as ethicaly wrong and I'm really sad that you can't see my point of difference between content and avertisment.

@vogue: My girfriend reads those magazines also. But she is always annoyed of the ads and the ad manipulated content. Some of these have at least ads you can take out and throw away, which she does also. She does not read the magazines because of the ads but because of the name of the magazine as well as the content (which is why she stoped reading the german Cosmopolitan for excample. The content became the ad in a way it became unreadable for her).

I've never ever heard somebody say: I buy/watch this product because I like the ads. I really doubt there is a relevant ammount of people who do this...

[theknown99]

When you go see a movie, do you enjoy seeing the trailers showing what other movies are coming out? Because I do. It's useful information.

Same with adverts in magazines. It shows me products and services I didn't know about, some of which will be useful to me.

[aluhut]

I don't know in which country you live but the trailers are only a minimal part of the pre-movie show. Most of it is again ads. Ads I don't enjoy at all. Nobody in the cinema does. Thats why people are still talking and not paying attention to what is on screen.

I don't even enjoy the trailers anymore because I've seen them all already on the Internet. I don't need them. Thats why I do something I can't do with a newspaper for example: I come into the room 30minutes later. When the actual product I've payed for is being aired.

This is a luxus I don't have with newspapers, on my company computer surfing the Internet, on the street,... My brain is being attacked by those unwanted information that has been tailored to hook onto certain mechanics within my unconscious mind I can't control. It manipulates me in a way I can't do anything about it.

And it is even worse: they also lie to me. I would never rely on this information because I know there is another player on the same market claiming the same things for their product. Why should I believe them? How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.

I also don't recall a single situation where an ad showed me a new product I've never heard of and was interested in. I just can't. Maybe I'm to informed but I doubt it. I asked my girlfriend. She's not even close to that nerdy as I am. She also never did that. You think that might be an coincidence?

What was your last product you did not hear about before and bought after seeing an ad?

[theknown99]

> What was your last product you did not hear about before and bought after seeing an ad?

Probably buy something each week that I saw previously advertised somewhere.

The last thing was probably some pig electric fencing that was advertised in a pig magazine last week.

You're an outlier. Perhaps you're just so determined to be against advertising you can't see the value in it. Without advertising, how would we know what products exist?

[aluhut]

So now it is me just because you seem to be a indifferent consumer with to much money?

I don't know anybody behaving like you described so I can't be an outlier. At least not where I live.

Too bad you decided against continuing the discussion based on the reasons I presented but I guess this is what keeps the show running. Good luck with that.

[theknown99]

You can still be an outlier in terms of the population as a whole. With all due respect, perhaps you're in a bubble.

Do you watch American Idol? Do you read celebrity gossip magazines? Do you play bingo or the lottery? Do you watch Fox news? Do you buy a newspaper? Do you click on ads?

Millions and millions of people do all of the above - they are not outliers.

On your previous point "How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.", we have this problem all the time outside of advertising with general information. Look at the average news story on Reddit. It's probably biased, probably a half truth, probably out of context, probably only half the facts of the story. Everything is biased and needs careful inspection before you can take it at face value.

However, there are obvious ways to do this. For example, I "trust" Lego. That means if they advertise a new awesome Batman Lego Arkham Asylum set, I'll know it's going to be quality, and awesome, and I'll buy it. If however it's some new unheard of company, I'd probably want to go examine it in a toy shop before I buy it.

I'm not trying to convince you that advertising is useful, I don't think you'll change your mind. But hopefully you'll see that you're not in a majority, and the majority think advertising is useful.

[aluhut]

@millions of people: I guess it is somehow connected to your example of you buying something advertised every week. As I said above: my gf reads gossip magazines or consumes crap information and even advertisement but it still doesn't mean that she consumes stuff every week just because she has seen it in some ad.

I see that in the US stuff is different and you are a lot of people that have been educated to consume for generations and it may stack up every day but that may be part of the problem don't you think? There must be a reason why you need that many credit cards...

@reddit:I have the CHOICE to believe the single one news source posted on reddit. Or I go to different ones and try to get a better picture. I may even completely ignore the news post or the whole subreddit.

I may even go to a completely different source altogether if I am really interested in a certain information and never ever see reddit.

I can not avoid advertisement.

@LEGO: Like with politics, your LEGO example shows that you are not the target group of LEGOs advertisement. You are like the voter whos parents and grandparents voted for the same party. You are completely irrelevant. It's clear that you'll buy. You are being really only informed on what to buy and when. You are the optimal client that just need to be fed. In this way, advertisement is really useful for you because you have to consume or you'll feel "hungry".

(Funny that you chose LEGO here because LEGO is a monopolist in his niche. How about Coca Cola and Pepsi?)

But as I said, this is not what ads aim for. They aim for new customers. People who did not buy the product yet. They need to be moved to buy your product and avoid the other one.

This is done particularly through methods that are unethical as I have shown above. They have nothing to do with quality of product or any other of those highly advertised properties that an optimal version of the object in question should have. It's more a stacking up of versions of those properties or even inventing completely new properties (product x makes you more sexy to gender y for example) leading to whole millions worth marketing strategies throughout every kind of media. If they work out, people will happily carry around the product and even display the logo creating even more advertisement. All this has nothing to do with the quality of the product. It may be a good one but it doesn't have to for the marketing to work.

Which leads us back to my initial post describing the whole advertisement industry as unethical up to annoying. And only because you or "people" got used to it, won't make it better. And if somebody who produces this illusion does not know what he really does, it becomes scary.