[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.

[smileysteve]

Ads definitely aim for upselling existing customers.

in the case of coke, they want to sell you coke more often, and when you start becoming health conscious, they want you to consider vitamin water. if you have seen their expensive super bowl or Christmas commercials, they don't focus on the product, its features, or it filling your needs. coke sells its image to validate the refreshing feeling you know.

[aluhut]

There are ads that do this. Car commercials mostly. Especially those who don't have any message at all, showing just the product in some surreal environment for example.

But you can't really say that the superbowl commercial was something to support excising customers. I'm sure it scared away a hell lot of customers who were used to the product as far as they can remember. They didn't have to do that. They could have gone for funny or sexy. Everybody likes funny or sexy. This was a attention hammer. Liberals praise CC for being brave. How many switched over because of it? I mean, we are talking about the most expensively aired commercial in US (world?) TV. You don't really believe Coca Cola would invest that much money on that spot only (or mainly) to aim for existing customers (by even scaring a part of them away)?

I have seen all superbowl commercials. I can't remember one that would aim only for existing customers like the ones I've described above.

I also said above that the product or it's quality lost relevance already. Which makes the whole concept of advertising even worse (I said this because the topic was usability of advertisement). Vitamin water, even if it comes from the same company is a different product. You can drink Coca Cola once a week even if you are health conscious just to "reward" yourself but drink the rest of the week a product made by a different company because the whole health-claim of that company seems more true to you. Thats why Coca Cola fights a new fight for NEW customers with a new product.

Sure Coke sells an image. Or better: they jump on an image that is in at the moment. Cokes image isn't the same today as it was 10 years ago. You don't do that if you aim for existing customers because they started buying the product when the image was different. The new image is mainly for new people. If you do this but your competitor don't, you of course keep existing customers but you also gain new customers from your competitors that did not jump on the bandwagon.

Coca Cola did a risky thing here hoping they get more new customers then they lose by the message.