Advertising may make people miserable, but it still has its uses

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/06/06/advertising-may-make-people-miserable-but-it-still-has-its-uses

by jkuria • 7 years ago

77 119 7 years ago

economist.com

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

Gotta love that "but" after "make people miserable"

Fnoord• 7 years ago

You could say the same about blocking ads. It makes some people miserable.

The premise of the article:

Ads and other forms of marketing ostensibly serve a straightforward economic role. Firms selling goods and services need to tell consumers about the availability and desirability of their wares, and spend on advertising to do so. By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.

(Had to laugh hard at the last sentence.)

Good products don't have to use advertising. Their existence alone, plus worth of mouth (e.g. reviews) assures customers become aware of good deals. Take good Black Friday deals, for example. There's a lot of BS and fake deals around, but if you search well enough there are some true gems hidden within.

Also, to me, advertising always meant some kind of deal. Merely mentioning the existence of a product doesn't cut it. It has to be a real deal where I'm saving money on the conventional price. Of course, marketeers hacked their way around that by making the discount price higher and the normal/non-discount price higher (above the actual real normal price). Old trick which is also heavily in use during Black Friday.

The conundrum is the more these tricks are used on consumers they will figure them out (eventually) and quit falling for them. So false advertising kills off the advertising market. My argument is that exposure to [such] false advertising killed the advertising market for me, and being the reason why I use adblockers 24/7.

Some firms target impressionable children

Which is AFAIK illegal in NL, as it should be. However targeting the parents of children is legal, and... annoying.

buboard• 7 years ago

Dentists make people miserable, but they still have their uses

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

Pain and misery are not the same.

anoncake14• 7 years ago

That's why people voluntarily visit dentists. They don't voluntarily view ads.

neonate2• 7 years ago

That's the Economist's headline humor.

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

Paywalled, so I don't know how the rest of the article reads, but

By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.

Vile bullshit. There can be no trust in modern advertisement. The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales. They communicate nothing concrete about features, performance, desirability, or anything of the like, and do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions. The entire industry is built on bullshit, and I wonder if the pervasiveness of fundamentally dishonest, so called indirect marketing has eroded the average person's ability to rationally evaluate information in media.

But everything I read about the advertisement industry, - data harvesting, shady marketing tactics, popups and dark UI design, exaggeration of effectiveness to corporate clients - consistently serves to reinforce the notion that the entire industry, perhaps in principle, is rotten to the core. I immediately refuse any interest from adtech recruitment because I feel like I'd be directly harming society in building such technology.

In a perfect world, sure, your product is sufficiently differentiated, you can communicate your advantages clearly and, most importantly, the people viewing your ads are willing to give you enough time and attention to rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey. But our reality is one where a thirty second spot of anthropomorhic squirrels causing an accident is supposed to convince you to buy insurance for the car you're expected to lust over because some handsome man with a hotter wife and more money than you on TV got one for Christmas.

goatherders• 7 years ago

I disagree with this cynical take. A Dell computer ad may exist to drive sales but that isnt exclusive to informing people of features and benefits of the machine. The purpose of a good ad should be to inform the viewer/listener of how what and why the product offers. Many do exactly that.

maxdamantus8• 7 years ago

If noone advertised their computers, people would still look into the various brands of computers as long as there is a natural demand for them. If you need a computer, you can go to a website or a physical store and have the ability to relatively fairly compare the different brands. Advertising doesn't really help with this.

The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year.

Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?

cm20124• 7 years ago

You know how good scientists try to falsify their hypotheses?

Go to the FB ads library and look up ads from some random brands and start-ups you've heard of. They're all here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

Count what % are basically honest, neutral, or just dishonest. The ratio may surprise you.

JudgeWapner• 7 years ago

Just like how fast food burger adds are 'honest' even though somehow, every damn time, the burger - excuse me, "sandwich" - they hand me in the restaurant never looks like the one in the ad?

shaki-dora• 7 years ago

The overwhelming majority of modern ads serve a singular purpose: to drive sales.

You don't say!

absolutely nothing to improve the quality of purchasing decisions.

They do communicate the existence of competing products, and are basically the only way to compete with an entrenched market leader. In this sense, advertising is rather important to keep markets fluid and allow better products to flourish.

rationally consider the direct marketing points you convey

For someone considering themselves hyper-rational, you comment shows a surprising amount of negative emotions.

It's also rather irrationally to believe one of the largest industries is consistently wrong by not following your preferred format of notarised feature comparison spreadsheets.

Because marketing is really full of spreadsheets: those showing that people do sometimes have emotions, and that appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.

fromthestart2• 7 years ago

It's also rather irrationally to believe one of the largest industries is consistently wrong by not following your preferred format of notarised feature comparison spreadsheets.

This isn't about my preferences. This is about the format of the average modern commercial, which is tantamount to clickbait.

appealing to them is good business and, frankly, not quite the end of the world.

The industry is a fundamental conflict of interest, designed to convince people in most cases to buy things that they may not need, with the deceptive insinuation that the ad is operating in the interest of the customer, while frequently relying on totally unrelated emotional cues to influence decisions.

For someone considering themselves hyper-rational

I'm not trying to make this about myself. However, a person who makes rational decisions can still experience and express emotions. The underhandedness of the advertisement business relies on the fact that the goal of many ads is to influence seemingly rational decisions by indirectly influencing emotions. It is an exercise in deceptiveness and manipulation, to bias people without their awareness.

Does this apply to all ads? Certainly not. But enough of the bunch is spoiled such that the whole game puts a bad taste in my mouth. And on top of all this, they're EVERYWHERE. Even if I don't consume media, simply by existing in society I'm bombarded by billboards, window TVs, and cable that I'm already paying for comes loaded with almost as much ad time as the programs themselves!

It's a race to the bottom through and through.

manigandham• 7 years ago

Ironically, you can't read this article because they chose to not use ads to monetize.

ducttape12• 7 years ago

If I'm in the market for a product, if a company makes a decent product chances are I'll find out about it by reading reviews, etc. I don't need ads for that.

Ads exist to make me spend money that I wouldn't otherwise spend.

mankyd• 7 years ago

This isn't a complete picture. If you are in the need for a product, you will be more comfortable with a product if it feels familiar. This is true whether that familiarity comes from having used it before, because you've seen others use it before, _or_ if you've simply seen the name a lot before.

Brand recognition has impact.

You might still go read reviews of the product first, but they still need you to seek it out to do that. That's where advertising comes in.

delish• 7 years ago

One of the standard seemingly-counterintuitive examples of uses of advertising is car ads. Very few people see TV ads for a Mercedes and walk into a dealership and buy one. So why does Mercedes-Benz run TV ads? The standard explanation is, MB's ads are for the end of the month, when you see (1) your car payment and (2) Toyota's ads claiming a car payment 1/3 what you're paying.

So the ads are intended to help you avoid post-purchase guilt. Hence their emotional appeal: you're a certain kind of person etc. That keeps you buying MBs on a scale of decades, rather than jump ship to a lower prestige, lower cost brand.

The larger point is there are many reasons to run ads, not just to attract leads.

SerLava4• 7 years ago

Wow that explanation of luxury car ads kinda blew my mind there. I'm going to be looking for that pattern everywhere now.

chii• 7 years ago

This is what i would call 'branding'. It's the same as apple running those "stylistic" ipod and iphone ads - full of happy dancing people using their product.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Source / citation?

riku_iki• 7 years ago

and many of those reviews will be paid, just another form of advertising, even more fraudant in my opinion.

nickjj3• 7 years ago

I don't personally run paid ads for my video courses but whenever I ask people what almost prevented them from signing up, a huge portion of the answers say they didn't know the course existed.

Reviews aren't enough for discover-ability, but they are awesome once you know the product exists.

I'm not convinced paid ads are the right move for me, but I do think general advertising (having someone talk about a product or service on a site that isn't yours) is absolutely essential.

esoterica2• 7 years ago

But how did the product get reviewed in the first place? Publications don’t review every single long tail product that gets made, only the ones that generate enough buzz and attention to get noticed. And the point of an ad is to generate that publicity in the first place.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

I actually like Hulu ads, primarily from knowing when it will end. 60 or 90 seconds of ads. It makes it so much more tolerable and I am glad that I find out about things. I'm not sure how much targeting they do, but I expect them too and it feels like great customer attentiveness. Seeing an ad with the same actor as the show I'm currently watching, and its like yes I did want to know about that.

bulditand3• 7 years ago

That's great and I'm glad you find joy in this. Me, I spent nights going to a show named "Nuit des Publivores" and loved it.

But like every pleasure in life, it needs to be consensual.

neonate2• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/U69lk

cm20124• 7 years ago

I post all the time in HN ad threads that most companies grow very slowly if at all from word of mouth, and need to use ads to grow (beyond a local level).

Say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.

Here's a real life example:

I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.

Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.

Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

nickjj3• 7 years ago

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

This is especially interesting in the world of tech.

Because sites like digitalocean post a massive amount of really in depth tutorials. Much more than any single person can churn out. So as a tech person interested in even giving away free tech info, it's a really uphill SEO battle. You can't compete with 65,000+ articles (based on Googling for this: site:digitalocean.com/community).

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

If you are giving your tech info away you are not competing with anybody.

icebraining3• 7 years ago

Ok, let's assume that's true: a large number of new companies like makers of apps for plumbers couldn't scale as fast if not for ads. Besides that being sad for the founders of such company, why is that a problem?

SerLava4• 7 years ago

Imagine that almost everything made by a new company never existed. That would be a problem. Groups of people who make things that only benefit themselves generally aren't called businesses.

The poster above explained that the new product might, say, increase the productivity of plumbers by 50%, and all other apps on the market are far worse.

analog312• 7 years ago

5) Advertising? People are flooded with ads, most of which are vile and dishonest, and have installed technology to block them.

cm20124• 7 years ago

Except it provably works, if you read my post.

petra• 7 years ago

Innovative businesses are a small part of the market.

Most(90%+) of businesses sell commodities, or near-commodities, or products that could be compared by a spec.

Marketplaces and parametric search seem like a fair way for them to get customers.

taffer3• 7 years ago

Most(90%+) of businesses sell commodities, or near-commodities, or products that could be compared by a spec.

Do you have a source for this number you can link to?

Barrin92• 7 years ago

I'm not sure all these needs require advertisement in the socially detrimental sense that the article talks about. If we simply want information about services to go to users we have discovery platforms for plumbers were people can search and find them, see them rated by customers and evaluated in an objective fashion and so on.

Advertisements don't fill the niche any more of informing people in factual manner about products. The modern advertisement is the 'axe effect' or instagram influencing, which is purely emotional, tying personal success or celebrity culture to products in an attempt to manipulate audiences. Creating 'stories' about products that personalise them or as the article points out, signal social status and class segregation.

cm20124• 7 years ago

Probably 5% of ad spend is for axe effect type stuff. I am on mobile but you can google industry ad breakdown.

anoncake14• 7 years ago

If plumbers don't want to hear about your damn app, leave them alone instead of spamming them.

You are not entitled to customers. The only valid reason for a business to exist, including yours, is to produce things people want. If no one wants your product, your business should not grow. Useless businesses not growing is a good thing.

Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

I know that advertising is useful to companies that do it. But I don't care. What matters are not the individual interests of your company but the collective interests of society as a whole.

andrenth6• 7 years ago

How do you know what are the collective interests of society? If you don’t know, who does?

mindcrime6• 7 years ago

I'm not the biggest fan of advertising in the world, and I make a distinction between "levels of annoyingness" and "levels of usefulness" of ads. But even at their worst, I have a pretty hard time justifying the phrase "makes people miserable" in regards to ads. Unless this article is talking about a kind of ad that I've never encountered. Blipverts[1] maybe?

For my money, if I could just get rid of any in-browser ad that starts playing audio without prompting, I'd be mostly OK with the state of ads. Note that, in this context, I'm not including any concerns about ad tracking networks, etc. I'm just talking about the actual ads themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)

icebraining3• 7 years ago

Ads are still often:

- attention-stealing (not just sound, but animation, flashing, etc)

- heavy (many of us can only afford mobile plans with small caps)

- misleading (e.g. fake download buttons near the real one)

- manipulative (using clickbait and divisive politics to get you to click)

- encourage censorship (since there's always the fear that advertisers will pull out if you show controversial stuff)

But personally, I could live with non-tracking web ads. Street ads are worse, in my opinion.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

Pretty much all beauty products as well as fashion and luxury product advertising's first order of battle is to make the recipient feel miserable, and to position the goods advertised as the solution for that misery.

mindcrime6• 7 years ago

Maybe. I'm probably not the target market for most of that stuff, but that statement doesn't exactly jibe with my subjective experience. It seems to me that an ad can suggest that you could be (better looking | more fashionable | more luxurious | richer | getting laid more | whatever) without necessarily needing to make one miserable as a condition. All of those things are relative, and pretty much anybody can see an ad and think "wearing that suit would make me more appealing to women" or "wearing that lipstick would make me more appealing to guys" or whatever, without first having to believe "OMG, I am the worst of the worst, I look deplorable, blah, blah".

the_pwner224• 7 years ago

Back when I started reading HN I saw a comment mentioning that that person always muted TV ads. I started requesting my family members to mute TV ads, and once you start doing it, hearing the occasional 'unblocked' TV ad in the background becomes extremely annoying. It is really no different from someone coming into your house and camping in your living room - their sound volume and jingles are intentionally meant to make you pay attention and distract you.

mindcrime6• 7 years ago

Sure, no argument there. But to me, there is a huge gap between "annoying" and "makes people miserable". Miserable, to me, is the excruciating pain I had for a week after shoulder surgery. Being annoyed by a jingle is barely on the same spectrum in my book.

JulianMorrison3• 7 years ago

Advertising for me measures on 3 orthogonal axes

1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's better, or how it's suited to a particular niche.

2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.

3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever.

Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is kind of harmless but much overdone.

Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.

SquishyPanda23• 7 years ago

Axis 1 is useful, but only if it's honest.

Advertisers are almost never incentivized to be honest with that information. This seems to be intrinsic.

Third-party sources either seem to rapidly grow dishonest (e.g. Amazon reviews) or to be very limited (e.g. Consumer Reports). This doesn't seem to be intrinsic (e.g. Amazon could crack down on fake reviews).

As a result consumers are assaulted with ads and marketing and there is no indication it helps consumers make better choices.

Advetising essentially just draws consumer attention to the products that shout the loudest, not to the best products.

craftinator• 7 years ago

I think the original comment meant intrinsic in that, because advertising has the greatest value when it advertises a better product than other categorically similar products, advertisers converge toward advertising a better product than they actually sell. If your product has the same qualities as a number of other products, the only way to increase value is to make your product seem better than it is. Also, this is not a new thing by any stretch; humans have been doing this since Ogg sold his "Magic Fire-God Kit" (1 piece wood, 1 piece flint, 1 piece rock) as making better fire than Uhg's "Fire Kit", consisting of the exact same stuff. Seems intrinsic to human nature. I think this is why innovators are more important than advertisers.

maxdamantus8• 7 years ago

My feeling is that 3) is the main result of advertising. The main point seems to be to drive a demand for something, not to inform people about market differentiation.

Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see:

* 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store

* a window cleaning product

* KFC ad

* "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store

* an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains

* "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store

* Powerade ad

I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?

esoterica2• 7 years ago

Why do “we” all have to work less? If you want to work less you can, you don’t need the whole world to join you to get started. If you’re a developer, the field pays well enough that you could make a subsistence level wage by doing part time contract work. So why haven’t you done it yet?

mindcrime6• 7 years ago

I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade,

I may be in the minority here, but I am extremely skeptical of suggestions regarding the ability of ads to truly compel one to desire something they really don't want.

Anecdotally speaking, I've seen hundreds or thousands of commercials for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and the like. And I watch a lot of football at sports bars, where I have plenty of opportunities to drink that stuff. Heck, they even have hot girls in skimpy outfits come in to the bar and give away random freebies, run silly contests, blah, blah, etc., to advertise those brands. And yet, while I am a (light) drinker, I have never felt any desire whatsoever to drink Coors, Budweiser, Miller, etc. When I do drink, it's almost always either a Sam Adams product, or a microbrew / craft beer.

Yeah, n=1 and all that, but if advertising were as powerful as some people make it out to be, surely I'd be drinking at least a little Coors or Miller by now.

randomsearch2• 7 years ago

I see advertising as a bug in capitalism. One of many critical flaws.

You’re not creating wealth, but you can manipulate people into believing you are by making them want what you make.

rocqua• 7 years ago

Capitalism requires informed customers. Without that, there is no sense in competing on quality. Advertising (in the broadest sense) is essentially the only way for a new player with a superior product to get the word out.

That is far from the only way advertising is used, but it is a rather important role.

jdietrich• 7 years ago

There's a fourth, crucially important axis - costly signalling. Spending a ton of money on mass advertising sends a clear and impossible-to-fake message that your company is in it for the long haul.

Sony could exclusively buy targeted ads on social media and the metrics would probably say it's a good idea, but their brand would be fundamentally less trustworthy if they stopped sponsoring soccer teams and buying prime-time commercials. That's why you intuitively trust their TVs more than a random brand you've never heard of, even if you don't consciously realise it; Sony have invested a lot more in establishing their brand, so they have a lot more to lose by tarnishing it. It's no guarantee that their TVs are the best, but it's a fairly strong indication that they won't be absolute crap and that the warranty might actually mean something.

Prior to the media age, bank branches were invariably grand and expensive buildings. On one level, that's just a waste of money; on a more important level, it's a costly signal of permanence. Would you deposit your life savings with a bank that operated out of a trailer?

barrkel• 7 years ago

If you've been around on the planet for a while, you'll notice that the signal isn't reliable. Big names go bankrupt with regularity - especially banks.

What saves the day is size, not branding: if the political cost of failure is too high, they get bailed out. Not just banks, but car manufacturers, factories, etc.

m463• 7 years ago

people always miss the hidden stuff:

- identification - identifying you. tracking your movements, learning your habits, your demographics, age sex race religion income address, etc

- discrimination - opting you out of advertisements that are unprofitable.

If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education>, you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit and then make the minimum payment for the rest of your life. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, charge it to the limit, make a few payments, then default. If you're an <ethnic> <sex> with <education> you will get a credit card, pay it off in full every month and not be very profitable to the cc company.

Unless you're the first type, you may rarely see a credit card offer.

Now think about this in other ways keeping in mind that the people who buy some expensive items are sometimes the least able to afford them.

This basically subjugates a lot of people.

quicklime• 7 years ago

What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain (3)?

To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only care about cost cutting.

Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind, or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?

Broken_Hippo• 7 years ago

2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.

3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever.

Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so.

But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.

JulianMorrison3• 7 years ago

I think that is where parsing them out on an axial graph helps. A brand can be a pure brand - a classical example is the many cartoon/cutesy characters that are used in Japan to represent everything from supermarkets to local government. A brand can also be polluted with axis-3 psychological manipulation[1], implied claims that aren't true, false differentiation, and so forth. You can separate at least in abstract as a thought experiment, how much it is of each.

[1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.

gopiandcode• 7 years ago

I believe the best way to separate 1 from 2 and 3 is to try and push for the removal of the artistic components of Advertising.

For example, to allow for creative expression, concepts such as puffery (unfounded claims) are explicitly allowed in adverts, and while it is true that they facilitate this kind of art, they are also prone to abuse when a profit motive is involved.

tim333• 7 years ago

The trouble with banning 3 is how are you going to do it in practice? I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that?

Maybe a better approach would be to rate ads as good or bad on a scale like yours and then people could chose to use selective ad blockers?

amelius3• 7 years ago

I mean take Coke ads which show happy healthy people having fun while the reality is similar drinks are a major cause of obesity and tooth decay. But how do you ban that?

Simple: ban the appearance of people in ads.

It is less drastic than you might think. In many countries, naked people are not allowed in public ads. So it is only a small step to ban people altogether.

egoisticalgoat• 7 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a while, what would a world look like if we only had about purely informational ads without any connection to companies? Like, purely informing you that a product exists and is helpful, without ever mentioning any particular brand?

goodmachine• 7 years ago

Everyone hates advertising, until they have something to advertise.

xtracerx• 7 years ago

Everywhere I have ever worked has relied on advertising for its existence, especially the ones that aren't household names. I understand how annoying some ads can be but, in general, the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs.

bulditand3• 7 years ago

the concept of advertising is essential to all of us having jobs

Citation needed.

anoncake14• 7 years ago

Doing work that ultimately neither makes anyone happier or healthier nor furthers progress in any other way is essential to all of us having (full-time) jobs. So you aren't wrong.

anoncake14• 7 years ago

Everyone hates murder until they have someone to silence.

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

Direct link to the research that the Economist article is talking about: https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis... Of note, is they make not firm conclusions about _why_ advertising makes people less happy in a society, only that it does, and that this is true even when controlling for economic growth and other normally understood factors that influence this.

In fact, for a given country, looking at the growth in ad spending in one year, is apparently a good way to predict if people will be more or less happy a few years from now.

It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds up over time.

GlennS• 7 years ago

There's been talk of a "banker's oath", because behaviour that is a little bit slimy or reckless - but not criminally so, nor perhaps even unambiguously unethical - can hurt a lot of people when your job involves looking after lots of money.

I wonder if people working in marketing, advertising and journalism should have to swear an oath in which they promise not to manipulate or deceive people.

Lying or deliberately misleading is obviously not criminal in general, but perhaps it should be punishable in certain professional settings?

I appreciate that this is very delicate, and needs a bit more thought on how to avoid it becoming a potential tool of government or corporate oppression.

Of course, this is pie in the sky. Most people in advertising and marketing seem to believe that what they are doing is fine.

sologoub• 7 years ago

The research into emotional well-being this article cites interestingly appears to be in favor of highly targeted advertising, as a means of showing only highly relevant offers and not making one feel inadequate by showing offers way out of the price range.

That said, I don’t know if such a system, if it was possible to be 100% accurate, would also have unintended consequences of denying people that are not as well off some important deals, such as a lower APR, because they are less profitable overall.

Still, this is an interesting concept to ponder - if advertising was as relevant as possible and goods attainable without undue stress, people would likely feel better about themselves.

Advertising may make people miserable, but it still has its uses

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