Currently I think it is difficult to argue that advertising in its most visible forms have any serious benefit to people looking to obtain a service.
How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.
Everyone knows it was impossible to run a niche business before 2006 when Google thankfully shoved irrelevant advertisements in the way of everything we wanted to do!
There definitely wasn't prior art of entire industries building themselves up out of nothing by making something that was self evidently good and selling it to like five turbo nerds who made sure everyone they found wanted it.
That industry is definitely not for example the software services industry before about 2000, and there definitely isn't a huge trove of examples of literally two guys in a garage building software, sometimes mediocre software, and selling it to niche businesses.
That's definitely not the, like, founding narrative of our entire sector of the economy or anything.
There definitely wasn't such a thing like trade magazines where you could browse a vague and generic interest and find all sorts of awesome and expensive and niche products to buy for your hobby, like low production run test equipment or literal scams built by weird guys in a garage, again.
China definitely doesn't have a clear current example of a huge industry that runs basically from a bunch of guys with a box of junk in a stall in a giant physical building that westerners literally go to as a niche tourist destination that drives a bunch of niche product development.
No no, we definitely need to let Google rewrite the very words in front of your face to sell you whatever the highest bidder wants to sell you. How else could you possibly find things?
Word of mouth. If you make happy customers, they'll readily tell others.
But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.
A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.
Eeyup. Costco does zero advertising, and yet everyone knows about Costco. Why? Because they're good. In reality, the prices don't always work out, but they have so many other nice things: opticians, tires, a food court (with loss leaders!), rotisserie chicken (also a loss leader), solid products, etc. Costco exists to make money, sure, but it doesn't feel like they're trying to screw you. I can't say that about 99.9% of companies now.
Discoverability is a very difficult challenge, especially for small niches. Many customers contact my employer, saying that they didn't know our products existed (and many products have existed in some form for >10 years). If you can find a way to improve discoverability, you would be a hero to many niche businesses.
I truly don't care. I would much rather miss out on hearing about a few genuinely-desirable products due to poor discoverability, if the payoff is that I don't have to suffer the deluge of imposed advertizing I never asked for.
Do you have any non-feeling based thoughts to contribute? I see your comment as being non-constructive, as you have not presented any new information or thinking.
On the contrary, you haven't explained why discoverability matters, or why any of us should care. You just take it as a given that it justifies the means. I believe that is what the poster above is pointing out.
I would agree, that I would rather not suffer imposed advertising I did not ask for even if missing out some products.
However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.
(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)
Exactly this. You can put information in a place that motivated consumers can find it. Heck, you could _even_ pay for it to be there, or to be prioritized there, if you want (I don't love that, but I don't have a coherent way to prevent it). But you should _not_ get to inject your information into my life.
There is absolutely no reason to think that advertising makes discoverability of desirable trades more likely, and every reason to think it makes it worse. The people best equipped to spend a lot on ads are those who are offering the worst deal (giving them the best margins). That's without even getting into ads that are used to manipulate people into wanting to make obviously bad choices, e.g. ads for soda, candy, fast food, alcohol, gambling, pointless plastic garbage, etc.
Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.
I think I (mostly) agree with you, but it seems like SEO and search in general would be even more distorted if outright advertising were disallowed or penalized.
It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.
Yes, I agree that (on and off-line) advertising does seem to be unnecessarily expensive (across the economy), but valuable 'advertising placements' are scarce, and I'm not sure how else they could be allocated.
Catalogs, the kind used in the '80s for electronic components. Yellow pages.
Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.
Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it?
People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.
Friends and family can be influenced, although I'd still trust them above anyone else. But salespeople are incentivized to lie to you (sorry, it's true). Product reviews are astroturfed by bots now. Consumer Reports, too, has been captured by industry, and is largely useless now.
When the metric is "make sales and make as much money as possible", it will be incredibly difficult to avoid bias from people with a vested interest in selling you something. This is why advertising (admittedly, mixed with our current society) is so insidious: it's very hard to find a third party that isn't trying to profit off of you buying something.
Certainly not through conventional advertising. There's heaps of billboards where I live, and I'd have a very hard time finding one for a shop/service/political party/business that hasn't been around for years.
Meanwhile Maine banned them decades ago and it turns out the world doesn't end and you can still find ambulance chasing lawyers and weird cults just fine.
Hell, one of our best known lawyers in the entire state is a freaking injury liability one.
But hey, direct evidence of lack of harm never seems to stop all the cockroaches coming out of the woodwork insisting that the world fails if we can't have our eyeballs sold to the highest bidder at every second, and that a different world is just impossible. Gee, I wonder if those people are just ignorant, or maybe have some motivated reasoning, like if most of them were paid entirely by advertising revenue.
> By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?
In my opinion, it would take quite a lack of imagination to ask such a question.
There's many many ways to reach people who want your product. Industry-relevant news publishers and conferences, professional/personal anecdotes (eg, blogs and recommendations), demonstrations and training offers, etc.
A different question would be: by what other means would businesses force their products on people who don't want them? Hopefully the answer is: none.
We can argue back and forth about the specifics but there is no denying we are way too far in the wrong direction currently. Buy a car? The dealership slaps their name on it. Every screen at every stage bombards you. Radio, music streaming, ads everywhere. Billboards, benches, bus stops, it never stops. I still occasionally see those tacky trucks with bright ads displayed on them just driving around.
A cursory search shows that the average person is exposed to ~5000 ads a day in the US. Everyone is screaming for your attention. It's not healthy.
It's solicited advertising. Something I don't think almost anyone has a problem with.
Unsolicited advertising is what everyone hates.
If I go onto my grocery store website and see "we have a sale on xyz" I'm not bothered because I went to that website to see what they have. I'm also not bothered by sales displays in the store. All forms of acceptable advertising.
But what I absolutely hate is navigating a webpage unrelated to my store and seeing "Did you know you can buy widgets at your local store!" or watching youtube and seeing an unskippable 30 second ad for my store. Or getting a newspaper that is actually just 90% advertisement with 2 paragraphs of actual news.
I see - thanks for the explanation. I try to filter out those sorts of ads too, because I don't want my decisions to be biased by the money someone else spends, but they certainly are less annoying than the usual sort.
I wonder whether you would consider ads for fashion houses in a fashion magazine to be "solicited" or "unsolicited"?
> Can you give an example of "solicited advertising"? I have never heard of such a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.
The only thing I would consider solicited is when I decide that I want to see product information. Everything else is just some chapter from the narcissists prayer: "and if I did, it wasn't that bad"
We built computers to store information and make that information searchable. Imagine! The place that sells stuff has a list of things...that you could search through...using a computer. Since you have to sell things somewhere, I am pretty sure the people selling them might put them in the place where people search for them.
Sure - NOW. Growing up in the 80s? How did you FIND things? For example, a shop willing to install random non-OEM car part for me? I had to hunt through the yellow pages, cold-call a bunch of places, etc.
My parents are STILL in that mind-set - TV "tells you" about stuff - and TV never lies!!
They're seeing more and more advertising during their "shows". And sadly, becoming more and more susceptible to it as they age - like the thousands of dollars of "apocalypse food buckets" they bought from some televangelist. Most of which they had to leave behind when they moved into the retirement community (ignoring the rationality of buying it in the first place).
You had to call a shop that you suspected had the thing and ask them? Sorry for the mocking tone, but yes, I did that too in the 90s. And then they might hold it for you! Or they could order it over the phone for you.
Sometimes you could also talk to people in a shop about what you were really trying to accomplish and they'd give you advice on what you might need or how you could do it.
I believe that's the wrong angle to be looking at it since you're starting from the perspective of someone trying to sell something.
The 'need' end is the perspective that's most useful to society. How can someone who has a need find out to satisfy it?
Make your product able to be found by those who need it. Don't shove it in the faces of everyone.
One problem with the above is the effectiveness of making 'unnecessary' sales by creating fomo by shoving it in the faces of everyone. This effectiveness, however, is evidence of the fact that it's psychological manipulation / abuse.
> Make your product able to be found by those who need it.
I think you'd need to more directly and clearly define "need." Do you mean only utilitarian companies and products should exist? What about the things I don't "need" but just "like?" What about music? How do I find new music? How do I know I like something before I've even discovered it? Should music radio, which is just an abstract form of album advertising, not exist at all?
I'm torturing the point, but outside of centralized market control, I'm not sure you can apply this logic across the entire scope of capitalism.
I have never, even once, bought a product or chosen a brand based on advertising (of course you can point to subconscious conditioning, but that would not support the point you're making).
Then we come to the rub: if "don't show me adverts" suddenly made common tasks (checking email, using a search engine) cost a bit of money, how many people would go for that?
Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads.
YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!
Acceptable ad: "I write code. If you need code, consider me because [short list of objective attributes about myself, related only to coding]." posted somewhere people looking for people to code go to find people to code. Consciously put there by someone that can be held accountable for choosing to post it. Doesn't evoke strong emotions, especially fear or hate, through barely related stories and imaginary. Doesn't contain any trackers.
Maybe these means should be employed in more moderation?
Certainly we wouldn't be better off if advertising were beamed 24/7 at full blast into your ears and eyes the second you step out into any public space.
About 5% of its current proliferation would be a nice target to aim for - maybe a maximum of 200 ads a day[1] - but if that still proves to be an issue, we could always go lower.
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[1] With maybe five rising to the level of notice.
A directory is no more advertising than a database is.
Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.
