IMO there is nothing wrong with advertising in the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case":
But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".
It is very hard to legislate this are because of freedom of speech concerns but the British have a very good set of regulations concerning to advertisement [1] and an independent regulator responsible for this area [2].
It's not just high school emotional blackmail, though that's a part of it. Billions of dollars are spent to scientific research and game people's psychology. On top of that billions of dollars are spent to then spread messages on massive scales that affect virtually everyone's thought process. It's social engineering in its truest sense.
The only way to see beyond it is to move to a place which is not affected by the same tools, say very very poor countries and see how different people's psychology is there. In Western civilization we are set up to be miserable from day one. Whether it's through the schooling process or workplace. It's a toxic environment and it is engineered to be that way. To sell more, to be more productive, and to drive everything in a very tight system.
It is a system which just like any other system serve itself much more than it serves the objects, humans, it administers. It encourages unstable mindsets and addictions.
A regular person sees about 5 hours of TV per day of which 30% is advertising. That is over an hour every day of messages telling you what you need to buy to be happy and where you need to travel, what kind of esthetic surgery to have, which car to drive, etc.
The main problem here is that the messages are disingenuous. They present the product being used by beautiful, smiling, sexy people, thus associating it with well being. We are constantly being told: you must get product X or visit country Y and your ego will be rewarded, more attractive, more successful. It's all about self image, how you see yourself. Very very insidious, because the self image is one of the most delicate and vulnerable parts of our psyche.
An opposite to watching ads would be to do mindfulness meditation and cleanse your mind of all this crap thoughts and fake values which are not in your best interest.
It's not as simple as hey I watched this ad and it told me to do this and I did or did not do it. Ads are narratives that create meaning. They in many ways define a sort of metaphysics of our world, a way in which we find meaning in who we are and what we do. They define us as people, society and civilization much like religion defined people in the Middle and Dark ages.
Ads are a one way conversation that the producers are having with the consumers. The other side of that is the actual production of the products, namely your jobs. Stuff you spend most of your life toiling away at. Ads are what it means to be human in the 20th and 21st century.
On the other hand, that technology and research is always going to be there. Let it loose in public and we can understand it, becoming naturally immune.
Is the alternative a naive public shielded from manipulative media? How long before that weakness is exploited, and by who?
The key to that immunity is education, of course. A little skepticism is all it takes to deconstruct any message with a motive.
You can become conscious of them, and then you can choose how you act.
The real question is, when does a person have free will? Ever? We consider people to be adults at some point. What that means is autonomous agents. I don't want to live under laws that do not assume this.
It's from the Superbowl ad for the mobile game 'Game of War: Fire Age'. It has sweet f-all to do with the game. It's literally just boobs + live-action battle scenes (neither of which the game has). Just another sad attempt to appeal to such basic caveman instincts...
'Game? Boobs? Me...game...boobs...like'
I'm tired of junk like that, so at the moment I'm attempting to build an advertising platform for a project of mine to test the theory that advertising doesn't have to be trash (as mentioned above).
The platform doesn't allow any sort of custom images/text by the advertiser.[1]
The idea is that users decide if they're interested or not based on objective information (the same information as presented by organic listings).
All the data for the campaigns is totally open for anyone to view & analyze [2] (although there isn't much data yet, as I'm only piloting the system now)
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't have enough boobs... but an interesting experiment to try anyway I think.
That Game of War ad is obviously unrelated to the game and appeals to "baser" instincts, but does it really deserve a label as harsh as "psychological blackmail"?
You're right, perhaps that's not precisely the correct term here.... "Psychological trickery" or just straight up lies maybe. As it's essentially trying to paint a picture of the game in your mind that's just not true.
I would hold them at exactly the same level of sleaziness though.
The purpose of the image is to guide your gaze to the ad. And nothing does it better than a scantly clad beautiful women. It is like the oldest trick of the trade.
Ever wonder why all those billboards feature beautiful women when the product has nothing to do with women? If you try, you can recognize how your gaze is captured by the image of the women (thanks to a strong evolutionary instinct built over million of years to quickly identify potential mates), and how your gaze naturally follows to the name of the brand/caption on the board...If it was only the brand name/caption, then you would never have even looked at it.
I am in no way justifying it. Oh. In fact, I hate it to the very last shred. I hate it so much that if I somehow end up looking at such a billboard, I avert my eyes before my gaze end up where they want it to end up which is their (brand name/ caption). So fuck you ad!
> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".
I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before.
Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show.
Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid.
> ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case"
Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way.
Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company.
Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste.
Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on...
A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
Wow. You're basically just describing the mechanism by which you're manipulating people's behavior, very apparently without concern for your redistribution of inherently finite resources. The opposition to modern advertising is in response to exactly this. It's not that much different than cigarettes. You're exploiting subconscious human mechanisms utterly without concern for any effect except number of purchases. People are better off when they can consciously think about what they're doing. There are people who are motivated to promote that in their societies.
This is totally true, but in a world where there are tens of thousands of products in our supermarkets alone, sometimes I prefer an easy subconcious choice. If Old Spice deodorant works, and I got there because of an advertisement that played on subconcious desires, eh. I don't really have the desire to conciously evaluate my deodorant purchase (even though I avoid anti persperants at all cost cause there are weird metals and it just doesn't seem natural to not perspire).
If I choose Pepsi over Coke because of some subconciously altered motive, eh. Whatever.
I'm not sure it'll be a popular opinion, but to be honest, I don't particularly mind not having to conciously evaluate my soda choice.
What I want is for someone, somewhere to consciously evaluate my deodorant purchase. At least in some way that doesn't completely disrespect what anyone would want given they had the capacity to consciously evaluate their deodorant purchase. I understand that that is what advertising is supposed to be.
>If I choose Pepsi over Coke because of some subconciously altered motive, eh. Whatever.
It is not about choosing Pepsi over Coke. What make you choose (Coke OR Pepsi) over plain old cold water, when you feel thirsty?
Another issue is when you let Ads work, you are allowing the brand that had the most aggressive ad campaign to reap a profit. Not the one with a better product. Wont this prevent a better product from rising in the market?
One could make an easy conscious choice if all products included objective information about their characteristics and performance. Hypothetical examples:
- Deodorant X was found to prevent odor for 5 hours and reduce it for 19 in tests with subjects similar to you.
- Fragrance A had the highest percentage of positive ratings among your desired gender and demographic.
Even then, is it worth the effort? I suspect that the vast majority of deodorants work well enough that the upside of choosing the best option isn't worth the time spent reading the objective data. Textbook rational ignorance.
And for things like Coke vs. Pepsi, where there is (I presume) very little objective differences that consumers care about, how does this idea apply?
Well enough is not universally defined, though. One person may just want something to mask ordinary human odor. Another might have allergies, or has friends who have allergies. Various people respond differently to different fragrances. Some fragrances might work better in a professional vs. dating environment. Etc. Objective data could resolve all of those questions far better than any sex-driven superbowl ad.
In the case of deodorant, the question one really wants to ask is either "Will this fragrance upset my coworkers with allergies," or "What fragrance will most impress the guy/girl I want to impress?" Objective, empirical data from the nearest demographic comes the closest to answering that question.
There's no reason that objective data has to require time spent. Computer analysis and machine learning could present the right data at the right times, if the algorithms were designed for that instead of for behavioral manipulation. You wouldn't go to the store, see a rack of 150 different varieties of deodorant, and read the data for each one. You would specify your requirements and see a short list of options, with the principal component of the remaining differences emphasized in the displayed statistics.
More effort is put into seductive advertising than would be required to build and present empirical analyses of fundamental product attributes, despite the perception of complexity.
To address your final paragraph, products that offer no meaningful distinction from their competition would die, while those that are truly useful (even for highly subjective definitions of "useful", like "fashionable") would thrive.
> The opposition to modern advertising is in response to exactly this.
Personally, I don't believe that. My theory is that a lot of concern about modern advertising is how it can destroy the user experience. E.g., 20+ additional HTTP calls on a mobile device. Or roadblock pages. Or punch-the-monkey ads that animate to try & grab your attention. Those types of things.
Those things are bad too, but my opposition to advertising is primarily the things he was talking about. On TV, at least, it's aggressively manipulative.
You're also not using money to circumvent the normal process we use to proliferate good ideas. If something is good, tell your friends about it. Notably this is exponential and very weak initially, hence the need for legitimate advertising. You may need to circumvent this process to jump start a non-manipulative idea but never to sustain it. Modern advertisers can't pretend to think I am legitimately ignorant to the existence of carbonated sugar water. They're obviously sustaining an otherwise unwanted behavior in the public via manipulation. Theres no protection of free speech when theres a concentration of megaphones "shouting down" (via the most possibly advanced techniques in psychological manipulation) anything but one particular idea.
You have to understand, most people are born with a conscience. It takes a long time and concerted effort to erase it. The doublethink and cognitive dissonance on display here is the end result of that process.
These corporations literally employ child psychologists to study the exact rate of white flashes and scene changes in a television spot that grabs their attention and will not release it. Our children are not on a level playing field with PHD educated adult psychologists. Marketers and salespeople will defend this practice. They don't see anything wrong with it.
P.S. I don't wear sunglasses or any article of clothing with a brand, drink coke or pepsi, and I eat the raisin bran I do because it comes in a bag instead of a bag inside a paper box. Mentally rejecting advertising has had the most positive impact on my physical and emotional health of anything I've ever done.
It shouldn’t be. "brand equity" is the issue that’s wrong with today’s market.
Often I can get the exact same product to a far cheaper price if I’m just willing to accept a cheaper-looking label.
And, while that’s very popular in Germany, and led to the rise of Aldi, Lidl, etc, it’s not enough.
Brand equity, as you call it, is the effect that we trust companies based on irrational ideas. That’s actually bordering on violating the EU advertising laws (you can only advertise stuff that is directly related to the product, you can only say stuff that is true, etc).
Yes, I know it is a thing – but it shouldn’t be. That’s the issue. Brand equity is abusing emotions to make people buy worse products for a higher price.
> soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that?
What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.
> Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
Since you work in advertising, you should know that that kind of thing is more pervasive than ever today.
It is very simple to regulate without getting into freedom of speech issues. Just declare (yes, I'm aware it's a constitutional/SCOTUS issue, not a legislative one) that corporations are not people and do not deserve freedom of speech. If individuals want to write checks for advertising that abuses psychology, that's a more troublesome issue, but getting rid of just the corporate funded advertising would be a huge step forward.
So you are okay with, say, the EFF and ACLU not having any freedom of speech? (Not that these organizations engage in much advertising, but they do some, and stripping freedom of speech would apply to content posted on their own websites etc. as well as to advertising.)
Or, for that matter, newspapers. Sure, you could make exceptions for the press, but then you have to define it; in general this is very dangerous stuff.
Neither of them are really advertising products or services, so any regulation (under a "commercial speech needs regulation" paradigm) that would apply to them (or other NGOs we might hold near and dear) would be light or non-existent.
There's a separate argument to be made about whether political speech should be free (mostly unregulated) for corporations... Japan as I understand it is a fairly good example of heavily regulated political speech. As far as I can tell, politics in the modern world is dysfunctional regardless of how light the restrictions on political speech and political organizations' funding and activities. Political speech has many of the same problematic aspects of commercial advertisements, so I think there's room for argument that Citizens United and other precedent on the issue are a disaster, regardless of how much it might help political organizations we like.
Many would, but I bet fewer would pay the advertising costs out of their own pockets. And any loophole you provide civil liberties organizations (pay them a salary to buy ads) will just as soon be taken advantage of by the corporations we all despise.
Corporations are people - this means that a corporation (rather than some of it's individual members) can own property and owe you money. If you want to sue or enforce obligations, you do it against the corporation itself rather than tracking down specific members and enforcing against them. That's all it means. If you eliminate this and then Comcast injures you, who do you sue?
Freedom of speech is held by the owners of a corporation and it's employees; the corporation is property used by the owners to engage in speech. Saying corporations don't have freedom of speech is like saying inanimate objects such as printing presses don't have freedom of the press. Note that printing presses do NOT have personhood, yet they still have freedom of the press.
This is very strange to me. You sue Comcast, the corporation, of course. There's nothing inherent to the label "people" that allows people to own property or have accounts, nor anything inherent to the label "corporations" the prevents corporations from owning property and having accounts. We could call them "non-person property-holders" or "obbgobblegooks" for all I care, and decide on whatever rules we want.
Isn't it generally quite clear when an owner is purchasing something personal with their own money as opposed to when an owner is authorizing a purchase of something for their corporation with the corporation's money? In theory, what's to prevent us from declaring that corporations are not people, are allowed to have money, property, goods, and debt and are not allowed to spend their money on, among other things, advertising?
This isn't to say that doing so prevents any sort of non-individual spending on advertising. But saying that "corporations have to be people" and "we can't impose any additional control over corporation spending because actually the owners do the spending" seems irrelevant and incorrect.
There's nothing inherent to the label "people" that allows people to own property or have accounts, nor anything inherent to the label "corporations" the prevents corporations from owning property and having accounts. We could call them "non-person property-holders" or "obbgobblegooks" for all I care, and decide on whatever rules we want.
Yes, we could redefine the term "personhood" to (in the legal context) refer to something else, and then use the word "obbgobblegooks" to refer to the concept that personhood currently refers to.
In theory, what's to prevent us from declaring that corporations are not people, are allowed to have money, property, goods, and debt and are not allowed to spend their money on, among other things, advertising?
The same thing that prevents us from declaring that the constitution doesn't apply to printing presses; the free speech rights of their owners.
If you want to argue against Citizens United, and say that the government should be allowed to apply prior restraints to free speech that uses property, go ahead and do that. But none of this has anything to do with corporate personhood.
Similarly, your right to name your ship "SS Ilovebush" has nothing to do with ship personhood - that's just your free speech right as a guy with a ship and a paintbrush.
It sounds like you don't have any complaints about the actual phenomenon that is commonly referred to as "corporate personhood," and that your only complaint is about the label itself.
Well, Comcast has hundreds of thousands of owners and they don't all get an equal or even proportional (in reality not in theory) say in how the corporation spends the money of the corporation to get its message across.
Corporations have 'free speech' in the sense that a corporation can spend its money without legal limit on political campaigns. The number of people who have effective control over that money is quite small in relation to the number of owners. Saying a corporation has free speech is not all like saying a printing press has free speech. Corporations have their own bank accounts, their own money, are subject to laws and have legal privileges that printing presses do not.
I agree that there are issues with shareholder governance; mostly a bunch of well meaning laws from the corporate raider era that prevent shareholder activism. This is a rather separate issue.
Suppose we eliminated corporate personhood. Now a collective of people are bound together in a web of contracts and call themselves "citizens united". They agree to act and use a subset of their property in accordance with a specific governance structure determined by a mutually agreed upon charter. How do you hinder this non-corporate group's rights to free speech?
Now you are saying that we can't regulate corporate spending because can't regulate a non-corporate groups spending. It's like saying we can't stop kids from buying alcohol because we can't stop adults from buying alcohol. It makes no sense.
I think you have a reasonable point to make, but you are not being clear enough.
Let me be very clear. The First Amendment to the US Constitution says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The court has ruled that this also means that humans can use their property in the furtherance of speech. Such property can be a printing press, a computer connected to the internet, a corporation, a ship, a billboard or other such things.
Some of those pieces of property are legal persons (corporations, ships), others are not. The personhood of the piece of property is irrelevant.
Corporations are not people. They are granted a subset of the rights and responsibilities that people have. This includes obvious things like the ability to enter into a contract, the ability to be sued in court, the right to own property, etc. They don't have all of the same rights that people do (e.g. they can't vote).
But that's just pedantry. The real issue is that your solution is far too broad and is likely to have unintended side effects. We already have laws curtailing speech of both people and corporations. Free speech is not absolute in the US. We already have "misleading advertising" laws that have been used successfully against corporations.
You can solve this problem if you want by just expanding the scope of existing laws. You don't need to abolish corporate personhood to achieve it.
> It is very simple to regulate without getting into freedom of speech issues. Just declare (yes, I'm aware it's a constitutional/SCOTUS issue, not a legislative one) that corporations are not people and do not deserve freedom of speech.
That would be one of the country's easiest laws to work around. It wouldn't be effective.
If you're not familiar with Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Century of the Self, on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (whom Bernays effectively made), and Anna Freud, as well as the influence of advertising, "public relations" (a term coined by Bernays), and propaganda (the term he coined PR to avoid) on the public, corporations, and govenrment.
Also Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which is an ad-man's perspective on what is fatally flawed with his own industry. See also his later book, The Capitalism Papers.
And of course, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly.
There've been a number of recent HN posts on how bloated websites are becoming, and how content is being watered down on the Web. Pretty much all of this can be traced to the current funding mechanism: advertising. Which is increasingly becoming the problem, not the solution. E.g., TJ VanToll's "The Web's Cruft Problem".
Thomas Wells hits on what I see as the two most likely alternative funding mechanisms: a content tax, and philanthropy or patronage. Combining these with some form of decentralised content syndication compensation system seems like a possible path forward. The total value of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, of which publishing is $152 billion. If 20% of that is online content, it amounts to roughly $100 per person per year.
Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK's broadband tax proposal is an earlier and similar concept.
Thank you for these recommendations. I enjoyed reading Amusing Ourselves to Death very much. I'm watching the first episode of The Century of the Self right now and enjoying it very much. It seems quite informative and seems less biased than Manufacturing Consent, which makes it more watchable for me.
Can you provide an example of an ad that is like psychological and emotional blackmail? The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps ads for luxury fashion brands. Is that a good example of what you mean?
The thing about luxury fashion brands, is that they actually look better than basic brands. There is nothing you can buy at Wal Mart that comes close to looking like it was produced by Saint Laurent.
These brands hire the top designers and talent to work with them. They are expected to produce top quality work.
And, if a luxury fashion brand starts to go down in terms of style, then reviewers pan their collections, sales drop, and they stop being a luxury fashion brand.
For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil.
Modern advertising is not merely informing people about products and what they do. It's brain-hacking, where advertisers have figured out over decades of experience, and research into human cognitive biases and failure modes, ways of presenting the same product, the same information, but getting a desired response out of the target.
We accept this as a society because we tell ourselves that, as rational human beings, we have the choice to listen to or reject these messages. But modern understandings of cognitive biases show how advertising works on deeper levels, and even works despite us knowing about the tricks that are being used on us.
The problem is that there's a severe imbalance. Advertisers are getting better and better at attacking -- at figuring out precisely what makes us tick, down to the level of pixels on an A/B-tested website.
Are people getting any better at defending themselves? Are people being trained in dealing with their cognitive biases to make themselves resistant? Overall, I don't think so. There's no law of nature that says that attackers and defenders must be equal in strength; the situation we're in right now with advertising is like medieval warfare with the advent of the crossbow -- a great imbalance in favor of the attacker that disrupted the nature of combat for centuries.
> the situation we're in right now with advertising is like medieval warfare with the advent of the crossbow -- a great imbalance in favor of the attacker that disrupted the nature of combat for centuries.
(totally off topic, but)
hm. I thought that the crossbow was a little like the early fireams, in that it wasn't particularly better than what came before, mostly due to it's terribly slow rate of fire; it was just easier to use.
My understanding was that someone skilled with a longbow was a more effective fighter, especially in terms of rate of fire, but also in terms of armor penetration and range than someone with a crossbow or a early firearm. (my understanding was that early firearms were massively effective at dealing with armor at very close ranges, but that effectiveness dropped off very quickly. Crossbows suffered from similar issues, in a less dramatic sort of way.)
However, becoming really good with a longbow was a serious undertaking, one that took up a significant portion of your time over a lifetime.
The crossbow and the early firearms, from what I read, were superior in that you could give them to a bunch of shopkeepers or construction workers or what have you, have them drill every third Saturday, and have someone who was a semi-effective warrior when it came time for battle.
back on-topic, I... think there's a hole in our schooling; one the greeks had down. Rhetoric. Most students don't study it. And most of that manipulation of other people (at least if you use words) falls under rhetoric.
Incidentally, I am given to understand that rhetoric and logic were often taught together. Formal logic gets more academic time than rhetoric, I think, but I think that explicitly teaching logic with rhetoric says important things about logic and how it ought to be applied to argument. This idea that we need to apply logic to our arguments before applying rhetoric is a cultural value that we don't have, that the greeks did. I mean, I'm the first to call the greeks assholes, and to remind everyone that they had slaves, that they were not good people and that we should not follow them in all things. But we have chosen to model our education systems after theirs, and this is one of the things they did that I think we should do, too.
In fact, I've been looking for a modern academic-ish rhetoric text; all I've found so far are a bunch of pop psychology style books, while I strongly prefer a more academic presentation.
But yeah; I think in this case, understanding what other people are doing to manipulate you is how you disarm them.
I agree with you on the importance of rhetoric -- in the sense of really breaking down what people are saying. Though, I remember being taught some of that in school and I don't know if it stuck for most students. It's probably a disconnect between a subject learned for school and tests, and a subject that's really internalized. A lot of analyzing dusty old essays and historical arguments, not enough forceful application to one's own modern-day surroundings.
(And I think you're probably correct about the crossbow bit. The influence it had was in the manner of making arms more accessible -- hand a peasant a crossbow and all that. I suppose a different analogy would be World War 1 -- outdated charging tactics coming up against machine guns, though that's a case where defense had the upper hand over offense.)
Most things aren't going to stick for most people. I certainly only retain some small portion of every book I read. But I do retain some. There is value in exposure to ideas, I think, even if those ideas don't always take root.
Now, I think we've got a really idealized vision of Greece; Idealized by a whole chain of different powers who translated their work, so some of this could be complete bullshit, but from what we read, it sure sounds like they saw rhetoric and logic as the practical skills one needed to be a pundit, a talking head, a leader, or even a participating member of a democracy. So... if we were to give the modern equivalent, we'd teach people about modern rhetoric more than historical rhetoric. History does have a place, sure, but it's not a big one. (I... really, really enjoy history, but I think it has less value that advocates clam to understanding the future. )
There were hippies who talked a lot about how important the connotations of a particular word are. gah. I'm forgetting the author. But I read all my parent's stuff when I was a kid, and it made a real impression on me. For a long time, i would translate everything I heard into the same thing, only using words with negative connotations, with the idea of inoculating myself against such a thing, and because for whatever reason, the negative connotation felt more honest to me than the positive. Less manipulative.
But that's the sort of thing, I think, that people need to think about if they don't want to be sheep.
That just makes it even more irritating. Knowing that my attention is being demanded for something that not only will not persuade me to buy but is also unlikely to persuade others is one of the reasons that I hold commercial broadcast television in such low regard.
It wasn't always this way, not in Europe at least. But with the rise of satellite tv it seems that the regulators have become either toothless or uninterested.
A species is less likely to build resistance to a threat in environments where the threat is not present. I don't disagree with you except that we do need the damage in order to grow. It's precisely because of that damage that you feel so strongly and are among so many others trying to work out the problem.
Ever since I've read this comic from Zen Pencils, I've taken a hardcore stance against any and all advertisements. I block everything with ublock origin, and mute my TV when ads come on.
I've sat down with my kids while they watch TV and it's disgusting just how much they POUND children with ads to buy toys. The advertising industry is insidious. Just absolutely hound them! I've seen taken the TV out of their room and taught them how to use Popcorn Time to watch whatever they want. No more ads in this house.
An ad-free house is definitely a good idea. I grew up in a household where we had a habit of always muting the TV when commercials came on. I really appreciate that that was a priority for my parents, and I think it was instrumental in my developing frugal attitudes in my life and rejecting at least some of the constant drive to get more and more stuff.
I can't help but think that, if our society didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, that it wouldn't be allowed nowadays. "Giving the consumer the means to easily ignore the messages that support the content they enjoy? That's stealing!"
It's downright painful to experience the "normal" level of ads in everything -- TV commercials, ads on the Web, the insultingly obnoxious sort of ads that play on most radio stations.
I'm with you. I block every single ad I can. I avoid commercial TV and radio, because I loathe and detest the advertising industry.
If it ever becomes possible to block real-world advertisments with some sort of augment reality sunglasses, that overlay classical art or even a white square over advertisments, I will be their first customer.
I'm sure it has happened in other places as well but recently, the new mayor of Grenoble, France, didn't renew the public advertisement contract with J.C.Decaux and removed all billboards from public space.
Well, those companies whose business model isn’t "let’s throw as much ads at children as possible so they annoy their parents and those then buy all our products"
There is no way to pay for each show. Even they pay-to-watch channels are full of ads, actually, the paid channels have more ads than all other channels.
Which is why I stopped watching TV completely, I watch news and documentaries from public channels online, but that’s it.
Well, the only content I can buy on Amazon, iTunes or the Play Store is dubbed and in 720p quality.
That’s shit.
If I want to get 1080p quality, undubbed, I have to either pirate, or order a DVD from Amazon.co.uk, which leads to obscene delivery costs. (Amazon.com doesn’t even deliver overseas).
Now that I think about it, I'm exposed to very little advertising these days. I stopped watching television years ago, and thanks to Ghostery I see few if any Internet ads.
I wonder if this has improved my mental health? Certainly, it wastes my time less.
Our descendants will consider advertising like we consider tobacco: dangerous to your health.
Adv manipulates your agency, your ability to make independent decisions. Tracker-based targeted advertising exploits all human vulnerabilities that are used in "the long con."
Firms that make their money on more sophisticated advertising techniques understand this. It reminds me of the classic picture of 7 Big-Tobacco executives swearing to Congress that "tobacco is not addictive" despite evidence that they internally held reams of documentation from 1960s indicating the opposite [1].
1. What were you hoping to accomplish with the Dylan quote? Are you ceding the agency argument and now asserting that advertising should be banned because it's obscene?
2. What scaling effects are we ignoring? You quoted Dylan, someone who communicated at a very large scale -- do you consider his communication to be worse on that basis? Is it immoral that we are discussing this on a forum rather than email?
If your main argument is that you're ideologically opposed to corporate advertising, why not just say that?
It was an illustrative description of the effect of money. That it's not speech so much as drowning out all else in the room.
If you prefer quantitative rather than qualitative results, this article on a recent Princeton University study on the influence of money in political policy:
Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
...
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” Economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.
Similarly, money bought decades of protection for the tobacco industry -- the medical link between smoking and cancer was established in the 1940s.
(So, yes, there's a literal truth to the complaints of some smokers about anti-smoking Nazis...).
Or, in the case of lead added to paint and gasoline, an understanding dating to the late eighteenth century, at least (though earlier understanding of harms dates back to 2000 BC), of the negative health consequences of lead, the harms from paint (up to 50% lead by weight) by the early 20th century. The "Dutch Boy" paint brand was adopted by National Lead Company (now NL Industries, Dutch Boy was sold to Sherwin-Williams in 1980). Or asbestos. Or CFCs. Or CO₂ and global warming. Or sugar, corn syrup, and diabetes.
Robert N. Proctor calls this "agnotology": culturally induced ignorance. It's only possible due to the scale of spending behind such disinformation. Millions to billions of dollars, over time.
While that's only a part of the problem with advertising, it's a large one.
I've mentioned Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which deals heavily with advertising, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I recommend both, strongly.
Also Adam Curtis's Century of the Self documentary.
Our descends, if we have any after a few hundred years, will consider most aspect of our lifestyles dangerous to the continued survival of our species.
Advertisements are pure deception, and every time a consumer is exposed to one, the consumer loses and the advertiser gains. Having that opinion makes me a member of a tiny minority in America.
I remember hearing on NPR about a study some marketers conducted. They surveyed college classes in the U.S. They asked students in person to raise their hands if they felt their purchasing decisions were influenced by advertising. Almost nobody raised their hands. They also observed that many of those who didn't raise their hands were wearing branded clothes and hats at the time (and not the clothing's brand, completely unrelated brands like Monster energy drink). This means that even when advertisers have successfully converted one of their targets into a walking human advertisement, their target remains convinced that the advertiser has had no influence over them whatsoever.
So if your goal is to diminish advertising, that's what you're up against. The victimized not only don't realize that they're being victimized, but will also defend the rights of the victimizer to continue victimizing them as a matter of free speech.
They surveyed college classes in the U.S. They asked students in person to raise their hands if they felt their purchasing decisions were influenced by advertising. Almost nobody raised their hands. They also observed that many of those who didn't raise their hands were wearing branded clothes and hats at the time
I do believe that people are often more affected by advertising than they believe, but this anecdote doesn't establish that. You'd have to show that they wouldn't have bought the clothes without the branding.
That's hardly difficult. Why do people buy branded clothes when no-label clothes of equivalent quality are available at much lower cost?
What else except branding justifies the ticket on a $5000 handbag? Even if you accept the fact that it's (allegedly) hand-made from the finest raw materials, the BOM and labour cost a negligible fraction of the consumer price.
And here's the real problem - people think they're buying handbags, clothes, cars, and computers, but really they're just buying capitalist fetish objects.
Advertising doesn't sell stuff, it sells a distorted and rather mad morality where conspicuous wealth and status display is the ultimate moral good.
Should we question that? Damn right we should. It's effectively a repackaging of the religious mode of discourse with a novel moral payload, and it's as destructive to rational freedom of thought as any other religion.
The standard TV consumer magazines show that every week.
"We’ll test 3 products in a blind A/B test against each other. We test a 10$ Aldi no-name product, a 20$ product from another discounter, a 80$ brand product, and a 180$ product from a brand associatiated with quality"
And then, after the practical and scientific testing:
"We were surprised, the discounter product ended doing better than the brand product. Let’s see what our testers say: 'I’ll never buy a product from that brand again, I thought I’d get my money back in worth, but this? I can just as well buy from Aldi then'"
Oh boy I love this thought. I think very bad of advertising in public spaces. Was there ever a public discussion on this topic before bill-boards became the norm. Even in semi public spaces, likes the 20 or so Dutch TV channels people receive I feel that it is reason enough not to own a cable connection at all.
But... I would not make it illegal, but very heavily taxed. Tax billboards for 95% out of this world because they are disgusting (that 5% might give us 50% of the current tax income), tax companies into only having small logo's on their buildings and into sponsoring events/art/archtecture/etc.
Focus, awareness, peace of mind, not selling out, "outside and inside come in pairs".
In my city, all billboards or outside ads over 25m² in size are banned. Bright lit billboards or animated billboards over 1m² are banned, too. (The area of the smallest enclosing rectangle counts).
Also, we have regulations on how much children TV shows and shows during the day may contain in advertising in my country, very helpful.
That's what I think as well: tax it. Problem is: it has become very hard to distinguish advertising from other forms of communications. I think there should be some form of blanket tax on all forms of communications (billboards, web, magazines, newspapers etc) and part of the tax income should be spend to compensate for the negative effects of advertising: i.e. educate people based on scientific facts and subsidise real journalists, public tv, quality newspapers.
Of course there is no good way of implementing this. Advertising happens on a worldwide scale and no government (except north korea, who have this problem under control already) can implement it. Besides: advertisers own politics, it will never happen.
Yes. Creative people creating ads are paid billions in fees every year to make useless things. Businesses buying advertising are just that stupid. They love to spend money on useless things instead of useful ones. I mean, who doesn't?
In the medical practice world, marketing of pharmaceuticals has been an incendiary subject for some time. The common gist has been that medical practitioners are too easily influenced and merely hearing what a pharma company rep has to say will lead to inappropriate prescribing.
On such grounds many clinics forbid manufacturers' reps to have access to staff, else they would be tainted. Of course they'd be, a dozen years of training and 20 years on the front lines mean nothing, really, prescribers are clearly unable to know a sales pitch when they hear it, incapable of applying their own judgement concerning a product's merit.
Sure, there are instances where pharma firms have been unethical, but in my dealings with them, reps have mostly stayed within the lines. In case they don't, I'm not that delicate and can deal with overzealousness when necessary. Generally, it's a two-way interaction, I listen to what reps have to say, and the better ones listen to my feedback about clinical realities.
One thing that gets lost in the noisy public discourse is the role of marketing. In our economic system marketing is fundamental to distribution of goods and services. A pharma company could develop a break-through product, but if providers don't know of its existence it won't be used where it would make a difference.
Inadequate marketing has impeded uptake of a number of useful medications, and fewer treatment options is not a good thing. I'm not advocating a free-for-all in this sphere, rules are necessary. But we can have too many rules too, better to maintain an intelligent balance.
Sometimes I think about an interesting experiment: what if all advertising had to follow the same rules as pharmaceutical companies? Imagine a car commercial on TV, and the announcer having to murmur a list of all the defects reported for the car's vehicle class. You know, real truth in advertising would be very refreshing.
I find the concept of paying people for their information and time fantastic as way to battle advertising.
In other ways, wouldnt it be great to have the right to not be subject to advertising? Adblock has been great at providing such experience on the web to me..how about billboards? TV? Eliminate product integration? Etc.
I dont like using the word "moral" to describe a problem, because it makes it very subjective. The amount of money that goes into advertising is ridiculous and in aggregate it has to be doing lots of damage by opportunity cost and mis-information.
I am not sure regulations will help much. For one thing, is is hard to specify where the limits lie, and to objectively detect when an ad cross the limits. Another thing is that all regulations bend depending on how much money you have to throw at those. And in this case it is a lot.
So along with regulations, I think it is also necessary to educate kids to defend against manipulations like this. I don't think schools will ever do something like this. So it should come from parents, from home. Teach them how such manipulations work, teach them how to recognize and avoid them. In the process, you will also teach them very useful critical thinking.
But there may be social aspects that work against these. For example, if you never watch ads in your home, your kid may get ridiculed in the school because he/she does not know about Ad xyz. The same way you will be ridiculed today for not using Facebook or whatsapp.
So, in short, I think we should talk about this, A LOT. Both online and offline.
Ironically enough, it may be CPC ads themselves that allow people protect their attention. Browser add ons like Ad Nauseam, http://adnauseam.io/, automatically click on ads (after first being blocked) and ensure that there's a high price to pay for playing in the ad game.
Banksy and peers, in a different medium, have been making many of these arguments for some time, in my opinion eloquently. They got me thinking about many of these issues of who gets to speak to the public and how do we decide, in ways I hadn't before.
The article states: "The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent."
Mostly, I don't think that's true. When I turn on the TV to watch a show, I think I am consenting to some advertising being present, and naturally the TV station has sold that advertising time to some other company. Similar situation with websites, search engines, radio, newspapers, etc.
The only situation where I think the assertion might be true is when it comes to advertising in public areas, outdoors, etc. I don't think it's reasonable to argue that consent has been given in those circumstances.
The article agrees with you: "Although consumers are not the customers of television companies, they ... have substantial influence over the transaction, and the quid pro quo for them is transparent"
BTW, both the article and the HN comment section make me realize that as someone not living in the US, I lead a sheltered life. The level of advertising to "captured audiences" in the US seems to have reached truly mind-killing proportions.
FTA: "Advertising to children in America has increased more than 150 fold since the early 1980s, especially inside schools where the audience is captive."
Advertising isn't just about business, if it were ìt'd be a lot more effective and less obnoxious. It's also about power. Being able to control what people see and listen to is powerful. Being able to inject your brand into the public consciousness is powerful. Many brands are familiar to us, and form a part of the culture background, because of advertising, regardless of if we use them.
This makes companies and advertisers feel good, because it's a demonstration of power, and of status.
Advertising makes as unhappy or poor.
It creates artificial tangible desires for needless goods.
Unfulfilled desire makes us unhappy.
Buying needless and worthless goods poor.
Is this in reference to people who are software engineers who work for big businesses that are mostly marketing, sales and advertising driven and who would not have a job if it weren't for what they're criticizing in this thread?
Not parent, but I'd argue generally Yes. Moreover it's an excellent dynamic to keep in mind when you're encountering strong resistance from someone. Often there's either a conflict of interest or cognitive dissonance at play.
This why there are no billionaire philosophers. Every argument he made about advertising i can make about his article, and about every interaction he had in his entire life with everyone he ever met. Just because economics are in play with advertising doesnt mean that everything and everyone else in the world shouldnt be held to the same standards.
Contrary to what this article claims...people do value their attention and are very particular and careful with how they allocate it. Good marketers also know how valuable peoples attention is and are careful to respect it...hence the rise of content marketing and value add advertising.
The argument that consumers dont give media permission to sell their attention is false. You can always change the channel, click away, drive a different route, and stop using an app. You make choices about how you allocate your attention and you accept the costs associated with it by allocating your attention to that media.
Becoming a billionaire requires being unethical in this society. The mere existence of billionaires is a problem, anyway. So of course people who care about ethics do not become billionaires.
Is that the fault of the people with ethical concerns? No, it is a damning statement about our society.
Want to know the only difference between your ethics and a billionaires ethics? Your ethics look to the world and others to assign blame and criticize...billionaires look to themselves to see how they can improve and grow despite circumstances outside themselves and beyond their control.
I might not be a billionaire...but i definitely dont want to be someone who cant take ownership my own problems.
I often feel a bit sorry for advertisers and consider they are simply wasting their money and effort. I have no more inclination to buy a car I saw parked on top of a giant rock on TV than I did before I saw the ad. I have no more inclination to drink a coke than I did before I saw the ad. The only ad I remember following or taking an interest in within recent memory was for a drone on youtube. Out of the thousands and thousands seen over the past decade. I realize maybe I'm not typical... but I simply can't fathom how commercials for things like shampoo on TV impress anyone. Are people really still susceptible in this day and age? I just don't get it.
I'm quite surprised to see so many here seem to agree with the idea that advertising is seemingly inherently bad. This article in particular is full of over-the-top writing that drives me crazy.
"advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties."
I wish my life was that important that my attention not only could be "precious" but that it was so precious that that I'm worried about the demands ads make on my attention instead of other things (like staying up too late making comments on web sites...).
It's insane that advertisement spending is tax deductible (at least in the US) given how questionable its impact to society is. A slight change to the tax code would cut down on ads considerably.
Products and services not directly necessary for sustenance exist only because of advertising.
If you are employed in an industry other than agriculture, textiles, or residential construction, there would be no work for you or any of your coworkers without advertising. If people's basic urges do not require them to give you money, then there is no money with which to write your paycheck.
Obviously it can be taken too far, but eliminating advertising from the world in all forms is probably not what you want.
Sure. Advertising is the craft of getting people to want things, then positioning a particular product as the best (or only) way to satisfy that want.
If you want something not embedded in your biology (i.e. food, sex, temperature regulation) then you want it because of advertising - either media you were exposed to, people who influenced you to want it, or just seeing the product out in the street. If you are aware of a particular product or vendor at all, it is because of advertising.
Of the people in the world who are economically useful, they are useful only insofar as as people want the things they help produce. Without advertising, people want only food, shelter, water, sex, etc. Without advertising, people are entirely unaware of where they can exchange money for anything they want, biologically necessary or not.
A world without advertising is a world without trade. The only way that could ever really happen is a centrally planned economy with resources handed out; the second you have something resembling a market, the way sellers and buyers discover each other is advertising.
Hm. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that children would not want to be told stories, without advertising?
I mean, I agree people need to be aware of a good or service to buy it (and that includes food, sex, and temperature regulation -- not sure why you've got a special case for them). But I think there's a distinction between making that information available for people seeking things out (like, having a stall at a market that carries your product) and bombarding people with messages about it at all hours of the day.
This article has quite a cynical tone that I can't say I agree with. The argument that advertising is the business of harvesting customers' attention, while not necessarily incorrect, is disingenuous. The ad industry is not some diabolical entity that conspires to brainwash citizens of the world.
I would posit that the advertising market is actually quite efficient as opposed to being a market failure. Let's examine a paragraph from the market failure section:
> Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, bill-board operators, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - namely, how easy it is for you to escape their predations. This is often much lower than the value to you, or to others, of directing your attention to something else.
The author makes the implicit assumption that advertisements automatically garner 100% of our attention. They don't. When was the last time you went to a movie theater before the previews started, sat silently, and stared at the advert loop? You probably have never done that! Instead, you give your attention to your loved ones or your phone. And maybe you'll watch the previews, but if you're even somewhat into watching newly released movies, those add value to you.
Some advertisements do capture our attention, and those are priced appropriately. Super Bowl commercials cost more on a CPM basis than a commercial to be aired during the Walking Dead, which in turn costs more than an Instagram sponsored story. This is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
Moreover, people do avoid advertisements when they deem it necessary. Some people buy the premium versions of iPhone applications, some people only watch new TV shows on Netflix, and some people pay extra to watch live sports events on an ad-free Internet stream. Again, this is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps the world would be better off without advertising. (I'm not even sure that this is true, given that advertising does benefit people.) But if there are no advertisements and a single company ran a TV spot, it would be at a huge competitive advantage. So everyone runs marketing campaigns. I really think this benefits the consumer more than the author gives credit for, however. Marketing is the field of creating value for a specific segment of the population, who in turn will enter into a long-term relationship with your firm and give you economic value in return. Advertising is an important part of this.
Also, to be clear, I don't advocate for marketing strategies that themselves are disingenuous. Moreover, there are perfectly valid arguments to make that inference-based advertising are immoral, or that Internet tracking is immoral. But the author is painting with absolutely massive brush strokes against the entire field of "advertising," and I feel the need to strongly qualify his argument.
There's a lot I want to say about this piece, because it seems that the author fundamentally misunderstands marketing. The entire bit about advertisers charging consumers directly is a terrible business idea, for example, for the same reason that we have grocery stores and shopping malls. However, I don't really want to spend all afternoon on a point-by-point response.
>The ad industry is not some diabolical entity that conspires to brainwash citizens of the world.
Yes, this is exactly the point.
Advertising is most certainly a "negative externality." Its cost is not fully borne by the firm, but rather imposed on intermediaries and externals. For example, there is no cost to the advertising firm for promoting blatantly incorrect or dangerous statements that must latter be corrected through costly education.
See for example the statistics about sugary-beverage advertising, and how society must ultimately pay for the health consequences [1].
>You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma.
Advertising is not an issue of prisoner's dilemma (in which two players who benefit from cooperation are driven instead by rationality towards destructive outcomes).
It is more similar to a problem with asymmetrical information, i.e. the "market for lemmons." All of the posts in this thread about how "advertising is helpful for bringing information to the people who are looking for it" are talking about the very few instances of advertising improving the efficiency of an information marketplace. Instead, the marketplace is full of "lemmons," i.e. instances of advertising that are not aligned with true information flow, but with manipulation. The ad market is like shopping for used cars. Use caution.
> For example, there is no cost to the advertising firm for promoting blatantly incorrect or dangerous statements that must latter be corrected through costly education.
I disagree somewhat, as there is certainly a regulatory cost. Now whether FINRA is stringent enough is an entirely different question, and one that would be more fruitful to discuss.
Moreover, you'll see toward the bottom of my original comment that I don't think misleading advertising is a good thing. My comment mostly dealt with the author's discussion of consumer attention as a resource, to which I strongly disagree that there are externalities.
> Advertising is not an issue of prisoner's dilemma (in which two players who benefit from cooperation are driven instead by rationality towards destructive outcomes).
I defined cooperation to be a firm not advertising and defection to be a firm advertising. It certainly seems like the definition of a prisoner's dilemma to me under the way I'd set it up. But we're free to disagree. I agree that this is an asymmetrical information issue, but that quite literally applies to the entire business world.
The fundamental assumptions in your post disturb me. You are essentially mitigating the severity of the problem the article describes by saying that, really, advertis[ers|ments] are not _totally_ effective in stealing all of our attention. We can probably tune it out, sometimes. Usually we can mostly tune it out. For now.
This is such a pernicious idea. I suppose it can occur because this whole advertising thing has been one giant boiling the frog endeavor -- the fact that in some places you cannot engage in public life without turning over your attention, and all the statistical learning that occurs with it, to some entity over which you have no control. Well, other than the trivial "just stay in your house" control, which I don't feel to be control in any meaningful way.
It's interesting that the solution proposed to this is to assert property rights over something that, like clean air, people will probably have an intrinsic reaction to framing as property. In other words, a tragedy of the commons defense against something that is, in some ways, the opposite of the commons: the right to engage in civic behavior and still be gatekeeper of your own attention. Although maybe you could say it's the attentional commons, as if we all shared the same attentional pasture.
Attention is one of those things where it seems to me the sci-fi future is closer than we imagine -- where you walk along a street, and, based on who some company things you are, helpful product info gets beamed into your brain. It's already that way with audio, which, unlike visual stimuli, you can't even turn away from or tune out.
I actually look forwards to the ads before movies on the rare occasions that I do attend cinema screenings. Since I watch no TV (and grew up without one) and make a point of minimizing my exposure to online advertising, this serves as an amusing little peek into the current state of pop propaganda.
ok, wow. First, let me point out how ironic it is that a news agency that makes most of it's revenue from advertising is the source of this article, and also that ABC is owned by Disney corp which is a pervasive media company creating advertising, receiving revenue from advertising and spends over 2 Billion annually on advertising[0][1].
Services we use daily are funded by advertising. Virtually all news and media companies. Sure, it is a bit nefarious to do some of the things that get done on the internet like trackers and info siloing and such, but seriously? Is not seeing an advert a moral imperative?
> I want to keep using this free email, social network, enhanced and personalized search capability, free cloud storage, document collaboration, real time news updates, weather, be entertained by television, be entertained by blogs, participate in an online community, etc
ok awesome, pay us money then, $1 a month per website/service you use?
> no
Or even the more infuriating, of course I would do that. Would you? Would you pay for google, facebook, twitter, reddit, HN, new york times, bloomberg? Maybe, but how much would you pay to that website your friend linked in an email? How many of you have apps or work at companies that get paid by advert revenue?
In a world where is is insanely easy to block ads, or to just ignore them, surely this isn't a question of morality. More of triviality and annoyance. I have 3 adblock extensions + uBlock as well as a DNS killer. I HATE ads. The reason ads are so annoying is because I have all of these things. So now companies search exploits to get my data to sell it and load tons of JS libraries to break through all of the blocking software I have. The situation sucks, but it isn't morality.
tl;dr If you think Axe body spray will get you laid, you are weak minded. Advertising pays for everything you use on the internet, and entrenched protocols are hard to disrupt. Get adblock, ublock and don't buy things you don't need.
The fact that advertising is so pernicious is in fact a large part of the problem. I'd argue precisely the opposite: that using a corrupt system to fight against itself is precisely what you want to do. There's a long history of that, with numerous corporate philanthropies (the Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc.) following this path.following this path.following this path.following this path.
None of your arguments address the failures of advertising noted in the essay.
As for the market for information goods, that is indeed a challenge. The fact that there's a market failure there still doesn't excuse advertising.
"Entrenched protocols" like slavery got disrupted precisely because a moral dimension was brought into play.
Everybody has weaknesses and exploiting them to sell ads is no more an art - it's a science - that is working at a speed and scale that we have never witnessed before. Advertising is more than just selling body spray. It's about selling anything to us - from our leaders to wars to taxes. I wont be surprised if ISIS is buying FB ads - target muslim youths in low income downtown areas - ad tech can do that for you today.
The same BMW in Europe is marketing car clubs and car pooling to save the planet, while in China and India the message is total opposite about aspiration and horsepower.
I almost feel like you are saying that forcibly exfiltrating someone from their land, packing them into a ship where ~15-30% die before even getting the "privilege" of being sold onto bondage[0] and serve the rest of their lives as property is remotely comparable to a person using gmail for free but retaining any right for such a company to profit from that data(which you freely give them)?
> Morality has to be talked about.
Logic has to be talked about. Your privacy and attention are your own imperative and outsourcing that is a fatal mistake. You will see adverts on a few trashcans but that is the price you pay for living in society. The choice is yours whether you want to sell your information to companies, you provide it, you have agency, stop.
> Even someone who supports slavery would likely be against kidnapping and mistreatment.
I mean, they didn't just show up one day. But yeah, I just met hyperbole with hyperbole.
> But why are you suddenly talking about corporate data use? Advertising happens with or without that data.
I think you can opt out of a lot of ads. I don't watch television often and as stated have a large amount of blocking software installed. I don't read magazines and have limited exposure to billboards as I live in a rural areas.
Data is the scary bit and it was mentioned in the article. Selling user data is morally ambiguous. Gun to my head, I come down on the side that it is probably wrong. Seeing an ad briefly while you steal a taylor swift song off youtube is different than the permanence of someone owning a silo of your personal intimate data.
Also, this data is used to create a profile of you which (outside of the 1984 scenario) is used to sell you adverts. This is pretty shitty. Once again, I try to maintain my own privacy on the internet and try to safeguard my data as much as possible and while I think it is a shitty practice, I think people should be responsible for themselves.
I'd argue that coal and steam power had far more to do with the end of slavery than moral arguments. Though those also held some sway.
When you can provide the work of tens, hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of people through fuel and capital, you can dispense with a great deal of uncompensated labour.
Of course, then there's the decline of that abundant fuel to consider....
Wrong abc buddy. that ABC is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation not the American one. a government funded organisation that doesn't do much advertising.
I find myself strongly dissenting with the article and the opinions of most here.
As vonklaus states, ads subsidize many services that I use and value but am unwilling or unable to pay for myself.
Advertising is a fair market exchange. Businesses are funding my access to information and services in return for the right to present to me.
We have quite a bit of control over which contracts we enter into, everything from changing the channel during a commercial to only consuming commercial free content.
As such a market, as ads become more and more invasive and obnoxious then they become less valuable in that they drive users away and hurt the content providers who are funded by ads. So there is incentive to provide ads to consumers in a way that can be consumed if desired.
Of course in some cases like advertising minors, I do think that limits are apropos as they do not have the experience to understand what they are entering into.
An immediate appeal to hypocrisy is a very weak form of argument, it does absolutely nothing to address the points being made, and instead is just an attack on the speaker.
My point is that nearly the entire consumer internet is funded by adverts, the first bit was simply humerous. Further, advertising is pervasive and annoying (even with blocking tools) but it is mostly found in private places. I don't think it is immoral to sell ads on your own website, radio station or media channel. If you dont consume free content you would see way less adverts.
Cable is a special situation. They get paid by our tax dollars both directly and with tax breaks, they sell content to us and they also sell advert space to companies. Advertising isn't really a question of "morality"
I would allege that logic, morality, and competitive business tactics all align with the sentiment that ISPs should be immediately decoupled from cable companies and we should allow market entrants to compete there. Cable companies are ruthless tax collectors and deeply entrenched in political circles. It is hard to disrupt this as well, but success in winning a free internet is something I think is truly worth fighting for.
Depends on your system of morality. For example, you could have a system of morality that has the axiom: "advertising is inherently bad." In this case, it's hard to imagine it would be justifiable. An opposite system of morality also exists, of course, that says advertising is inherently good.
Since there is no objective standard of morality, and since "morality" is just a fancy word for "things that people consider good or bad," we probably just have to look out into the world and see whether advertising is against the morals of most. Given that we see little great outrage over the use of advertising, even among those who are aware of its risks, I have to conclude that advertising is morally justifiable.
> Since there is no objective standard of morality, and since "morality" is just a fancy word for "things that people consider good or bad," we probably just have to look out into the world and see whether advertising is against the morals of most. Given that we see little great outrage over the use of advertising, even among those who are aware of its risks, I have to conclude that advertising is morally justifiable.
you could have a system of morality that has the axiom
But that's a strawman. It's not the argument being made here. Or by the numerous other critics of advertising: Adam Curtis, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, etc.
The remainder of your arguments follow a similar train.
But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".
It is very hard to legislate this are because of freedom of speech concerns but the British have a very good set of regulations concerning to advertisement [1] and an independent regulator responsible for this area [2].
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2008/9780110811475/conte...
[2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Our-history.aspx