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661 points anotherhue | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.006s | source
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voidUpdate ◴[] No.41243350[source]
I still don't understand a lot of youtube advertising. Like for me, if I'm being advertised something, I instinctively don't trust it, because they're having to pay people to say good things about it rather than people who have used it telling me it's a good thing. And there are still so many sponsorships from places like BetterHelp, which has been known to be a scam for a while now, and Raid Shadow Legends, which is just a crappy mobile game that is about as "mobile game" as you can get. The only reason I use onshape is because a friend recommended it to me, and I was very skeptical about it initially
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dkarras ◴[] No.41243454[source]
you're not the target. advertisements work. the people managing ads are very meticulous about their spend vs. return. if you are seeing an ad of something for any noticeable duration of time, that means it works. by that I mean they get positive return from showing the world their ad. if it generates negative returns, it will be pulled pretty quickly. they are humans just like you and me, we don't like losing money.

also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.

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sidewndr46 ◴[] No.41246077[source]
This is the same myths that everyone in advertising propagates.

Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

The "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.

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nj5rq ◴[] No.41248124[source]
> Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.

What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.

Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

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1. autoexec ◴[] No.41248409[source]
> Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.

My guess is that those people are the most susceptible to their influence. Even when you know the tricks being employed to manipulate you, it doesn't always make the manipulation less effective. It's like an optical illusion where you know what you're seeing is wrong, but you still can't stop seeing it.

It's the same with people who don't care about their privacy because "no one cares about what I do" without realizing that companies wouldn't be spending massive amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing every intimate detail of our lives that they can get their hands on if it wasn't making them money hand over fist at our expense.

Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't reasonably sure that it was paying off for them. As surveillance capitalism continues to creep deeper into our lives companies are getting better and better at being able to track the success of their advertising and what they've been seeing so far hasn't caused them to scale back their efforts at manipulating us. It's just making them better at it.

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2. shiroiushi ◴[] No.41253728[source]
>Ads are not about education or product awareness. Everyone already knows what Coca-Cola is, but they still spend 4 billion a year in advertising

This isn't true. Some ads really are about education and product awareness. If a new product comes to the market, how is anyone going to find out about it if there's zero advertising? Word-of-mouth can be useful at times, but that only works when someone's already bought and tried the thing, so how did they find out about it?

But yes, for many, many products and services (like Coca-Cola), everyone who hasn't been living under a rock already knows about it, so that advertising isn't strictly necessary. The point of Coca-Cola ads isn't to make you aware of it, it's to keep it in your brain, and to establish some kind of emotional connection in your brain when you hear or see Coca-Cola, to make you more likely to buy it when you have a choice. Basically, that type of advertising could accurately be called "brainwashing", or "psychological conditioning".

I think it's entire reasonable to be disgusted by the latter form of advertising, while not being completely opposed to the former. An ad that says "hey look! We just invented this handy new gadget that'll make it much easier to fix your bicycle when it breaks on a long ride! Click here to see how it works." isn't so objectionable to me, unlike most other ads.

The problem, however, is most ads are total BS, and there's really no practical way to filter out only the ones that 1) aren't brainwashing, 2) aren't for crap I don't need and would never need or want, 3) aren't for something that's really a scam, and 4) aren't plainly obnoxious and irritating, so I have to resort to using ad-blockers, which block all ads.

I really kinda miss the old Google search, where they used to put some small, text-only ads on the side, that were directly related to whatever you were searching for. Those were actually useful: search for "fix bike chain" and you might see an ad for a tool to fix bike chains, for instance. Sometimes you'd find something new and useful that way. And if you didn't, it was just some easily-ignored additional text on the side, not flashing colors, videos, pop-ups, or other attention-stealing BS.