Say, In a world of 1,000,000,000+ great products, reaching consumers through word-of-mouth is hard.
I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price. But you don't know about it and none of your friends or network have the same problem for you to give you the solution.
The only way to solve this problem is for the product/service provider to know about you and the fact that you have a problem.
Advertising is actually an optimal / scalable way for companies to reach you.
In a Billion+ product world, you need at least 10 Million Trust worthy reviewers to give you an unbiased review of everything. But, how do you trust the reviewers?
Only way?? No.
No no absolutely not.
If/Since we are talking ideas and hypothetical, the preferred way would be for me to search for a product / indicate my need, and then marketplace to provide / compete for it.
The whole notion that advertiser must understand what I need, all the time, without my involvement knowledge or permission, then shove what it thinks I need up my throat constantly, is dystopian.
Basically, I think we are mixing up a pull paradigm to satisfy the consumer, with a push paradigm to satisfy the business. This is not to be naive about realities of world, business, saturated market, crappy products and differentiation, etc. But it peeves me when companies lack self awareness to be honest with themselves about which model is beneficial to which party.
Edit (and if we are going to talk about consumers being ignorant of the realities, let us not please pretend that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to perfectly satisfy a need with optimal product. Ultimate purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Sometimes, that sale is in fact optimal for the consumer. We can disagree how often that occurs as a percentage.)
Edit edit : the more I think the more I disagree. It's the word "optimal" that really bugs me - there's nothing optimal about modern online advertising. Clever, persistent, pervasive, desperate, obnoxious, hard work, devious, are some attributes that come to my mind. But it feels far from optimal - there's so much money and effort in this arms race which is increasingly hostile between an advertiser and consumer, and knowingly so; google and meta are 300 billion worth of not optimal :->
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
It's not about making money by serving ads, it's about "organizing the world's data". It's not about winning defense contracts to put military hardware into space, it's about "colonizing mars to save humanity". It's not about printing money by getting poor people to sign up for 50,000% APR payday loans, it's about "providing liquidity to undeserved communities". Etc.
Yes and then AI to find the best matches for me.
But there are also things that would benefit me that I don't even know exist, so I can not ask for them.
I sometimes browse random awesome-[thing] lists just to see what they have in store and if anything in there gives me any new idea or seems to scratch some itch I didn't even know I had.
No need for any invasive tracking or obnoxious pop-ups.
True, but those are categories of products, not products. That's not something companies are interested in advertising to you, so you can't rely on advertising to learn about them.
Furthermore, rather than trying to find the few people whom a product matches, it is often about pushing the product on people who never needed it in the first place - such as the diamond industry marketing inventing the practice of giving diamond rings for engagements, or the toy industry creating ads to specifically teach children to nag their parents. Or the vast amounta of pills promising penis enlargement.
Sure, these things may not happen so much in B2B specialty advertising, but in B2C they are the norm, and exceptions are few and far between.
Absolutely. How else are you going to grow 15% YoY or hit your sales quotas?
Are you comparing women to children in their ability to discern advertising drivel from real facts about a product? Not only is that insulting, it is obviously false.
i) You can only use factual information.
ii) You can't use visual props unrelated to the product (sexy women, beaches, fancy cars, spas)
But to burn advertisements due to shortcomings is like hating/shutting down internet because of 4chan or QAnon
Now, this is simplified, they don't get to bear all the blame, and there are worse industries, but we better reform them fast, and radically.
But as I said, the vast vast majority of advertising by any measure you chose to use is of the manipulative kind, not informative. And this despite the existence of truth-in-advertising laws for decades.
And banning advertising is not even that harmful to industry - we have the case study of the tabacco industry, which didn't exactly die away once advertising of all of its products was entirely prohibited in all wealthy countries.
You can't. I don't understand how so many engineers can't do basic logic.
Convincing people who are happy that they have problems they need to spend money to solve for your personal benefit is morally dubious at best.
How would you let people people know that they may be prone to cancer?
How can you inform the world population that there exists coursera that teaches you skills on any imaginable subject that may change their lives?
Most people aren't looking for those categories of information.
Provide universal healthcare and continuing education for doctors.
Advertisers sure as shit aren't the answer.
The parent you replied to believes everybody else is unduly influenced by 'asshats' and that his/her favored influencers are not 'asshats.' As if Ezra Pound or Edmund Teller weren't 'asshats' for nuclear explosive mining, or fascism.
Dismissing advertisers for being into the 'filthy lucre?' So what should we do with all the engineers doing the same?
I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers.
One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided.
Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.
If the problems actually need solving, ill go looking.
If I'm not looking, there's no problem (to be solved).
What if you are looking, but an advertisement helps you find it faster?
As an example, I was shopping for a keyboard the other day. I spent several hours looking through different specs. It would be handy if a website would have popped up "hey, here are the 3 you are probably looking for, pick one!".
The benefit would have been for me (less time looking) and for three site (less server time serving pages to me)
The only time advertising has been of use to me is advertising clothing. It's an extremely saturated market, so searching for "cool t shirt" or "nice jeans" is worthless. Before COVID I would go to a nice area in Tokyo, NYC, or some other major city and just load up when it was time to buy new clothes.
I block most ads, but a couple ads have gotten through over the years and I've learned about new brands or atleast new styles and had a jumping off point.
I still feel I am way better off blocking as many ads as I can, but can't say they've been completely worthless.
Most of the HN crowd can't fathom the idea of spending money on clothing outside of necessity. Shirts that will last ten years is more popular of a topic than shirts that actually look good.
OTOH if an ad popped up and said "here's the best keyboard for you" - or even "here's the top 3 choices for you" - would you seriously trust that?
The vast majority of the population, they don't even know there are solutions that would change their life.
E.g: In a world of 8,000,000,000 how many people know that there is Coursera which has top-level courses that can change their lives, improve productivity and make impact?.
"I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning (and prevents people from knowing about coursera). You are just advertising that personality to the rest of the world
I would bet there are more people who know Coursera exists than people whose lives would literally change if they took a few Coursera courses (though that doesn't mean that there aren't some people whose lives could be changed by Coursera if they knew about it).
However, seeing an Ad for Coursera is not likely to help anyone find out whether Corusera can actually help them or not - since there is absolutely no way to tell from an ad whether the product being presented is going to be even close to fit for purpose. The only thing the ad tells you that can be trusted is "Coursera is a company that is trying to sell online courses" (note: that doesn't mean that they actually provide online courses, you can only trust that they are trying to sell them - see the myriads of ads for mobile puzzle games whose gameplay has literally no relation to the game play shown in the ad).
Note: I'm not trying to take potshots at Coursera here - they are a reputable business and have many good courses - which I know from my own and friends' personal experiences. I'm trying to look objectively of what an ad for a company you know nothing about can actually tell you.
> I know everything, don't tell me. I'll ask" is exactly the attitude that prevents learning
This feels parental-- a version of mommy knows best. Why not let me, by default, decide if I want personalized advertisements? What if I want to be ignorant in regards to the new fad product? What if I don't want companies to mine my interests, location, prior searches, etc just to tell me that coursera exists? Advertisers are afraid of using an opt-in model because they know most people won't do it.
The thing is, in our society, institutions mostly develop venues for advertising rather than for listing - since both the owners of the venue and the entities offering products/services have overarching profit motives, and advertising is more profitable.
There is an ideal world where everyone spends a lot of time getting to know themselves on an intimate level and then broadcasts their very personal desires to an advertising industrial complex, which finds the solutions to these deep and difficult-to-articulate drives. But the advertiser can't realistically get that kind of information on anyone. I know that's not what advertisers claim, but I'm confident in calling bullshit on what they say about knowing their customers. They can't even tell when they're irritating someone to the point of installing an adblock, and they're supposed to know what self-actualization looks like to each of their many customers? I ain't even renting that.
I agree with the basic premise that advertising can be a force for good. But the advertisee has to be an active participant, else the advertiser will reliably determine that the target's telos is 'maximize shareholder value for <advertiser>'.
The Palace Economy central planner says, "give me wheat." The Soviet central planner says, "more steel comrades." The American style technocrat planner says, "we will tell you what you want and then deny market alternatives."
I think there's no reasoning with these people
I don't need companies to reach me - that's their problem.
> I bet there are products that solves a lot of your current problems at a decent price.
I bet not. The problems I care about are not solvable with products. Even if there were unknown products I might be willing to learn about, the problems they solve would necessarily be minor things relative to the primary concerns of my life, and I will very happily forego the opportunity to discover them in order to shut down the overwhelming firehose of inane, manipulative toutery.
