Yes, these scams have aleays been there. The distinction was that advertisers like newspapers and magazines had a standards body that would reject ad placements that were insulting to their audience's intelligence.

>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same can be said for basically all other phone OEMs, and if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable.

I should start by saying that I find ads incredibly irritating in any form. That said, Miele and DeLonghi are both more than a hundred year old companies. Maybe they don't need to advertise because they have such solidly establish brand identities, but they do advertise and they have advertised throughout their history as companies. Ads are a way of maintaining brand awareness, introducing new products, and creating demand. Even if you have an incredibly solid product with good word of mouth there is still benefit to advertising it.

Maybe. Stealing ad space from a competitor may be in itself valuable.

Another metric comes to my mind: if a newcomer has money to spend on ads, then it's a stable firm.

I'm sure there are more.

Two of the three names are unknown to me. This word of mouth delivery did nothing to make me interested in any of the three though. I have no idea what any of them actually do. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as how best to internet search "Henry".

> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.

Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

I remember back in the good old days (so like 2008) you'd visit the some bigco website looking for specs on some item and then later you'd see their products in your banner ads. Times were so simple back then.

50, actually.