This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.
I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
It's a childish and immature opinion really.
Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
On the contrary, I think the author addresses this via the "cancer" metaphor:
> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.
I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.
* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.
I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.
Yeah, the problem with that is it's a completely flawed premise.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."
No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.
Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
You are being a bit pedantic and misdirectional with that first quote. It's not an important thesis of the article that people already know about the products ahead of time.
In no way have you demonstrated a "completely flawed premise".
> It's been dishonest since the start
How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
Firstly, I don't think it's unnecessarily pedantic to say that the origins of advertising and what they are for are not what he says they are.
>How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
Because if your argument is that advertising is becoming or has become dishonest and manipulative and it needs to be pulled back to what it was before, that is a lot weaker if advertising has always been dishonest and manipulative.
> It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.
There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.
>> I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
> That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.
Not a logical flow in that analogy from my perspective. There is legitimately bad advertising out there that is blatantly malicious -- malware, popups, click jackers, spyware, non-consensual tracking, etc. -- that could be described by that to a tee. But the original article goes further and calls all advertising cancerous which is just plain dogmatic and frankly, extremist. Its extremely easy to put down advertising, but the truth is everything in life is advertising, since advertising is just a game of attention -- predating the internet and printed paper. I think an average internet denizen has a viewpoint somewhere between.
Then we have people who work in marketing, and might see the article and be opposed to the article. But I don't think that matters. Advertisement is not going to stop because of some article putting it in a undefended spotlight, it's a fulfilling prophecy from a game theory perspective precisely because you can't not advertise -- as the article notes.
What makes the current system suboptimal? I mean, the markets are Dutch auctions, which penalize overvaluation. Compared to my youth, I'm definitely exposed to far less advertizing.
If advertising truly is an arms race, then the cost is money and effort wasted on keeping up with the competition -- building an excess of supply because you lose if you can't keep up.
Of course there are also plenty of opportunity costs to wasting billions annually on the overpromotion of overpriced products that are consumed in excess...
There must be a way to do advertising that respects the consumer, and doesn't use some form of sketchy manipulation to achieve the desired goal. And yet the vast majority of advertising is (to me) offensive.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise.
That's a rather childish and immature rejoinder. The world of employment simply doesn't work that way, and people's job mobility is not infinite and frictionless.
That's because we discovered psychological manipulation for advertising in the 30's thanks to Freud's nephew, Bernays. And it was brought to light when psychology hit center stage in the 70's after the psychedelics lash-back. So our current advertising methodology is a very recent phenomenon.
I won't be offended if advertisers can figure out which ads I won't respond to and then refrain from smacking me in the face with them. Or if they can avoid annoying me with moronic gimmicks like dancing lizards selling insurance.
I'm ready. Go ahead advertisers. Delight me with silence.
>I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
That isn't relevant regarding the truthfulness of the author's claim.
Whether or not ads are vital for any industry, product or technology (an extremely complex question by the way, not to be easily dismissed with a dogmatic "X would not exist without advertising") has no logical relation whatsoever to any opinion one might have about ads.
"Dogmatic viewpoints" are the real cancer on society. Actually "lupus" might be a more apt comparison.
Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.
Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.
He doesn't directly call for the completely abolishment of marketing/advertising and actually recognizes the free markets have a place for advertising but is using that blog as a place to complain about the cancer it has become.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."
Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.
I've worked at an organization that failed to advertise its products, causing massive inefficiency & waste - lots of people have access to our technology but don't know about it and end up implementing the same basic CRUD app over and over.
Don't underestimate the economic loss caused by people just not knowing there's a better way.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
There's a huge difference between informational advertising, which I support, and manipulative advertising, which is reprehensible. Telling people that their custom CRUD app could be ready quicker, cheaper to support, and contain fewer bugs if they used your product is great. Bombarding people who already know about your product and its half dozen competitors with subconscious messages that your competitors are evil and that if they use your product their sex appeal will increase is dishonest and stupid.
I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
> I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
The good old survival bias. You did it thus it's possible for all!
Sadly the truth is, word of mouth doesn't always work, you are just lucky.
The primary reason word of mouth doesn't always work is because of advertising. If you don't scream, nobody will hear you over everyone else's screams. But if people stopped screaming, then they could actually hear conversations.
So in your world where advertising went away and Facebook/Google/YouTube/etc are gone (don't pretend they'd survive without ads), where exactly do you do the screaming? In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
You don't scream. You talk to people. They talk to other people. If your message is worth it, it'll organically reach those who'd benefit from it. Also, you could post your message in places where people interested in the kind of problems you're solving come to look for solutions. Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
> don't pretend they'd survive without ads
I don't see why Facebook and Google couldn't work with a non-advertising-based business model. You might end up having to actually pay a little bit for it, though.
> In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
> You might end up having to actually pay a little bit for it, though.
How old are you? I'm from the 90's, I'm from the generation that was on MSN all the time. My parent would have never let me pay for anything online, with no access to credit cards...
There's no ways they would have paid 5$ a month for a social networks, even if "all my friends were on it", which wouldn't be true, just like Runescape in the past.
Late 1980s. MSN didn't exist at the time. MSDN did, though, and didn't require advertising support, Microsoft was fine with offering it for free.
I didn't mention it in the article, but I do recognize what you said as about the only redeeming thing about advertising on the Internet. Free content is a huge boon not just for the less wealthy, but for kids. I do not have a good idea how we could get rid of ads on-line while not excluding these demographics at the same time. I was kind of hoping someone on HN would have some ideas, but nothing turned up so far.
But that's the problem. Businesses are always going to scream about their product, there's no easy way to put restrictions on that and still have a free market. Remove advertising and incumbents have all the advantage. Word of mouth is powerful, but it can't be done alone.
> Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
These are all advertisements, just a different type.
Informational promotion is not the same thing as advertising. A PSA is not an ad. There are many ways to inform the public of services or resources other than interrupting a media stream with ill-targeted spots. Getting someone credible to favorably review your product would be a far better way to differentiate your innovation than web ads or TV spots.
The waste you speak of sounds the result of misjudging demand rather than spamming too little. Or maybe people were informed about the merits of your better mousetrap, but just didn't care. Startups often guzzle that kool-aid.
Advertising is the last place I'd go to learn if someone's novelty is better. Who trusts ads?
Right, but there's a difference between the occasional text or non-animated static image ad and the sorts of browser-fingerprinting spyware prevalent today.
There's also a time and place for ads, and the article's examples (like actual medical documents) are neither.
We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervasive as to be unavoidable; they can also still have a net harm even if you think that orgs "depend" on them for income, which is dubious.
And just for the record, I work for a nonprofit who advertises minimally, and definitely not to the public.
The problem is nobody is having a proper discourse on how to make ads better. There is a real problem here that we can fix and need to fix if we want to keep the internet economy from eventually collapsing when everyone gets too sick of ads to avoid adblockers.
There is a wide range of aggression in advertising tactics, and the arguments made in the article apply in proportion to that aggressiveness. It is not necessary to eliminate all advertising to start recognizing and addressing these problems.
It's the average opinion of people who are uninformed, and who've never had to sell anything for a living. They live in a fantasy world where ad people are wizards who can control people's brains and make them buy things they don't need by making them sad.
Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.
It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.
> I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
There aren't many things that can only exist because of advertising. Most of the things people things think depend on advertising already existed in some form before advertising took over and would continue to exist in some form if ads went away.
Maybe they're valuing inferior products they only prefer due to advertisements?
Imagine how much better our world would look without advertising. Will some adtech devs lose their job? Yes, but honestly it would probably be worth it. They'll find work in a non-scummy industry and can be a net positive for humanity.
> I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
Those are outweighed by the things that don't exist because due to advertising, resources are allocated to less valuable things instead.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
The classic non-argument of conservatives defending the status quo. People who don't depend on advertising for their income just get criticized for selfishly demanding the stop of a practice that doesn't benefit them instead.
I have a SaaS business which exists ONLY because of advertising. It’s highly niche, really the only product that does what it does, and a few dozen people a day click through from Google Ads and find that I have a product to automate something they had been spending hundreds of hours on. You should see the effusive thank you notes I get if you think advertising is pointless. This product wouldn’t exist without Google Ads because I would have no way to find the 50 people a day worldwide who need it.
I won’t even share it’s name, why would I open source it? Lol. It makes a decent amount of money and requires close to 0 engineering know how to build. So no, I will continue to let it make money quietly...
The things I buy may be advertised, but I buy nothing based on ads. I see almost no ads because I pay to remove them from all services that allow me to, and the rest I block.
I search for a product based on its category, read reviews, and find unpaid recommendations from things like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter.
Computers. And if you want to be pedantic, you'll say but they would exist for military etc!!!!!
But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.
Not just computers but everything related to them too.
Companies would absolutely be able to sell stuff without advertising their products. Self education, word of mouth, and 3rd-party informational sources has been enough for a lot of products. Purely informational advertising - the kind you'll see in an extremely old newspaper - would probably not be considered cancerous by the author of this article.
Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see some new information about a product that solved a problem you didn't know how to solve. You'll see problems that you didn't know you had, solved in ways no rational person would expect: Your problem is not enough attractive women making eyes at you? Solution: Buy new car. Your problem is life doesn't consist of exciting parties with cool youths? Solution: Buy light beer. Your problem is you're not a professional race car driver? Solution: Buy chunky watch. And if you missed the message, the same three commercials will air during the next ad break in 6 minutes, and you'll see them when you look at your phone or computer, in the wad of glossy ads cocooned within the thin pages of your newspaper, and you'll hear about them on the radio until the host decides it's time to play another song.
That kind of advertising may be necessary for Budweiser to keep up with Coors, or for Ford to keep up with GM, but if it disappeared tomorrow, people would still know that beer and cars were a thing. People might make smarter choices on how much alcohol to drink and when to be content with their current transportation instead of buying a new car, and sales might go down a little, but that would not spell the end of society.
Oh, sales might go down a little. So GM doesn't advertise their latest model and it doesn't sell as much. No worries. It's not like the livelihood of thousands of people is at stake. They'll just find other jobs. Who cares about them?
Replace GM with a factory, and advertising with dumping toxic waste into the local river. Would you still cry about the lost jobs if someone proposed banning dumping toxic waste into rivers?
Strawman argument. When advertising works it has some upside for everyone (customers, platforms and advertisers), dumping toxic waste only benefits the dumper.
I don't see the upside of the crapton of billboards I pass daily, or the flashing, potentially malware-inducing garbage I would see everywhere on the Internet if I turned my ad blocker.
Advertising has ridiculous externalities; this is what makes it similar to the toxic waste scenario.
That's because companies have abused the ecosystem and created all this garbage. The irony is lost on them that they're going to be less profitable because they've devalued ads so much.
I truly believe we can find an equilibrium which works.
I believe we can find an equilibrium that works too, and that it starts with rolling back almost all advertising "innovation" of the last 100 years.
You'll note the game-theoretical mechanics at play here. If your competitors use garbage advertising, you can't not use it and hope to compete (much like if your competitor is dumping toxic waste to a river, they have advantage over you who tries to safely dispose of it). If one of your competitors invents even more garbagy way of advertising and gains a temporary advantage, everyone will follow suit and the advantage will be cancelled out.
This suggests that simply making it not possible (technically or legally) to engage in garbage advertising won't hurt companies much, and might even be beneficial - companies will still engage in the same competition, but at a cheaper and less invasive level.
There's an anecdote about tobacco companies that I still need to find a proper citation for, but it goes like this: tobacco companies were apparently happy about legal restrictions on advertising, because it was applied to everyone equally, so no one ended up relatively worse off, but now they didn't have to spend so much on advertising anymore.
The two scenarios aren't that different. Sure, poisoning rivers is worse. But my point is that "think of the jobs it supports" is a poor argument for a practice that hurts people at large.
Unless you think that only companies that produce 0 pollution are acceptable, all you have to do is provide the cost/benefit analysis of (no advertising, less employment) vs. (advertising, more employment).
I don't think it's a poor argument, because I don't think "advertising" is hurting "people at large." I think that's a fantasy.
Of course there's some shitty, lame advertising, and there's some "manipulative" crap, and there's shady practices like ad tracking. No one is arguing those are good. Ad people are constantly mocking shitty advertising themselves. But no one is offering better solutions.
I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution. That's a huge opportunity to make billions and make the world a better place that I would support 100%.
Unfortunately, it seems like people are more interested in infantile hot takes and engineering vs. marketing culture war screeds. I'd rather we talked about the above.
Can someone who thinks advertising should disappear explain how they intend their new fangled startup to grow and reach its target market with no form of "advertising" or "marketing", bearing in mind things like opportunity cost and cash flow management? Feel free to include/exclude whatever you want from those labels and explain why.
> Of course there's some shitty, lame advertising, and there's some "manipulative" crap, and there's shady practices like ad tracking. No one is arguing those are good.
The argument I'm making in the article is that it's not some advertising that's manipulative and shady, but that it's almost all of it.
> I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution.
It comes up monthly because it's a problem, particularly on the Internet. But solutions are hard to find, because it's a hard problem. For one, it has prisonner's-dillema-like nature - if you show up with a way to do well without advertising, a competitor will take your method, add advertising to it, and proceed to do even better.
(Scott Alexander once wrote a very long essay specifically about such problems[0], and he didn't figure out anything actionable either. It's a hard problem, and arguably the root of all the big human-caused issues on this planet.)
I have no good solutions and I said that exact thing in the article. If I ever find one, I'll let the world know. Best I can think of now is individual and collective (i.e.: regulatory) ways of resisting and reducing the individual shady practices and negative consequences of those.
The home PC revolution was started in big part by accident when IBM made a computer that was both cheap and easy to clone. They became the leader against other, much better recognized computer brands, clones appeared left and right, and here we are.
They became the leader because their product was a better market fit, and not because of advertising. If anything, PCs actually canibalized the products that IBM was actively trying to market (mainframes come to mind).
And then there's Unix and GNU/Linux, the OS of choice for servers.
Home computers were initially a novelty item, sold mainly through direct-response advertisements in magazines like Popular Electronics. This early hobbyist market created the economies of scale that made a mass market home computer a possibility.
In the late 70s and early 80s, most people simply had no idea why they would want a computer; The first home computer adverts in the mainstream media didn't really sell the benefits of one computer over another, but sold the idea of the computer:
Without that kind of advertising, it's entirely plausible to believe that home computers might have been a fad, with the computer resigned to being a specialist tool for business and industry. There's a parallel universe where the home computer and video game boom never happened because nobody told consumers why they might want a computer, the 6502 and Z80 remained niche microprocessors for embedded applications, Woz went back to HP and Bill Gates finished his degree and got a job at Honeywell.
The fact that people were already reading about electronics in magazines they bought with their own money shows that people would have known what computers were regardless. Those advertisements only worked because the audience was already interested in computers. Those computers also already existed and the notion that no one would have used a computer if an ad didn't tell them to is absurd. Computers exist because they're useful and fun and they were purchased by people who wanted computers and were willing to seek out products they wanted.
"In it's current form" is quite the qualifier. "Hey, computers would probably not look exactly the way they do right now if we had changed something thirty years ago".
I don't know whether there are examples (aside from "the funniest advertisements" shows), but computers certainly aren't one.
Advertising should still be regulated for the stability of society, but regulation is always behind, and is frequently distorted by the folks being regulated.
examples where better regulation is needed: robocalling, pervasive tracking and data sharing, dark advertising patterns, drug marketing, etc.
>This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.
You're asking him to argue against himself rather than put a strong case forward for a position. And you're framing the fact he doesn't as a mental limitation. You're denying the authors agency by asserting it wasn't even a stylistic choice about presentation; he didn't present what you would have so therefore his brain must be broken.
Businesses are made of people, and people have ethics. If you're running one, consider the way you advertise. Are you aiming at making mutually beneficial transactions, or are you just trying to milk you users out of their hard-earned cash? Not all advertising is inherently harmful to individuals or society. Choose the ethical option. It may cost your company some lost profits, but then again, you may gain loyal customers who'll want to reward a honest business.
Indeed. We remove advertising, how many folks lose their jobs that are allowing them a level of self-actualization where they can analyze advertising effects on society at large?
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.
I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
My brother has the same view of advertising as this author but also loves MotoGP and other motorsports and doesn't see the conflict staring him right in the face as sponsor-branded bikes fly past. I agree it's childish and short-sighted, and I'm certain the author would have a different viewpoint if the time came to market his own small business.
Of course, he rides bikes relevant to the series and wears gear from the sponsors involved. Not to mention all of the non-motorbike sponsors like energy drink companies, insurance companies, tech companies etc...
I think LinkedIn is despicable but I have a LinkedIn account because it’s basically expected that you have one for recruiting purposes by many employers.
This argument that you can't criticize anything if you benefit from it is absurd. If he didn't use any technology that comes from companies that advertise, he would never be able to communicate his message in the first place. In fact he wouldn't even be able to leave his home or feed himself, unless he just farmed off the land and made his own clothing. Ridiculous.
I'm not involved in those, I merely use them for obvious reasons almost everyone uses them - network effect. Facebook is the XXI century rolodex (also, I was very young when I got on it, and it looked differently then); LinkedIn account I maintain for the off chance it could be useful in finding a job. Also, that doesn't mean I like how these services work.
I fortunately avoided being ever involved in anything directly related to adtech, and I plan on staying that way.
Using Facebook to talk to your friends is literally a form of exchanging word of mouth. It's not a dating site for me, I don't advertise myself there.
A LinkedIn profile is technically an advertisement, but it's not one I push on people. Someone needs to go and look for it to find it. It's akin to an entry in a product catalog. I consider this kind of advertising to be fine, and I said so in the article.
(Also incidentally, all the jobs I ever had I got through the word of mouth.)
I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
It's a childish and immature opinion really.
Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.