> There seems to be this idea that advertising is “shoved down our throats”

For me it's not that ads are being "shoved down my throat". Even 'unobtrusive' ads are fucking annoying. They are a waste of space and bandwidth.

I have never bought anything because of an advert. If I want something, I search for a variety of competing products, compare the prices and features etc. and then choose the one that best suites my needs.

Showing me a product that exists, will never make me want to buy it. That information is completely useless to me. If I want something I will go look for it. It mustn't find me, and then assume I want it, because then I will hate it.

Please know that the more advertising I see for a product, the less likely I am to ever do business with your company. If you want my business, just provide easily accessible and clear information about all your products/services on _your_ website.

I understand parent commenter (who I agree with) and I are outliers, but the utility of advertising to me boils down to one comparison.

advantage of product discovery << lying and inappropriate product suggestion noise

I appreciate the discovery aspect has some value (to customers), but I'd assert that it's always less than the latter two detractors

Purely anecdotal, but my experience with Instagram ads has actually been useful. I have run as blockers since i learned they existed and the only place I see ads now is Instagram (I don’t use Facebook proper). Adverisisers have figured out that I run a marketing agency, and I have found dozens of helpful and informative ads through Instagram that show me what others are doing in my business, offer free strategies, or provide software that can make my business run more efficiently and provide better results for my clients. Without these ads I never would have found out about these valuable services and products.

Of course I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, it’s useful and ads value to my business. On the other hand, I agree that in the main ads are intrusive annoying and slow down pages, serve malware etc etc. Plus the privacy implications. But for Instagram specifically, I find many ads I see useful and they are never intrusive since they are native to the platform. Instagram is a product I enjoy using and it’s free. I don’t see why the company that runs it shouldn’t make money on the product, esp since the ads they serve are (sometimes) relevant and useful and reasonable in number.

I will continue to run ad blockers on every other site though because I do not find this to be the case anywhere else besides Instagram.

I find that there is often a problem of quality in products advertised.

It may be products floating in Amazon searches because of fake reviews, sites with great SEO, and most ads online really.. none of those correlate to quality of product.

Then entire point was to make finding things easy, but I find that advertising just makes that harder.

In September I was looking for a Volleyball club in Paris for people in their 30s, as I wanted a fixed team with whom I'd share interests. My searches failed me horribly. Google and Duckduckgo mostly fed me news articles, competition stuff and some big club websites. Then my local mayor's office site had a totally out of date page, and did not list clubs closeby but outside its district.

Eventually I went to a local sports fair to meet up with clubs, but almost none of them offered adults teams, because that's typically a young people's sport.

I the end, I did find a place for me, by talking to people at the mayor's office, and random players at the fair.

And often when I look for an object, it takes a very long time because quality products rarely float above the rest. It's excrutiating.

So now I hate advertising, and I hate ratings. They are noise designed to mess up with human psychology.

Yes this is a big problem. Particularly for google searches. Now that there is so much money at stake for being the top of google results, the best information often gets buried because the people who stand to make the most money have the biggest budgets and are able to spend thousands on SEO. I’m not really sure what the solution is. Google has become “the internet” for billions of people and its utility for finding information has gone down (in my opinion) not up. Now everything at the top is sponsored, or a big aggregator like TripAdvisor or yelp.

As someone who works in advertising I try to do my part by only taking clients that I trust sell something quality and do business with integrity. I could make a lot more money if I just sold anything and everything. I know people that market tobacco products on Facebook, for example. Those contracts are extremely lucrative, but I simply could not feel good about promoting those products.

I would not be able to do what I do (from a moral standpoint) if I just advertised for everyone. I enjoy what I do because I am able to promote people and companies that do something positive. There are a lot of scammers in my business, and I was tired of watching the least honest people get the best results (because they can afford top agencies) and the smaller clients actually doing something positive get screwed by dishonest marketing people.

Do you still make a buck? Aren't you drowned by big players?

I think advertising works best when you don't actually care what you're buying.

You're in the toothpaste aisle at the store. There are 47 different brands that all cost $3 for a tube. It literally doesn't matter what you buy, they're all fine, and if for some reason the toothpaste is awful in some way, you are not out much money... and even then, even the most avid tooth brusher is only affected for four minutes a day. So you probably buy whatever the manufacturer paid to have placed at eye level, or what you have a coupon for, or what you saw an ad for. Yeah, you're being manipulated, but does it really matter? The only thing it really does is raise the barrier of entry for new manufacturers of toothpaste; until they can make their manufacturing process as efficient as the competition, they will not be able to spend as much on advertising. It is unfortunate, but what can you do? The tubes of toothpaste have to be presented in the store (or online) in some order, and the store makes more money if they just order it by amount paid. I just don't think there's any way you could ever get around it. And, of course, if you have strong feelings about toothpaste you'll just ignore the ads and buy the kind you like.

It also works for things like online stores. If you have a specific product in mind but you're searching for it, you probably don't super care where you buy it from. Especially if you look at something like cameras -- the manufacturers all specify minimum prices, which everyone sells it for, so it doesn't cost you money to buy it form store X instead of store Y. So you just go where you're told to go. Again, some stores have enough profitability to be able to keep the lights on AND buy an ad, while some don't. It's not really your problem. If all the camera stores went out of business because ads were too expensive and they couldn't get business any other way, you would just buy from the manufacturer. The ads just serve to make a decision for you that you obviously don't care about.

Then there's a third category, things you actually care about. Say my keyboard broke and I wanted to buy a new one. I didn't forget everything I know about keyboards. I know I like Topre switches better than Cherry switches, so that pretty much limits my choice to a handful of manufacturers. If I was searching for a Topre keyboard and saw an ad for Cherry keyboard, I probably won't give it a second thought. I already know what I like and no advertising is going to change my mind. And indeed, if I search for "keyboard" and click through to shopping, all the ads are targeted at people that don't care what keyboard you get. One is a piano. The next is some glowy thing that connects to your iPhone. Then there's one for $2.99. If you don't care, this probably helps you get the decision over with and some sort of input device in your hands. I wouldn't enjoy a $3 keyboard with free same-day delivery (how can that possibly be profitable, btw), but the ads aren't for me. For someone that literally doesn't care, the $3 keyboard is probably the right choice. I'm sure the $3 keyboard that doesn't have an ad is slightly better than the $3 keyboard that does have an ad... but it probably doesn't matter.

I dunno; the TL;DR is that I don't really care about ads. Either something matters enough to spend hours reading forums, asking friends, shopping around, finding somewhere to try before you buy... or it doesn't matter enough and you just take what you're given. Either way, I don't feel that advertising is ruining my life in any way. Yeah, we should probably spend the money inventing some sort of cure for all known diseases or feeding the poor... but I doubt that if advertising went away that's where the money would go.

Heartily agree! The major upside of conversion tracking and auction advertising on the business end is enabling smaller businesses to compete.

One of my personal highlights was an AdWords campaign was where one conversion delivered 14x ROI for the entire campaign, even though we were a small player - if we couldn't attribute that, getting sign off would've been nearly impossible.

Certainly not. And I wouldn’t take on a client that wanted to do that because it’s unethical. Not to mention Facebook doesn’t provide obesity or anything close to that as a targeting criteria. We advertise for a lot of yoga studios for example. We also advertise yoga teacher trainings etc.

I guess I just want to point out that not all advertising is unscrupulous. My clients do business honestly and sell something that is highly valuable that people want. If people click on my ads, I know that they are buying an experience or product that they will enjoy. Not to say there’s not a lot of shady stuff going on like you describe, because there absolutely is. And believe me I am more against it than anyone because it makes every one of us who do business honestly and promote other businesses who do the same look bad.

>not all advertising is unscrupulous

That's a strawman. But even if the businesses you work for are decent, they are nevertheless in competition, a "race to the bottom" if you will, with unscrupulous ones. And even if the consequences of a hypothetical overhyped-but-mediocre yoga class are not dire, there are many products for which this is not the case (smoking, skydiving, sugary drinks, surgery, etc).

If you’re saying that are participating in a capitalistic marketplace, then yes that’s true as it is true for every business in the United States. Putting our feelings about the system in place aside, people still want things, and businesses have missions besides a profit motive. Not all of them, again I’m speaking only for myself. I had a conversation with the founder of a yoga school, one of our clients, and I told him that we could raise our prices a little bit because they were having some cash flow issues and their prices were far below market. This is one of the oldest, best and most reputable schools in the world. And he said “no, I know we could but that’s not why I started this. I like to keep it cheap so people can afford to come here”.

His mission is not profit driven. Sure, he has to make money to keep the place open, pay teachers etc. But his mission is to get more people doing yoga. Whether you think yoga is a worthy cause or not is besides the point.

Facebook and google are hugely important for him so people can find out about their offering. I know this guy is an outlier, but I think it’s an important thing to remember that good people out there are doing good things with the power of Facebook ads.

Obesity has strong, clearly understood, negative effects on health. Ads trying to illicit change in those regards aren't necessarily unscrupulous.

Once upon a time, not so long ago (within your parents lifetime if not your own), all advertising by medical providers was considered illicit and prohibited by standards of professional conduct.

It's interesting to see how attitudes have changed.

Seriously? What are you talking about? Have you ever used online advertising before? The fact that you can show it, the fact that you can point directly from any specific ad campaign to the exact set of results it generated, is literally the whole point of what makes online advertising so valuable.

Do you mean that I can’t show that my ads produce positive return? Or that I can’t show that my clients are able to advertise in a way that wasn’t possibly before? Of course my experience is anecdotal, but I assure you that both of the above are true (for myself and for my clients, and for many others in my business)

Clay please email me as well [email protected]

Can you email me? [email protected]

I'm confused. Are you saying he can't show that online advertising has leveled the playing field, or that he can't show that conversions attributed to his ads make 5 times the money it costs to employ his services?