There is a deeper truth that marketing people (like yourself I am guessing?) don't want to admit: what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer, and social media influencers are the most horrid incantation of this dystopian reality.

Note that I distinguish marketing from mere ads, which (one hopes) are just trying to impart information. I have no problem with you saying you have skateboard for sale at $50. When you pay a 19yr old model to stand there looking cool with a sultry look on her face, thats not advertising, its manipulation. Sure it works, its even legal, but it's a very evil thing.

https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).

Advertising - including subsets of advertising like including models or playing on insecurities - is only a small subset of the discipline of "Marketing". Most of Marketing is about finding out what people want and need, how to deliver it, and how to let people know your delivery of their need-fulfillment is available.

Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.

Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.

Free will is highly overstated though: as the parent comment said, everything you think and believe and thus do is linked to a particular social context. That's true for the stuff you buy, the stuff you believe in, the things you think are "wrong" or "right" or "normal" or "abnormal". When you start looking/living in other societies you realise that all of these is just cultural norms.

This is true but it's not cause and effect like OP suggests. If it were then marketing would be a solved problem.

So if we wanted to disprove that, we need to find this one guy that is in the same social groups but believes something fundamentally different?

I think this is overgeneralized and the effect that people agree on a set of believes/values/rules isn't a good indicator of the presence of free will. There might be other mechanisms involved.

But it makes a difference whether you are part of creating a society within which a entities fortune is based on exploiting (and feeding into) the believes of gullible victims or whether you try to create a society in which you try to bring out the best from within the people.

The latter is some sort of humanism, that ultimately resulted in all the things we collectively seem to value about western societies, while the former is more or less responsible for the biggest problems we have.

So even if free will turns out a complete illusion, it would still matter how people treat each other based on that idea. Usually you can amend it to: “Free will is an illusion, at least for those poor idiots who have nobody but themselves to blame for it, which is why it is socially acceptable for me to exploit them”

(This is not aimed at you, it is just a thought that crossed my mind, when I read your comment)

When you have an exploitable information asymmetry, do you exploit others with it, or do you inoculate others to it?

* or do you exploit others with it until you're financially comfortable and morally uncomfortable, at which point you pivot, mea culpa, and educate...

> You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine

I flipped open at random the other day the book 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' and was a bit disturbed by what I read. It was about a particular way of starting a conversation in order to manipulate someone into then finding it difficult to resist your next conversational gambit, with the obvious end goal of parting them from their money against their better judgement or similar. I want to get rich one day and get out, but is this what I need to become to do it?!

Your last sentence is perfect. Get rich and get out. Probably the front and center thought of every tech worker.

Everything that we do in life is a form of marketing and PR. The very way we present ourselves to the world, our body language, how we dress, make up, color and style our hair, stuff that we talk about, it's all an attempt to sell ourselves as better and smarter and sexier than the competition, and we all do it all the time. And for all of us at least part of it is really just plain fake. If you'd apply the same rules used for commercial products on all those happy couples, perfect housewives, cool bros having crazy adventures that you can see all over Facebook, Instagram, etc. they'd all be charged for false advertising. So don't be that hard on people trying to sell you skateboards...

Don't tar everyone with the same brush. There are a lot of people out there who figured out that life is much better when you drop the facade and social media glitz. For obvious reasons they don't exactly shout it from the rooftops, they just go on living their own lives in their own way, detached from advertising, trends and fads.

Marketing is poison, and the sooner a person learns to ignore it and do their own thing instead, the happier they'll be.

I make it a point not to sell myself in superficial ways. I'm privileged not to be hideous to look at, and am not completely uninvested in my image, but I don't chase trends or use self help book tips on how to make people like me. It doesn't really help me to be this way, but I am repulsed by the self perpetuating standard rituals of deference, attention seeking, and status signalling that seem to me to preclude what could be a more genuine form of interpersonal discovery.

I don't do anything for that reason. That sounds like a marketer's projection instead of any objective reality.

It also sounds like the Postmodernist Disease of the Science Wars assuming nothing is real while they write bullshit indistinguishable from a Markov Chain generator output.

The prevalence just shows that - not that it isn't pathological.

Two things:

1. You're putting a lot of very different things in the same bag. Marketing is not advertising, and all advertising is not unethical.

2. I don't know where you work, but I'm willing to bet you're making a living because advertisers are pushing a product or service you build/direct.

If you're going to make this kind of blanket statement, you should at least follow its implications all the way to the endpoint.

Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL. One example is advertising toys to kids during kids programming: most of this is done in a way that makes kids feel left out for not having the toys, relies on FOMO, envy, and molds susceptible children into more jealous and materialistic people. It misleads them with its imagery into thinking they will be extremely happy if they just have that thing. I think that perhaps even the majority of what is done as accepted practice in advertising (across all its forms) is harmful, and further, it will stay that way because the $ales a campaign generates are the only measure of success as far as success is rewarded.

>Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL

Hard to disagree with that, but this is very different from the parent poster's claim.

That depends if the ad is just presenting something or the marketeer engages in further "perception management" (I don't know the jargon).

This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness".

Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.

The parent made a pretty blanket statement that marketing is wrong.

There are bad marketers as there are bad programmers, bad lawyers and bad physicians, but we don't jump to 'all programming is bad'.

Didn't say that all marketing or even the majority is wrong. Just that there are bad practices.

Yes, it very much depends. That's precisely the point.

Free will is an illusion.

It's an illusion to any given organism, from the outsiders meta kind of view, sure, but in the context of your own reality, it's real. Your decision making depends in ways on believing you have decisions to make. Not having a sense of free will can have some negative consequences, whether or not you believe we are actually deciding anything or just a function of our inputs.

I feel strongly compelled to disagree with you...

> https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).

Let me guess, Bill Hicks, right? Anyway, this is a straw man of what marketing actually is.

Marketing is the process of finding out what a customer wants and finding the most efficient way to deliver it. What you've described is advertising.

Marketing is never about finding what customer wants, it’s about making customer want a thing marketer wants to sell.

Marketing isn't intrinsically evil. The positive side, for example, might be showing people how great switching to wireless headphones is going to be, (justifying the expense) and then hey what do you know these really are awesome!

Marketing at its best is helping people see how a product fills a need or makes their life better in a way that might not have been clear at first.

If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.

You seriously want a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker. The only reason you don't know that you want one is because you didn't grow up in Winnipeg. But trust me. You want one. It's a shame that you will read this on HN and you will dismiss it as a stupid joke and you almost certainly won't go out and order a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker -- all because you didn't watch 100's of hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings in Winnipeg (or probably you'd be good in Regina or even Calgary... I'm not sure).

Yeah, it's crazy, but there is something noble about letting people know that there is good stuff that can help them in ways that they can't imagine yet. It's doubly good if that helps you run a business that makes a truly useful product.

I don't know anything about Hunky Bill (I just noticed he lived in Vancouver! WTH... Can I really trust him?) But that perogie maker. Yep. Good as gold.

But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.

I'll admit that I heartily agree with you there. I think my only point was that marketing is not inherently bad. It's just the extremes that we take it to.

This is ridiculous. There are about a zillion products and brands out there that people didn't know about until they found out through marketing.

Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC

Jesus surrounded himself with lepers, whores and thieves. I'm sincerely not trolling here, I just don't see a point in preaching only to the choir. I respect values of information here, like how Snowden landing in Honk Kong was announced here before any other website. But comfort zones, echo chambers, safe spaces and news bubbles are the same as any gated community, in that they block out most of reality by design. Including quite a lot of truth.

Thirty years ago nobody knew why they should care about the internet. Fifteen years ago nobody understood why they should get a smartphone. New technology often has to initially answer the question of "Why should I care", even if it's obvious in retrospect. You could wait around for people to figure it out on their own, or you could help them.

Just as an illustration, if you watched the show Silicon Valley, this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.

> or you could help them.

What you call help is not what I would call help - using a wealth of scientific literature to design information that when conveyed can optimally take advantage of statistically likely emotional or physiological triggers to exploit people into buying something they didn't already want is evil.

Marketing as a concept could make some sense in information scarce environments like the era before global instant communication between anyone anywhere to any number of people. Since then, absolutely nobody has asked the question "I don't know what to spend my money on, I sure wish a corporation would suggest something".

Quite, but those aren't the only things being done by companies (or indeed smartphones!)

Cynicism is easy, but the truth is that there are useful, helpful things out there, and that making people aware of this is not intrinsically wrong.

Exactly, we've all been shepherded here and now have nothing to show for it but increased rates of cancer, illiteracy and suicide. All thanks to PR.

> this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.

Is this the "decentralized internet" product, or the initial Pied Piper product? SV the show is very accurate in some ways, but how did it take them until Season 2 to discover that average consumers don't give a crap about a hard-to-use, seemingly B2B-focused app that compresses their pictures?

> Marketing isn't intrinsically evil.

No it isn't. It's just a shame that 99.99% of the industry are ruining it for the rest of them.

Advertising a new product or service is great, but showing me the ads over and over again is manipulation. Creating a brand to get people emotionally invested is manipulation. Almost the entire industry is manipulating people to buy something they didn't want, spend more than they should have (including the costs that marketing adds to the product) or trying to convince them to buy from you instead of someone else.

Marketing is a subset of the Exploitation Economy, which is effectively a global cult now.

Everything in the exploitation economy is evil. But then most previous attempts at large-scale human organisation have been evil too, in their own ways.

It's possible to have a humane non-exploitation economy, and it might even be possible for it to include some marketing. But it would look very different to the economy we have today.

How exactly is exploitation defined? That term has been awfully watered down to the point a miller buying wheat, grinding it to flour, and then selling the flour qualifies because the farmer doesn't get paid a second time - despite doing the miller doing useful work and the fact a farmer can always mill themselves with just flat stones if the deal is so bad.

They may be staple tactics, but they are by no means universal tactics. Just as you realize right from wrong, so do others. And some of us have to solve marketing problems.

Are you suggesting goebbels was evil?

> what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer

For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation").

I personally like 'tptacek's definition of marketing (at least within the tech area he was in at the time):

> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024678

That definition describes the field much more reasonably.

The cognitive dissonance in marketing starts very early. I read this book cover to cover in a previous startup life (1) because it was a recommended first year college text in marketing. I have it in front of me right now. They define marketing as "the process by which companied create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return" (page 5). Then, in chapter 15, they have a detailed case study spanning multiple pages of the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" ads Apple ran a few years ago. These are some direct quotes from that book, though I have shortened them somewhat, without changing any of the overall tone or message:

"The ads portrayed Mac as a young, hip, laid back guy in a hoodie, whereas PC was a stodgy, befuddled, error-prone, middle-aged nerd... not surprisingly, adroit and modern Mac always got the best of outdated and inflexible PC ... The campaign produced results... less than 2 years later its [market] share had doubled... the cool campaign also helped boost customer value perception... Good advertising wasn't the only thing contributing to Apple's success..."

That campaign clearly had nothing to do with 'creating customer value'. It was a smear campaign. Yet in the same textbook these marketing academics praise it as great advertising. There is a laughably tiny section on ethics (2 paragraphs) at the end of the chapter which simply has open-ended questions, no guided discussion or anything.

It should surprise no-one that marketers have a fantastic bullshit story to convince people marketing is some kind of force for good. It is after all their job. Most amusingly I think they have largely pulled the same trick on themselves.

(1) - https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-14th-Philip-Kotl...

-- For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation"). --

Marketing professionals absolutely use manipulative predatory tactics like that on the people they are trying to convince to buy their products. Just because you nonsensically try to suggest otherwise, doesn't magically make it so.

What's even less shocking is that it has real limitations in that, once trust is lost by a bad actor in one area of marketing, all other areas are suddenly seen as untrustworthy as well. That is the reason marketing only tends to work on younger people with little to no previous experience being targeted for the hard sell.

You can't distance yourself from people who use predatory advertising as a means to increase the "awarenes" metric any more than you can claim marketing isn't actually selling anything.....

> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.

Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.

I agree with everything you're saying but this:

> How is the "influencer game" different from ads?

Big difference -> ads are specifically marked as advertisements as legally required. The legislation is wildly inconsistent for influencers (#ad etc)

Last decade, legislation settled on requiring bloggers to disclose all sponsored posts.

> feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place.

Just because they take place here doesnt mean everyone here is involved in these discussions.

> humans are at not rational

Thank god! I think we got lucky there...

I agree with influencers making a difference and we see something analogous to buying clicks here. This will distort perception further. Fringe topics will suddenly seem to be important to lot of (fake) people. This will distort perception heavily.

Influencers aren’t ads. Influencers are product placement.

Oh you thought it was a coincidence that every desk in MI5 has a Curvoiser bottle always pointing at the camera? Or that Black Panther chases a Mercedes not a Maseratti?

No such thing as a brand shown by accident.

The funny thing is aggressive copyright law is to blame for it and lawyers forcing "brand x-ing". Without it we might see more "organic" classification intended to reflect the character like the old noir smoking cliches. Sure there would be manipulations still but it wouldn't be approved as a norm and other intrusions like "don't show the fancy sports car getting dented after ramming a gunman at 120 mph".

I’m reminded that ET’s iconic candy was Reese’s Pieces instead of M&Ms because Mars said no.

There are different audiences out there and the "metrics" reflect some of them but not others.

Simplified version.

Type 1: Think that metrics (followers, friends, likes, reposts...) have meaning. Pursue that meaning. Have no effective moral structure. Maybe are dumb.

Type 2: Don't care about metrics. Find a way to get something that they actually like out of the systems. Have some moral structure.

Much discussion assumes that all users are dominated by their Type 1 side. Type 2's are invisible to the analyst.

Me I say. If everybody is genuinely Type 1 it's time to can "Project Mankind" and start again. Fortunately I know that there are Type 2's out there.

That's all fair enough. I think the root of the complaint is that the influencers that people find objectionable just aren't very good at influencing, however that may be defined. Nobody appreciates blatant, yet poorly executed, attempts at marketing.