Here's the thing...

I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:

Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.

Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.

No amount of advertising will be able to convince you to like something that you dislike. Advertising is manipulative, but it's not mind control.

But advertising is not trying to (for example) make you like cola if you don't like cola. What it's trying to do is make you choose one brand of cola over another.

For certain types of advertising, such as soft drinks, they're aiming to influence a particular moment. As a Pepsi executive once explained, they're aiming for that half-second when you're reaching for a soft drink and are making a spur-of-the-moment decision about which one. That sort of advertising is about influencing that spur-of-the-moment decision so you're more likely to choose theirs. It's effective because, in the absence of thought, you're overwhelmingly likely to choose a brand that you recognize the most or have the most positive associations with.

That's what ads are for. To get everyone to know that they live in a reality where your product exists.

I find this quite easy and intuitive. I'm not against advertisement at all. I've seen and remembered several advertisements but they almost never offer a product compelling enough to buy. When an ad does offer me something I actually want, I'll buy it (this happens for far less than 1% of my spending).

and yes, i'm well aware of how advertisements influence our perception of brands. but how is it effective if I never buy anything that has a brand? and when I do buy, I usually never have a choice: Utilities, etc

I have a 15" macbook pro that may have been aggressively marketed by Apple. But once again, I had no choice. the reason I bought it is because I'm a developer who used to create IOS apps and I needed the development environment to build apps (no choice but to use apple machines for that).

Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.

>Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.

[0] https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-effect

This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" -- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.

By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.

A similar story applies to other things that we consider so normal today that we don't even think about them, like deodorants, women shaving their legs and armpits, etc.

All of these things only became common because of advertising.

But at scale, at the level of a population, an expectation of individual rationality loses out to the realities of these manipulative techniques. On an individual level they might not work, but on a population level they tend to work.

If a population is being manipulated by political propaganda, then yes it's good advice to an individual to think critically / rationally. But that only affects change on the tiniest margin. The propagandists will still win overall.

You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.

That's like saying stopping rape is easy, just don't reward it. It completely ignores the non-consensual nature of the interaction. Except advertising is even worse, because at least rape victims are aware they have been victimized, people that are manipulated by advertising don't even know it. In fact, if you ask, almost everyone will say "advertising doesn't work on me." If that were true, then why do companies spend billions on it?

Is this any different from the free market arguments about how regulation is bad, and the customer must inform themselves about literally everything and every consequence, with convenient disregard for the fact that it's impossible for a person to learn everything, and that it turns into a way to assign blame rather than to make the world a better place to live?

Why should "you must think for yourself" become a justification for you to be allowed to show advertising to me continually?

taking bad deals like minimum wage etc.

The only reason there are minimum wages, is because people fought for them, and refused to take even worse deals.

Stop categorizing it as a tax-deductible business "expense".

It's not a requirement for doing business, and it should not be treated as such.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with being bombarded with advertising from cradle to grave.

Literally no one can do that for everything. The world is too complicated and, depending on the area, there are either too many or too few choices available.

I don't think they're making much money off me. They still keep advertising at me.