I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.
The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.
My every interaction with my environment doesn't involve millions of trained professionals bent to the sole purpose of influencing my actions.
Outside of ads, that is.
I'm not saying that ads are particularly ethical, but I struggle to think of a replacement that isn't more paywalls. This is an easy decision to make for people that have the money, but is much harder for the majority of Americans. A Vox article [1] estimates that this would add an average of $35 a month, assuming every US adult paid this cost (which is a bold assumption).
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/24/18715421/internet-free-...
It was something I was interested in; I wouldn't have know about it without the advertising. We had an exchange of services for money.
How is this wrong?
Sure there are deceitful practices in advertising, but you're painting everyone with the same broad brush. IMHO, it is best to address the negative aspects of advertising instead of restricting communication from vendors to potential consumers.
When I search "good USB charger" in Google and get an ad, click the ad and make a purchase for a USB charger, how was that nothing something I normally would do?
There's absolutely deceptive advertising, but to pretend all advertising is "intrusive" and "convincing you to do things you wouldn't normally do" is disingenuous.
Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in the form of toys.
Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? Why is brand recognition such an influential thing when it comes to making purchasing decisions? Why do children beg their parents for certain toys? Why do adults pick TGI Friday's over the diner next door?
Ads.
EDIT: I think it's worth flipping the question a bit as well. Why would companies pay for ads if they had no value, if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.
The minimum advertisement is essentially: "we sell ____."
I guess that could be called manipulative but without it, I'm not sure the economy could exist.
How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
> Why do folks trust some brands, and not others?
So then why even have a brand to begin with? Are you suggesting we just ban all advertising altogether? When you start a new company, new market, new idea, then what would you suggest that isn't advertising for a company to do to explain to customers what it is you do and how you may help them?
Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the argument no good.
> How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good. All it guarantees is that they paid the most to get your eyeballs on that particular search.
This is where you lost me. You assume:
1. There is a free service that allows you to search products. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
2. There is a free service that allows you to read product reviews. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
> To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good.
And please do tell me, where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.
Even a Turkish Bazaar merchant will tell you that the tube of toothpaste they're selling you last only a month.
That an alternative is not easily available, does not somehow make the existing services ethical.
That said, and the mystical service is called your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/etc. It ain't perfect, but it's remarkably effective. In the 2-300 people in your first and second degree networks, there's probably a few anecdotes to help you find a good product.
It even has a neat name: word of mouth.
Tangent, but damn I wish reviews were reliable nowadays. They've fallen to deceitful practices like fake reviews, and are no better than advertising nowadays.
I work at a company that is trying to introduce a new kind of product, one that I sincerely believe is intended to help people rather than _just_ make money (this is unusual for me, because i'm usually extremely cynical about motivations). The problem is that most potential customers we could help aren't even aware that what we're offering exists, they may not even think to find out if such a thing exists. How do we create awareness of this thing without advertising?
Unfortunately, more widespread and effective advertising has real costs that end up raising prices. Coke’s premium over sugar water is backed up by their advertising spend.
Tracking, manipulation, etc are major downsides to advertising. But, even purely informative adds on TV aren’t free.
Whether true or not, it will convince you to top off your tank, and potentially purchase some things from the shop.
To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive. On the other hand T-Shirt advertising can convince you to buy significantly more clothes in a lifetime.
It’s a qualitative difference even if I didn’t express it well.
> To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive.
City/state/national tourism bureaus are taking care of that part. With help from the automobile industry's marketing arm.
It’s little different than a hospital sign. People don’t think hey there’s a hospital maybe I should have this gaping chest wound taken care of. Which is why they end up as H’s with a simple arrow rather than list out which specific hospital etc.
my take on this is to call advertisements/marketing as "lies" on regular conversations. "I watched a lie from nike the other day..."
I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
nit: that's my family's joint income. My individual income is at https://www.jefftk.com/money
(I've been putting my income online since 2008 when my salary was $65k. https://www.jefftk.com/p/salary-publicy for why I think more people should share their incomes.)
Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to take it, even if people call me evil.
However, the mental gymnastics to write an article like this does bother me. It's the same stuff probably everyone else in ads and other evil industries does to justify their actions. Reading something non-satirical like this makes me feel less good about the world.
You’re way off base here. The author links to the Effective Altruism page on “giving to earn” one link deep in: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
This is a well established concept, the idea is that in many life situations you can maximize your positive impact by taking a well-paying job and putting that money into charity.
So the arrow of causation is the opposite to what you are claiming; starting with the desire to give to charity, what job optimizes the amount that can be given?
It’s disheartening to see the cynicism that is being directed towards someone that is transparently advocating for making the world a better place, and taking the time to put their thinking in public to seek feedback on it.
The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.
Let's not blame engineers for what is effectively a political issue. If ads are an issue, let's get the law to handle it.
If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law.
There are some circumstances where you think something is wrong, but not doing it would be impossible or require really drastic life changes. For example, maybe you think driving a gas-powered car is wrong because it contributes to climate change, but you can't afford to buy an electric car or move somewhere that doesn't require a car. This is not one of those cases. The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.
The way I look at it is like so:
I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and compensating for that giving the money we make to other organizations that are definitely contributing positively. While this is better than not doing so, I think it misses out on the leverage that exists in what we build vs. the money we're paid for it.
For example, despite making over $500k last year, we know your employer thinks you are producing more value than that, because otherwise they wouldn't pay you that much. You would be a drag on their income statement otherwise. What this means is that even if you donated 100% of your salary to charity, you still aren't taking advantage of the leverage of what you can build, vs. the fixed amount you can earn.
If instead, you choose to work on something which is inherently good for society, society at large benefits from that leverage. You might be paid less, say $200k instead of $500k. But since the positive value you produce is leveraged you could be contributing, let's say, $1M of positive value for society - $200k to pay you to live in the bay area ($800k net positive value).
Just something to think about.
If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
Yes, but software skills are fairly fungible. Just because you currently work on ads doesn't mean that's all your skills are good for, or even that you need to work anywhere in ecommerce.
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
He specifically said he doesn't do that. Did you finish the article?
"My sins are forgiven as long as I tithe some of my profits". Buys your way out of the issue, doesn't change the lifestyle.
The question is really how do you count all that excess "value", and is it good-value or evil-value. Once upon a time, the culture over there explicitly stated that they didn't want it to be evil... the bikeshedding going on here is opinions about the current implications of it all.
Some might find
1. all advertising unethical
2. targeted advertising unethical
3. not consider advertising unethical
4. consider the product that is being advertised
Could you be more specific about what you think the ethical issue is? I've seen many comments describing very different ethical objections, from several perspectives, and I'm not sure which one is yours?
The is actually what I like about Brave's solution, which is:
- no ads by default.
- if you have money and want to pay for the content you consume, you can load money into the browser and have it automatically dispense to publishers/creators based on which content you consume for how long, determined locally on your machine so no privacy leakage there.
- or if you don't have enough to justify paying all those creators directly you can turn on (again) privacy focused ads, where analysis for targeting only happens locally in the browser.
But from what I've seen, HN really hates Brave so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I kinda mean a better alternative to funding all this stuff.
I tend to think we'd be just fine without this "stuff." The internet still worked when the only advertising was banner ads that didn't run code on my machine. In a lot of ways, it worked better.
Citation needed.
You're criticizing the author for not addressing the "actual ethical issue", yet you yourself are failing to even state what you think it is.
There is absolutely zero societal consensus that advertising is unethical, in the way there is a consensus that fraud or murder are.
To the contrary -- there is vast disagreement around the ethics of online advertising, delicately balancing concerns around societal good, access to information, funding, factuality, bias, tracking, privacy, and consent. The incredible complexity of the issues involved is pretty much proof that there is nothing merely "prima facie" at all.
Advertising is not 'prima facie' unethical. It's actually a societal good. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you can set aside your emotions with regards to the discussion, and view it from a distance, it's not too hard to show.
To start off, I've never actually met anyone who doesn't want advertising at all (despite their claims). They just use the term advertising to refer to those kinds of advertisements they don't like, or find too intrusive.
Advertising is, at it's base, finding a way to deliver a message to someone who is doing something else. Thus, getting rid of advertising means no more signs on buildings (yes, being forced to read the name of a store as you walk down the street is a form of advertising). Even if you were willing to accept how difficult this would make it to discover businesses (life harder for the end user), this would make it nigh impossible for new entrants to any market. That means that pretty much all commerce would be funneled into a few catch-all stores, and not only would the economy suffer, but consumer power would be greatly diminished.
Advertising indirectly improves the quality of life of people who have more time than money. (Generally the less money you have in total, the more advertising benefits you.) This is because advertising as a source of revenue is a useful tool to amortize the cost of a product over many users. Free-to-watch TV would be mostly non-existent without advertising, not to mention all of the internet services like search and news; also consider free newspapers like the Metro or 20 Minutes.
That doesn't mean that I don't understand what people really get worked up about. Let's forget spam and obnoxious blinking signs, or having to punch the monkey. It's like how knives are great in the hands of chefs, but not murderers. Crime is crime, and someone like the poster of this article is not trying to defend those kinds of practices.
Let's get into what people tend to get really worked up about: customized advertising. However, it's not the customized advertising that really bothers people, it's the fear of abuse of tracking. In a world where customized advertising was perfected, you would see 95% less ads. Why? Every ad you see that isn't a match is a waste for everyone involved. The business doesn't want to pay, because you aren't interested, and the user doesn't want to see it, because it's distracting and wastes your time.
But still, tracking, that bothers you, right? You don't want an advertiser to know your kink, right?
Well, what if the advertiser is the store that happens to serve whatever your kink is? People shop in adult stores, and they have no problem letting the store know that they're interested in their wares, so clearly it's not just the stores learning that is the problem. The problem is the abuse. People want to choose who they trust to share information with, and don't wish to risk. But... if you're clicking on an ad from some store that delivers your own brand of kink, you're okay sharing that with them, so what's the problem?
Well, as an example, maybe if you're a teacher you don't want your community to know that you like buying purple teddy bears because it might cost you your job. You're okay shopping in a purple teddy bear store... but if the purple teddy bear store had advertising that only targeted teachers, suddenly someone knows that you're a teacher that likes purple teddy bears, and you consider that dangerous.
So yes, abuse is a problem. This is why advertisers actively engage in trying to solve the abuse problem. This is why the advertising industry is looking for ways to move forward.
Yes, they also fight the change, because in their own eyes, they're trustworthy (to at least their own standards), and change is hard and expensive. But that doesn't make advertising unethical, 'prima facie' or otherwise.
Ads are the consumers choice. Given a choice between paying for something or ads, they will chose the ads. So they get ads. That's mostly why we are where we are.
Many of the negative externalisatons are a matter of application, moreover, there are a variety of opinions on what is appropriate and not. For example, I don't care if Facebook uses my behaviour on Facebook to decide what ads to run, as long as that is otherwise anonymous, private and protected. Others will have differing opinions but I think most regular Americans, Europeans etc. have a variety of views but mostly not centred around the notion that ads are inherently evil.
The problem, of course, is that this closer inspection didn't happen.
The biggest problem is that you are shipping and forcing something users, in most cases, don’t want. It’s like pornography and illicit drugs in that yes eventually there are some beneficial edge case side effects, but almost universally it is bad. In order to increase market penetration you must become more bad and simultaneously sell it as a positive.
This isn’t a universal truth. Users are willing to accept advertising as a payment in exchange for media or something similar. This isn’t evil so long as it isn’t violating privacy, is immediately apparent without deception, and is voluntarily accepted by the audience.
I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? The result is closer to a self-indictment than an apology.