Advertising works at a subconscious level. The more you see a product, the more you subconsciously learn to like and trust the product, especially if you are being exposed to that product in a trusted context (popular celebrity posing with it, etc).

I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

> still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

The claim you're responding to is not that they won't allow it to influence their decisions, but that they will actively refuse to even consider a product if they learned about it through an ad.

Most of the ads I encounter are through podcasts because I don't watch TV and ad blockers of various kinds apply everywhere else. I will never use or recommend Squarespace for any purpose, simply on principle.

Which principle?

Similar to endisneigh I take as many steps as I possibly can to avoid letting advertising influence me. I block ads wherever possible, and anything that slips through goes on a shit-list of companies that I will avoid buying from unless I have no other choice.

So if you see an ad about something, you never recommend it. Sounds like you let advertising influence you quite a bit.

Sure, if you're going to insist on an overly literal reading of my words.

Advertising is mental pollution. Reacting against it isn’t the same thing as being influenced to consume what they’re hocking.

Where can I buy some of your Bitcoins, please?

Maybe its reverse psychology by competitors

Not rewarding the awful ad-tech ecosystem is a good principle.

I don't think you can say this in general. I really, really dislike ads, but they _do_ sponsor a lot of content creators which could otherwise not focus on their content creation and they help companies to get their product known to you - which does not need to be a negative. If they sell you a product which genuinely improves your life, it's a win-win-win for you, the producer and the person advertising.

The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.

The mafia was also famous for its community outreach and charity, that didn't make it a net positive.

Yes, but the key difference is that the mafia is, by definition, a criminal organization and the upside is not linked in any way with being a mafia. Ads, on the other hand, do inherently have the positive quality of showing you products and could exist without their current downsides.

Regardless of their current downsides (which are indeed considerable!), ads by definition are there to make me want to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise want to buy. That’s not exactly noble, even if we pretend that they’re just showing me stuff I wasn’t aware of.

> That’s not exactly noble

That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!

Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.

Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.

As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.

It’s especially true of me when I’m making a purchase where I don’t already have a favorite brand. I know I gravitate towards the most familiar thing, which may be the deodorant brand I saw a friend using (true story).

I mean, it's a valid signal. The same way you may ask your friends for a dentist recommendation.

>I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.

If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.

Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.

Opposite for me, I go out of my way to avoid brands that drown me in ads. I don’t mind the occasional ad, that’s just nature of doing business. It’s the ads that are nonstop in your face or the forced viral campaigns.

Coke stopped buying advertising once. Cause everyone already knows about them, so why pay for ads? Their sales dropped dramatically. Now they pay for lots of ads.

Different context but in 2012 eBay stopped buying keyword search ads and nothing happened

https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...

That's only surprising if you mistakenly imagine ads to be about competition. Instead, ads are about getting you to consume things you don't need, and since no one needs Coke,lless advertising -> less sales overall. Of course, that's only a bad thing for Coke, and should be encouraged actually.

citation?

Yeah, I do this too. I don't know why or how, but on a subconscious level, my brain registers online ads as something bad / malicious, and so anything I see through an ad is automatically labelled as bad.

I even freak out if I accidentally click on an ad on mobile because I feel as if I have downloaded a piece of malware.

I don't know where this comes from...possibly due to having been there back when many ads really were malware? I am not sure.

wait so if I showed you an ad for every product in existence you would buy nothing at all?

poster didn't say anything of the sort. but given the situation you're constructing, i'd expect they'd buy only what's necessary and all things being equal from the one that advertised least.

Yeah, precisely. In that case I'd only buy what I need. If there are multiple sources / alternatives, I'd buy from the one that advertised the least. If they all advertised equally, I'd probably ask people I know which one they found the best and research on the best alternative.

Whenever someone tells me a video URL that I decide to invest time in looking at, Grammarly or Liberty Mutual will tend to barge in, and interrupt whatever flow that was.

Sure, I remember the brand names. And I'm going to be sure to remember that those brands spent a lot of money wasting my time.

This one really ticks me off for two reasons:

I now understand that ads are purposefully nonsensical and annoying because they’re stickier that way. The ostrich in the insurance ads doesn’t have any damn thing to do with their product, but because it’s out of the ordinary my mind is left to absorb it, wondering, what was that ostrich doing there. It’s just straight mind manipulation and I resent it.

And 2, it hardly makes sense to advertise insurance (I’m never in the mood to cancel my current plan) but they have a gargantuan adspend because their profits are capped by a percentage (search 80/20 rule)- This is basically the same reason Coca Cola is famously ad-spendy - since they are locked into a low percentage of revenue, the only way to grow is “make it up on volume”

We’re fixing a “bug” in our app that it stops Grammarly working properly, such is their hold on things now!

Liberty Mutual. Same here. Will never buy from them.

Depends on the ad - if it's excessively irritating or intrusive absolutely.

To the point where I'll boycott entire stores if an ad pisses me off too much.

Tangentially, youtube's ads are getting worse by the day and Hero Wars' efforts are now so damned desperate that they've gone beyond deliberately misleading to damned near pornographic.

It's bad enough that I'm considering completely dropping Google despite the inadequacy of DuckDuckGo and the fact I've had the same Gmail address since university.

YT is certainly levering up the ad annoyance lately. It drove me to look around and I discovered not only is it better without ads, it's better without any social component at all. CloudTube uses YouTube APIs for what you actually want, just the video: https://tube.cadence.moe/

It would very much be worth it to dump GMail and purchase a privacy-focused email service with IMAP/POP3

There's lots about the human experience that you can't control, and advertising works on those levels too. You are affected by the mere exposure to it. You're not just sold a product - you are told about the brand, values, how they approach the world, how it's acceptable in these times to express yourself, lots of stuff. And you see it and you learn it. It doesn't really matter what you think about afterwards, you are already affected, because that's how humans work, and advertisements are exploiting how humans work. The solution is to not be exposed to it in the first place, and because you can't really block them all, to accept that you are affected and work with that. Denial will bring you nowhere. But, it can be a good milestone to realization.

I buy things from ads if the things solve problems I have. Sometimes I don't know about the solutions and the advertising works because FB/Insta know what I like. They work well and I'm grateful I get relevant ads.

I do this too but I generally search on google/amazon for the product before buying. Much of the time, the same product is available cheaper from someone else. I think certain companies buy and resell stuff through paid advertising, so they have to pad their margins appropriately.

I bought some sensors that Instagram advertised to improve ski technique and they’ve worked wonders

If you don’t mind me asking, can you please share a product name or link? Sounds cool

As the other poster said, it’s Carv (https://getcarv.com/) . It has helped me a lot to improve technique, I actually learned how to carv in skis, and I’m much more comfortable when going fast (my speed record is now 105 km/hr) . It’s beautiful having objective data to tell if you have improved and what did you improve, as well as what needs more work. For me it was a cheap buy as a private lesson one whole day would go for the price of the device, which I can use the whole season and gives me objective data. Stomp it tutorials in YouTube is also a big help.

Thanks!

Looks like it's called Carv, here's a link: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=skiing+sensor+improve+techniq...

Thanks!

I don’t mind what people are marketing or that they’re marketing and I occasionally buy things I learned about from ads, but I do mind that’s it’s a keystone of the modern internet.

These things are difficult to separate these days. I don’t blame the people who want to sell their goods though. It’s scary to try competing without using online ads in many industries.

Yes and no. But I do avoid buying products which price is mostly based on their advertisment budget. So in the end yes, never bought anything suggested from an Instagram or Facebook ad. However I only get shown absolute bullshit that has zero relevance to me (prolly because of blocking so much of the tracking)

Depends on the ad, tbh. Some ads just scream low-quality crap. No matter what, that impression will stick with me, even if I see the product in a retail store I trust.

However, I recently bought some Dr. Squatch soap, so ads can work.

No. There might be the perfect suiting product to me. There is, however, a huge red flag for all these companies and products. This usually drives my buying decisions (against them).

Generally, though they did recently nail me by sending me an ad for a new type of earplug. The algorithm must've figured out I suffer from misophonia.

I make it a point to support small businesses that are creating interesting products, even if I learned about them from ads.

If I do buy, I buy it from somewhere else after clearing cookies.

Not only that, I made it a point to contact those companies and tell them why I won’t buy their products.

Absolutely. If I see an ad for something I make a mental note to search for competitors before buying that brand, assuming I need the product.

If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.

> If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.

Or they just want to make even more money than they could make organically, which they can then put into R&D or into cutting pricces (through economies of scale).

Yes, it is possible to do things ass- backwards. The first way is better for consumers, the second way exploits consumers at a subconscious level, and is more often leveraged to maximize profit than to benefit consumers.

E.g., Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit? Surely the ends justify the means?

Corporations trend toward consumer exploitation and as they get bigger, there is less chance for any human concerns like ethics or morals to correct negative behavior.

> Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit?

Head into your nearest pharmacy and check out what they sell. Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.

> Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.

Homeopathics only reliably do nothing (different from whatever inert carrier is provided) if they are real homeopathic dilutions, which thanks to the absence of regulation and testing in the homeopathic market, they often are not, which has led to homeopathics with dangerous levels of ingredients that would be < 1 molecule per package if the stated dilutions were accurate.

Which, I guess, doesn't contradict your point.

My nearest pharmacy doesn't sell many homeopathics, and I live in the USA - land of the hucksters and home of the deregulators.

It's got aisles for fungii, ears and eyes, cuts and bruises, stomach stuff, cold/flu/allergies, prophylactics, etc etc. But the closest thing to unapproved cure-alls are the stronger sort of cough drops.

There are plenty of stores that sell sketchy supplements, but they usually don't have prescription pickup counters with pharmacists.