> 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?