I find that ads are usually a very poor source of information when trying to figure out what product to buy. Ads are designed to deceive. They're supposed to make the product larger than life, more perfect than possible, and absolutely essential to your continued existence.

What I find more helpful is authentic experience from other consumers of that product. The authentic part is getting harder and harder to validate, of course.

Some adverts are informative. I saw a poster a few years ago saying Jason Donovan was in Joeseph in London as Pharaoh, I likely wouldn’t have known that without that poster at the station.

I didn’t mind skippable YouTube preroll adverts. Now they are unskippable, multiple ones, and appear mid video.

Howver I don’t watch YouTube enough to justify paying more than Netflix and Disney combined just to skip adverts (but not skip the burnt in sponsor adverts)

Is that how much it really costs??? Damn. I have to go to the top and read the comments again with this new information. I pay the equivalent of around $2.5 for 6 people. No way I would pay the same amount as Netflix or Disney, let alone the two together.

U.K. YouTube wants $183 a year for YouTube premium - and that’s not even the family option.

Ok so you want to find out about new products or services from other customers. So how do those other customers find out about the product? At some point there are no customers or so few that you never run into one of these customers. So what does a small company do at the stage where they have no word of mouth?

Imagine if it were your business for a second, you’ve created a new website or a new physical product and you want to get more customers or users, what do you do? It’s not going to sell itself if nobody knows it exists no matter how good it is.

I wanted a new small camera recently. How did I find it? By trying to find opinions of people who had owned different cameras, and comparing their opinions about the ones that they owned.

I didn’t need an ad to tell me to buy a camera. I didn’t see any ads at all! Rather, I decided “I wish I had something to take pictures with”, so I started researching how I could accomplish that thing.

And ads would not have helped me find the best camera option at all, in fact it’s probably a slightly negative signal — they must have big profits to spend lots of money on ads, compared to a company that just makes the best product and has their customers promote it for them.

Same thing with any other product. I see my coworkers using a terminal app I’ve never seen. It looks better than the normal one, so I ask them about it.

Yea aside from it indicating less budget for R&D, anything that’s ridiculously promoted probably means u would b spending significantly more than you should be for that lol.

It’s very simple and not even nuanced I’m just unsure why many seem to gloss over that. Perhaps I’m more jaded than most

I will always have a need for a VPN. I will never pay for NordVPN. Their level of advertising has me convinced they are up to no good regardless of whether that is true or not.

Hahah the other day a buddy asked me about Nord and after suggesting Mullvad for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I was wary about Nord. But that’s what it was, their incessant advertising.

Like, what new stuff? If that’s something that’s been around for years (like cameras), go ask friends or read some reviews or bug a salesperson in a camera shop. If that’s something that nobody knows about (yet) - well, you don’t know it exists hence you don’t need it. Don’t overcomplicate, keep it simple. That’s basic mental hygiene.

Targeted ads are terrible at that. They are quite often overly specific and just try to convince me to buy more of the things I already know about.

including stuff you literally just purchased

I see you just purchased u-joints for a Dodge pickup. Wait until you see these brake pads for a Honda Civic!

Or, alternatively, I noticed you recently purchased an instant pot. Would you like to subscribe to purchase instant pots monthly?

The new stuff you can buy is always limited to whats already available at your market. Your market might be your grocery store, walmart, amazon, a little local bodega, whatever, but if its not there you don't get it ads or not, and if its there chances are you can find it without an ad by going down the right aisle or using the right keywords.

Plus ads are fundamentally inefficient sources of information. Billboard lawyers like to flood the interstates with their "Accident? call me" signage, on the off chance someone without a lawyer has an accident and looks up and sees Jacob Emrani smiling on them. Big payoff for the lawyer if they do get a job from this ad, but for the vast majority of the millions of commuters a day who pass such an ad its probably a useless waste of thought to even catch one in your periphery.

Both of you are missing the point because you're confusing online advertising with traditional media advertising. PPC advertising is about making a conversion on the spot, since ROI can be directly measured. Media advertising is about context poisoning for eventual conversion.

You already know you need toilet paper. There are only so many brands to choose from. Every month, you have to make a decision about one of them based on whatever factors are important to you at that time. (For me, it's usually cost, ply count, and how likely it is that someone in the house is going to flush a massive wad of it and clog the pipe.)

The point of print/radio/television ads are to groom you into associating some positive feeling with a specific choice, whether or not it's new or you know about it. So the next time you're looking at the wall of toilet paper, you recognize the bear, the colors, the jingle, the florid language about its delicate softness upon your tender starfish, and get you to feel something positive enough to get you to gravitate toward it despite its higher price. Joy, lust, anger, and vanity are easy to appeal to.

They're not trying to inform you of anything or make you a die-hard fan. They're buttering you up to tilt your next purchasing decision in their favor. That's why advertising never stops; it's an endless loop of a handful of charlatans competing with each other to coerce you into buying their version instead of the other guy's.

Professional review sources like Consumer report, ATK, and Wirecutter are far better sources than a random ad. I don't think I would ever buy a random product from an ad without reading reviews unless it was something completely disposable, like a new soda, or something that you have to willfully make terrible to screw it up, like a t shirt

If its not too private, do you mind sharing the last new thing you bought that you hitherto had no knowledge off?

It was an half rack with width that can be regulated. I knew I wanted an half rack or a rack, but the recommended ones on blogs and such were always too big for my taste (also I'm not gonna lift heavy, especially at home). I actually stopped looking for one because I thought there were none fitting my needs, then one day an ad slipped with this model that had good features and reviews and I bought it (after researching it more of course).