Yeah, I agree about positive discussion in technical space. Even if it’s just the founder coming on a Reddit thread and shilling their own stuff while still providing value by comparing it to other products.

Example: I was interested in looking more into Dremio the other day but couldn’t really find any good positive technical discussion about it on HN or Reddit so I just… stopped looking into Dremio

Totally agree. Value is the most important thing if you are going to talk about yourself. It's not even like it's that hard to just try to be excellent to people and to users and share something worthwhile. But time and again, this is where people fall down.

Weirdly, google ads and GA4 are great examples of not providing value and not treating people or users well. And yet they cling on.

I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can be entirely unaware of this and it still works.

Maybe the ad is not what convinced you, not at all, but it did prompt you to wonder if this LaunchDarkly thing is any good. Youtube kept spamming it in your face and you kept ignoring it, but of course the name stuck and now there are talking about it on HN so you decide to read "that" thread and not the other one about unleash or something you never heard of.

Yes, but it can work in the opposite direction as well.

Eg, all the Youtube ads of NordVPN only did was to convince me that if I'm ever in the market, I'll use someone else. Part because all that advertising has to cost a lot of money, which of course the subscription has to pay for. Part because some of their advertising is less than completely honest about what they provide.

Sure but for every person like you there's several people who are not knowledgable about VPNs and use NordVPN because it's the one thing they heard about the most.

And an absolute truckload of people deep in the para-social relationship who couldn't imagine their 'friend' steering them wrong on a product, intentionally or otherwise

Tom Scott is a good example of the influence of VPN money. He made an entire video about how and why he would not make ads for VPNs because VPN ads are deceptive, this video got millions of views ...and then later he started making ads for VPNs (NordVPN iirc). I always wonder how much they bought him for.

Pretty sure he made a video about him doing those ads when he did them to answer that question, but you kind of answer it in your description anyway. His objection to VPN ads wasn't the fact it was a VPN, but the deceptive content in the ads. Promises they don't deliver, benefits you get from basic SSL anyway etc.

When a VPN was happy to work with him on an ad that wasn't deceptive or misleading he was happy to run it. I think the original video only existed in the first place because at that time he was willing to advertise a VPN for the money offered, but they couldn't agree on ad content he felt was fair. So his price never changed, the VPN company just gave into his 'advertise honestly' demand.

I believe the economics of VPN companies is that they have a quite inexpensive, commodity product which has a lot of churn. The ads get people to sign up for a month or two at any price, which pays for the cost of the ads.

Tom Scott’s video a few years ago helped, but some creators still seem to be saying or implying that using a VPN makes your browsing “safer,” which unless you have a very specific need for a certain kind of safety, is untrue. I wish VPN companies would audit the claims their partners are making about them, but there really isn’t an incentive to do so —- if their brand gets damaged irreparably they can release a new VPN under a different brand.

In the vast majority of cases, these creators are only taking slight liberties with talking points provided by the advertiser.

If basically every NordVPN ad on YouTube is talking about safety, you can be fairly confident that it was a talking point provided by NordVPN.

Nordvpn seemed like a decent choice for streaming bbc but I won’t use them because of a company advertises that hard it must be bad. I would never trust them for privacy they are too big

Apparently VPNs are stupidly high margins so the more lemmings to convert, the more pockets lined.

There did not seem to be a lot of lower cost options for watching bbc they all cost about the same dispite high margins

thr notdvpn ads may have enlarged the consumer market for vpns as well, which may benefit other vpns like mullvad (people that never heard about vpns are convinced by the ad that vpns are needed, searches more on google or reddit and end up selecting what is considered the "most private" one, that is, not nordvpn)

Indeed, you remember the brand, but forget how you got to know it. So even though you learned about something through ads, and you hate ads, eventually you'll forget that it was ads that put it in your brain, but you'll still remember the brand.

That's why I call ads psychological violence. They force themselves in your brain and there's nothing you can do against it

We need a worst offenders list so that every day we can look at the list and make a point to say something disparaging about that company.

That way it won't be:

> nothing you can do

Then we'll have pretty retribution.

Could you list down some non popular digital service you pay for(i.e. not google workspace, AWS etc.) and how you heard about it?

Sure.

High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/

Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.

Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.

Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.

In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.

This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement).

I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found questions from people on forums asking how to accomplish [what our product does] and we'd answer the question with a post recommending our service.

And then we wrote a bunch of tutorials / guides for how to integrate [popular service] <> [our product] to achieve [what our product does] so that if anyone googles "[popular service] [what our product does]" our help docs are usually top of the page.

Posting on forums was fine to get the first few users, but it was long-tail SEO (which is pretty easy to rank since it's long-tail) that got us the next 200. If the search terms are specific enough and the category is relatively undiscovered/unexploited, it's easy to rank. Unfortunately it's really hard to find unexploited niches.

> In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.

Yup. I avoid every single ad I can on principle. Only exception I used to make was for youtube sponsors, mostly out of laziness, until I finally installed sponsorblock.

I've gotten so good at it that at this time I haven't the faintest idea of what movies are there to see at the cinema. Not a single one.

I'm probably a very extreme case in actually having succeeded in disconnecting myself from popular culture to a very large extent.

There is a real problem with discovery without any ads. I'm still aware of movies, but I never have much idea what TV shows exist anymore, or even when shows I like might are back on the air/streaming.

I might hear about about something interesting on social media or a podcast, but won't remember it until I see a picture on the streaming platform months later, when it's already been canceled for lack of viewers.

Youtube is actually the only place I actively block all ads, because they seem unable to stop spamming me with android games that are nothing like the ads at all and are unbelievably annoying. Most websites and stuff I'll let them show ads by default, then block the site if they have more ads than content etc. Although I also just try to avoid those sites in the first place.

In general, I don't want to "discover" products, not at all times of the day, on every web site I visit, every radio and TV station I tune into, every billboard I pass.

Marketers have this notion that people are all merely 24/7 product-consumers, constantly on the lookout to discover new products to consume, and as long as their "message" reaches my brain, it's an unambiguously good thing for both parties.

When I'm browsing the web, or driving to work, or watching a show, or trying to complete some basic task around my life, I'm definitely not trying to discover your product. I wish marketers would stop assuming I am. If I want to look for an unknown product, I'll deliberately go out and do so. In that case, and only in that case, ads are welcome.

Not knowing about whats new on TV is a feature! Given the wealth of tv and movie content available, should you be treating a canceled show that wasn't intriguing enough to look into at the time as a loss?

Read the post again. "Word of mouth" was in scare quotes because this "word of mouth" is actually astroturfed product placement "native" advertising.

(People forget that humans invented the advertising industry precisely to shield civilization from this kind of "word of mouth".)

True, but it still has some upsides. These days I mostly hang out in dark corners of the net. If it's profitable at all to astroturf there, then it's barely so. And if you manage, it's mostly because you actually managed to make a positive contribution to the space at the same time.

perhaps it depends on the audience as well correct? for example, a dev tool has sa technical audience who would primarily not be influenced by say PPC in contrast to form posts

Even negative discussion can be a positive signal sometimes, e.g. if it's someone complaining about the rough edges that they still use a product in spite of - because it still ultimately solves their problems.

> If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad

Yes, that’s the point of a “branding” ad campaign - to drive upper funnel interest in a company/product.

They can also use retargeting to show the same people “performance” ad campaigns, which are meant to drive a lower funnel conversion like a signup, purchase, or even a demo.

Depending on the product, you can even use an organic discussion about your product as marketing material to get people to see the interest others have in it. Or market a conference or dev day where they show off its capabilities.

There’s a lot of layers to marketing, it’s not as simple as HN makes it out to be.

also check if it's just alphabetically sorted - "a" comes before the other options, and people being lazy just pick that

Aren't you mostly talking about what the article calls awareness vs conversion? You're saying that ads made you aware and technical discussion is what would make you convert.

The other thing is controversial. "There's no such thing as bad PR" is a saying for a reason. I am also convinced that there are some things that make me never, ever consider a product. And yet: there was this one brand I hated, but it's been a while, and this one looks familiar... was it the good one or the bad one? Never mind, I don't have time to try to dredge that up, this looks familiar at least so I'll just grab it and remember for next time. (Sure I will...)

And that's just one way that bad PR can still be effective. Another is that it gets people talking about you, and some people will argue the other side because the main person's arguments are just bad.

Bad PR is good for awareness. Conversion is often based on different criteria than you expect. You may hate X, but you have a client who has heard of X and hasn't heard of Y, your preferred option.

> Bad PR is good for awareness

intuit/turbotax. Will never use them, ever. Looking forward to the day that product is eliminated from existence by regular online filing.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...

What do you use to do your taxes then?

Most people who are able to use a calculator could do their taxes using https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

I think that TurboTax is a winner in the “TurboTax lobbies to make the tax code so complex that you have to use TurboTax” narrative because it makes people more afraid of doing their taxes through the tools the IRS provides than they should be.

I think your point is that bad PR affects your decision not to use Intuit's products, but I'd argue they're a perfect example of bad PR not being a problem. They have sensationally bad PR, yet they're worth >$100B, one of the 100 most valuable companies in the world, and they dominate their category.

So many people don’t understand this. “There’s no such thing as bad PR” doesn’t mean you won’t lose customers - it just means that for every 1 lost, 10 more are gained due to simple exposure/awareness.

Wouldn’t that still be a beneficial thing? It’s like how I don’t need a plumber but if I did need a plumber I’d go reach for the last one I remember.

>For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word "proprietary".

You may enjoy this: https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-t...

>If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your face and hard to avoid. But it almost never is what convinces me to try the thing. In some cases ads actually dissuade me from trying the thing.

In my primary business (used video games) I've found that the #1 way to get sales is:

- Give the consumer every feature they need (ideally communicate this in a picture) - Be the first search result

It's not about detailed descriptions, super-competitive prices or superior product quality.

People will literally just throw money at the first product they see that ticks all the boxes.

In the SaaS world, where everything has a free trial, I can imagine this "rule" is even more true.

Paths to conversion are typically rather complex and have multiple touch points.

Awareness is a big deal and a necessary step before it's possible to even be in a consideration set.

For example, TV ads typically rank very low in any self-reported market research on influencing purchase intent.

And yet if you run a test in a DMA pulling TV ads you'll see sales decrease dramatically.

While the industry likes to pretend it has come a long way, in many cases marketing and advertising is still just as much "I know half of my ads work and half don't, I just don't know which half is which."