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Everyone thinks that they are immune to advertising. But study after study shows that’s not the case. Those overbearing ads played ad nauseam work. Those idiotic spam emails selling boner pills work. All that invasive tracking and fine targeting works.

Pleasant it might not be, and its ethics are dubious… but on the whole, it helps sell shit (though advertisers are notorious for using inflated and half baked metrics to overstate the return on investment for their services).

Coca-cola and Geico and the cheesy injury lawyer in your hometown don’t buy advertising on a lark. It makes them money.

3 comments

Advertisement exploits common psychological triggers to achieve a non-consensual outcome at the expense of the consumer being manipulated.

There's a balance yet to be found between freedom of commercial speech and the imposition of reasonable limits on deliberately manipulative content.

Influence ratings displaying the percentage of difference in various metrics between a standardized "just the facts" product description (think nutrition label) and the refined ad might be useful and reasonable. Ad metrics and platforms should be required to publish a catalog of their customers, copies of ads, history of demographic targets, party, pac, and funding and so forth.

If metrics are useful to sellers, they'll be useful to buyers, and we can legislate transparency and regulation.

Advertising certainly has effects, they are just not the effects you imply and can not be said to make them work. This is the effect advertising has on me:

- I no longer watch broadcast television, at all

- I no longer listen to broadcast radio other than sometimes in a car. In that case I find commercial-free stations, switch channels when commercials come on and switch off the radio entirely if there are no commercial-free alternatives.

- I do not subscribe to any physical magazines, newspapers or other publications

- I do not "consume entertainment", I couldn't care less about recent movie releases - most are a mix of "progressive" propaganda with product placement anyway?

- I block digital advertising 'quite effectively' as in 'I never see ads'. I do this by having effective content blockers, proxies for channels like Youtube, I do not use things like Facebook/Twitter/whatever. No Google, I use my own instance of Searx. Effective spam blocking on my own mailserver, spam is as rare as hen's teeth here.

I can go on but the reality is that all advertising has achieved is that I quite effectively shield myself from exposure to it. If that is what you mean with "working", well... it'd make me wonder why they spend so much money on creating effective resistance against their own products. I guess I'm not the target market? In that case, neither are my family members who use my services.

I understand that advertising works for those who sell it. As to whether it works for those who buy it, who knows...

Spam ads (e.g. a windshield repair shop on the radio playing all the time) are probably useful for discoverability. That is probably self-evident.

However, the big question is if they receive more profit from extra jobs than the ads cost.