this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Why have ads at all? It's just wasteful and annoying.
Recently, Louis Rossman made an excellent point about advertising. When was the last time you saw and ad and suddenly felt like buying something? How often does that happen? Most of the time, the money spent on ads doesn’t actually do much other than annoy the people who are exposed to the ad. Providing good experiences to the customers is a far more effective way to advertise products or services.
So I can tell you from experience that there's a huge difference in terms of how much of your products you sell by doing advertising versus doing nothing. It's very rare that advertising is designed to take the person who's observing it from "IDK what this is" to "Holy crap I gotta go buy that" -- but building brand recognition, making people aware that your stuff exists, and yes sometimes having them see an ad for something and click on it and buy something, is 100% worth it when it's done right.
I actually do agree with you as to as lot of advertising on the modern internet, though. I think like a lot of areas of human endeavor, online advertising has been overrun by people who genuinely just have no clue what they're doing. Someone works at a company that has a river of money coming in, their job is to buy online ads, so they direct some of the river of money at buying obnoxious ads that do very little except piss people off (and, enable the site where they run to keep operating and paying their people, which is nice). It doesn't accomplish anything for the company they work for and no one notices, and that persists for years, and the internet as a whole is crapped up for everyone in general. :-/
I’m willing to buy the argument that advertising done right is effective. It’s just that I seem to be in none of the target audiences of any company that does any amount of online advertising. I guess I could try living without an adblocker and allowing all the tracking cookies to see if it makes a difference. Actually, I’m pretty sure that would cut my internet usage a lot, so at least that would be positive.
I think about 95% of ad campaigns are no more effective than just listing the product and the price. Maybe 5% are creative or well targeted enough to actually influence some purchases.
Problem is the people in a position to evaluate effective advertising are mostly the same group that gets paid by to create advertising. There's no one running around to businesses trying to sell them on the idea that advertisements aren't all that effective and they could just save their money on much simpler communications. Plus we indoctrinate hoards of 'marketing' graduates into the cult of advertising every year. There's a critical mass of people that just uncritically embrace the idea that modern advertising is the only way to sell a product, and many of their careers depend on that remaining a widely accepted idea.
Don’t these people ever study the effectiveness of different types of advertising? In physics, chemistry and biology you need evidence to support a belief. Otherwise, it’s just a questionable hypothesis.
I think they probably do study the effectiveness to a degree, but there's no structure or incentive for peer review in marketing research. So their methods are likely tuned to find whatever they think will convince their clients to spend more on advertising.
If they find a simple $1000 newspaper ad is just as effective as a a $100K television ad, they can just say "Our research has found that $100K TV ads are effective."
But businesses don’t have an infinite supply of money, now do they? Making smart business decisions means spending as little as possible and getting as much as possible in return. It’s in the best interests of the business owner to spend money on efficient advertising instead of wasteful advertising.
Absolutely. But most businesses don't have the wherewithal to hire impartial analysts and statisticians to evaluate the effectiveness of their ad buys. They have to rely on a combination of intuition, customer feedback, but mostly on outside advertising professionals, and those professionals have every incentive to maintain the impression that spending more on advertising it the best decision.
You are absolutely right. There’s clearly a conflict of interest. I also have a feeling that companies buying advertising services don’t really know what they’re buying, what they’re supposed to get, what they could be getting in the best case scenario etc.
In fact if I see a product being heavily advertised I am less likely to buy it. Not only because it is annoying, but also because I know a significant percentage of the purchase price is just paying for more advertisement instead of actually relating to the quality of the product.
I make a mental note to avoid a company and their products whenever I see an ad. If I want your thing, I will seek it out. You wanna entice me to buy it? Go make your blogpost demonstrating why yours is better than the alternatives I'm looking at.
LOL, that was a great story. I’ve been running ublock origin for such a long time that I can’t even remember hating any brand with a passion like that. Oh, well I guess Meta deserves that throne for reasons besides direct advertising.
Honestly the best "ads" I've received have been YouTubers reviews on products. I follow people and they tell me about products related to the subjects I specifically follow them for.
And I don't mean influencers. I follow retro gamers and they occasionally get a product in the mail to review. I follow Amateur Radio operators and they occasionally get radios and antenna products in the mail to review. Foodies and cooks get stuff for the kitchen. Etc. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad and bought it.
I kind of hate that the greatest minds on earth are working on creating products on monetizing around the current advertising model.(Ex: Google/Facebook/Amazon etc).
If the advertising model useless or less useful why do we keep doing it ? I think we hate it and that's why we are on Lemmy but most people suck up to ads do buy useless shit. Check out the rise of Temu and Shein.
I hate ads like the rest of us but can community donations sustain the instance ? If they do why dont we have that model yet ? Why we still keeping using YouTube and Gmail etc ? What percentage of community would donate ? Will be donating to the community or the server instance ? Will there be push back from users of small communities who are paying if the money goes purely into the maintenance of large communities ?
A lot of Mastodon servers are run like that. It generally works if you run a instance as a community and not a catch-all general purpose one as then you will have a smaller dedicated group of members willing to subsidize the un-avoidable lurkers and free-loaders. This is like those "Free2Play" games that are massively profitable despite having no ads and are free to download if you want think about it in capitalist terms.
In the end it isn't terribly expensive to run a Lemmy instance or any online service. Facebook and the other ad companies spend most of their revenue on user tracking and advertisement infrastructure which is super wasteful as it is just done to attract more advertisers... basically a snake eating its own tail.
I think Reddit gold was a brilliant way to support the platform and get something in return. I’ve been thinking of supporting various FOSS projects, but getting nothing but a a warm and fuzzy feeling in return just feels inadequate. Getting a Debian/Inkscape/Firefox hoodie sounds much more appealing to me, so recently I’ve been lookin for those sorts of donation options.
Lemmy.store to support lemmy.world, the community can design and sell custom community themed merch.