> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".
I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before.
Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show.
Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid.
> ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case"
Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way.
Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company.
Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste.
Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on...
A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
Wow. You're basically just describing the mechanism by which you're manipulating people's behavior, very apparently without concern for your redistribution of inherently finite resources. The opposition to modern advertising is in response to exactly this. It's not that much different than cigarettes. You're exploiting subconscious human mechanisms utterly without concern for any effect except number of purchases. People are better off when they can consciously think about what they're doing. There are people who are motivated to promote that in their societies.
This is totally true, but in a world where there are tens of thousands of products in our supermarkets alone, sometimes I prefer an easy subconcious choice. If Old Spice deodorant works, and I got there because of an advertisement that played on subconcious desires, eh. I don't really have the desire to conciously evaluate my deodorant purchase (even though I avoid anti persperants at all cost cause there are weird metals and it just doesn't seem natural to not perspire).
If I choose Pepsi over Coke because of some subconciously altered motive, eh. Whatever.
I'm not sure it'll be a popular opinion, but to be honest, I don't particularly mind not having to conciously evaluate my soda choice.
What I want is for someone, somewhere to consciously evaluate my deodorant purchase. At least in some way that doesn't completely disrespect what anyone would want given they had the capacity to consciously evaluate their deodorant purchase. I understand that that is what advertising is supposed to be.
>If I choose Pepsi over Coke because of some subconciously altered motive, eh. Whatever.
It is not about choosing Pepsi over Coke. What make you choose (Coke OR Pepsi) over plain old cold water, when you feel thirsty?
Another issue is when you let Ads work, you are allowing the brand that had the most aggressive ad campaign to reap a profit. Not the one with a better product. Wont this prevent a better product from rising in the market?
One could make an easy conscious choice if all products included objective information about their characteristics and performance. Hypothetical examples:
- Deodorant X was found to prevent odor for 5 hours and reduce it for 19 in tests with subjects similar to you.
- Fragrance A had the highest percentage of positive ratings among your desired gender and demographic.
Even then, is it worth the effort? I suspect that the vast majority of deodorants work well enough that the upside of choosing the best option isn't worth the time spent reading the objective data. Textbook rational ignorance.
And for things like Coke vs. Pepsi, where there is (I presume) very little objective differences that consumers care about, how does this idea apply?
Well enough is not universally defined, though. One person may just want something to mask ordinary human odor. Another might have allergies, or has friends who have allergies. Various people respond differently to different fragrances. Some fragrances might work better in a professional vs. dating environment. Etc. Objective data could resolve all of those questions far better than any sex-driven superbowl ad.
In the case of deodorant, the question one really wants to ask is either "Will this fragrance upset my coworkers with allergies," or "What fragrance will most impress the guy/girl I want to impress?" Objective, empirical data from the nearest demographic comes the closest to answering that question.
There's no reason that objective data has to require time spent. Computer analysis and machine learning could present the right data at the right times, if the algorithms were designed for that instead of for behavioral manipulation. You wouldn't go to the store, see a rack of 150 different varieties of deodorant, and read the data for each one. You would specify your requirements and see a short list of options, with the principal component of the remaining differences emphasized in the displayed statistics.
More effort is put into seductive advertising than would be required to build and present empirical analyses of fundamental product attributes, despite the perception of complexity.
To address your final paragraph, products that offer no meaningful distinction from their competition would die, while those that are truly useful (even for highly subjective definitions of "useful", like "fashionable") would thrive.
> The opposition to modern advertising is in response to exactly this.
Personally, I don't believe that. My theory is that a lot of concern about modern advertising is how it can destroy the user experience. E.g., 20+ additional HTTP calls on a mobile device. Or roadblock pages. Or punch-the-monkey ads that animate to try & grab your attention. Those types of things.
Those things are bad too, but my opposition to advertising is primarily the things he was talking about. On TV, at least, it's aggressively manipulative.
You're also not using money to circumvent the normal process we use to proliferate good ideas. If something is good, tell your friends about it. Notably this is exponential and very weak initially, hence the need for legitimate advertising. You may need to circumvent this process to jump start a non-manipulative idea but never to sustain it. Modern advertisers can't pretend to think I am legitimately ignorant to the existence of carbonated sugar water. They're obviously sustaining an otherwise unwanted behavior in the public via manipulation. Theres no protection of free speech when theres a concentration of megaphones "shouting down" (via the most possibly advanced techniques in psychological manipulation) anything but one particular idea.
You have to understand, most people are born with a conscience. It takes a long time and concerted effort to erase it. The doublethink and cognitive dissonance on display here is the end result of that process.
These corporations literally employ child psychologists to study the exact rate of white flashes and scene changes in a television spot that grabs their attention and will not release it. Our children are not on a level playing field with PHD educated adult psychologists. Marketers and salespeople will defend this practice. They don't see anything wrong with it.
P.S. I don't wear sunglasses or any article of clothing with a brand, drink coke or pepsi, and I eat the raisin bran I do because it comes in a bag instead of a bag inside a paper box. Mentally rejecting advertising has had the most positive impact on my physical and emotional health of anything I've ever done.
It shouldn’t be. "brand equity" is the issue that’s wrong with today’s market.
Often I can get the exact same product to a far cheaper price if I’m just willing to accept a cheaper-looking label.
And, while that’s very popular in Germany, and led to the rise of Aldi, Lidl, etc, it’s not enough.
Brand equity, as you call it, is the effect that we trust companies based on irrational ideas. That’s actually bordering on violating the EU advertising laws (you can only advertise stuff that is directly related to the product, you can only say stuff that is true, etc).
Yes, I know it is a thing – but it shouldn’t be. That’s the issue. Brand equity is abusing emotions to make people buy worse products for a higher price.
> soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that?
What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.
> Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
Since you work in advertising, you should know that that kind of thing is more pervasive than ever today.
> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job".
I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before.
Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show.
Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid.
> ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case"
Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way.
Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company.
Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste.
Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on...
A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.