Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising?
I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public aware of the existence of my very good product which nonetheless fills a niche that is well-occupied and not a very important part of people's lives (and therefore unlikely to be discussed unless immediately sought)? How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results?
This idea that advertising has no use and exists sort of parasitically is baffling to me. Even more baffling is that it's a meme which routinely nets all the upvotes on a place like HN -- where presumably the commenters are more likely to have actually created and sold valuable things, and therefore, one assumes, would have more than an academic appreciation for how business is done.
It's been said many times before, but the level of discourse around here is retreating rapidly into equal parts academic idealism and Reddit-esque karma-driven populism.
> How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results?
the problem is that there's a conflict of interest between the seller of a good and the buyer of a good. Every seller wants to claim that their product is better, regardless of actual reality, while every buyer would like to actually know which product is better
As you rightly point out, the buyer doesn't want to do a lot of research to find this out, but.. the problem with advertising is that advertising does not give the consumer a good idea of what is actually best because of the aforementioned conflict of interest.
I think if we are talking about reality, we mostly rely on the law here; E.g. if I go to the corner store and grab a gallon of milk, it probably won't poison me, because there are 'minimum milk' standards (my area has yet to legalize unpasteurized milk for human consumption) So I can buy the cheapest milk in the store, or the milk advertised to target my demographic, and either way, little harm is done. Worst case I spend a little more money than I'd need to.
The right answer to the research problem is something like consumer reports (though really, I think it'd work better if it integrated with cooperative retail... e.g. I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there.)
The right answer to the research problem is a digest of research results? I think you are overestimating greatly how much people care about most purchasing decisions. A false positive in my almond milk is not going to make a bit of difference, and a true positive will slightly please me for a week. For this, I would go consult Consumer Reports? And how do I know that Customer Summaries isn't more aligned with my values anyhow?
The idea that advertisers all claiming to be the best is a detriment to consumers presupposes that we need to live in a world where people only speak about empirical facts. We are all skilled in the art of bullshit detection, and we all have aspirations which can be played to as well -- frankly, life would be dull if we weren't able to attach an undue sense of optimism to a cup of coffee from that new cafe. Advertising succeeds in some part because it pushes buttons which sometimes go unpushed in our daily lives.
> The right answer to the research problem is a digest of research results? I think you are overestimating greatly how much people care about most purchasing decisions. A false positive in my almond milk is not going to make a bit of difference, and a true positive will slightly please me for a week.
I don't know if limiting consumer choice to a few of the massive number of alternatives is the right answer. It's probably not the optimal answer, but it is the current answer. Right now, most consumers are exposed to 2 or 3 brands of a thing, and which two or three brands is controlled through advertising. What sorts of things a consumer is exposed to is also controlled by advertising.
The problem with advertising, from the consumer's point of view is that the people paying for the advertising have interests that conflict with the consumer's interests.
But yes, right now, advertising serves the product discovery function, and the product discovery function is important.
My argument is just that the consumer would be better off if they paid someone to research the available brands and present them with a manageable number of choices, and with interesting new types of products rather than allowing the people selling them stuff to do that. My argument is that organizations structured like consumer reports, that is, organizations that only accept money from the consumers they are doing research for, would have the fewest conflicts of interest, and thus would probably provide better results (for the consumers) on average.
> For this, I would go consult Consumer Reports? And how do I know that Customer Summaries isn't more aligned with my values anyhow?
The consumer, of course, would still need to choose which consumer research group most closely matched their needs and values, which in and of itself is a hard problem. But, I think if done properly, and conflicts of interest avoided, it is an overall better product discovery system than advertising.
Also, you'd clearly need to figure out some way of making it easier. Following the recommendations of the research agency I have hired needs to be as easy for me as following the recommendations of advertisers is for me right now, at least if we are to use this for things like milk.
(Also, the more I think about it, the more I think what I said about integrating it with a store is a bad idea; it introduces conflicts of interest. But it would be the easiest way to reduce the cost in terms of checking with my research company before buying.)
> . I'd go to the store and only the top 2-3 products in each catagory are there.
Aren't you by limiting selection - limiting innovation, the ability of each one buying according to the price and other characteristics he he sees fit?
Yes, if you hand over the choice of "limit all possibilities down to a few I can choose from" to another party, then yes, you are handing them a lot of power over you.
However, you are probably going to hand that power to someone - there are just too many products to research them all. I am arguing that you are probably better off if you hand that power off to an entity who's only revenue source is you and people like you, than if you hand that choice off to conventional advertising agencies.
I come from games. It seems like advertising is the only way to effectively "get the word out" about my new game. I'm not seeing how that's useless. I also don't see the conflict of interest. If I make a bad game and people buy it they're not going to buy my next game so that problem is solved. So I all I'm trying to do through advertising is inform the people who might want a game like the one I created that my game exists and could they please take a look.
Because you are describing the informational construct known as discovery, which can - and is - provided through many methods in every field, including gaming, and does not require advertising whatsoever.
Minecraft is basically a cultural icon now, despite having no effective advertising throughout its growth years. It was only after it was already gargantuan that Minecraft Pocket Edition started seeing adverts, primarily because the parent company ran out of ideas of what to do with their money, which is often the motivator for a lot of advertising budgets.
Specific to the games industry, discovery is a problem if consumers both A. have no peer group involved in gaming to get recommendations from and B. have no sources of discovery media (ie, rankings, reviews, etc) to find games themselves. Which I'd definitely say is true - the two largest game stores in the world, Google Play and Steam, have incredibly bad discovery mechanisms built in, and the former's entire market is mostly an appeal to getting on top of said discovery mechanism through psychological manipulation in skinner boxes.
>If I make a bad game and people buy it they're not going to buy my next game so that problem is solved.
"one bite at the apple" eh?
There are a lot of small companies in America, and a lot of people do businesses under different names. "Was an officer of the company I'm about to buy from involved in shady dealings in the past" is one of those things I'd love to have my consumer research firm research, but it's not something that comes in to play as much as you think, I think. A lot of the games are written by first-timers, or people who's first try flopped because nobody played it (which is similar as to the informational content you are talking about)
Advertising doesn't solve any of those problems, but makes them all worse.
Now instead of 200 brands of almond milk and 85 sushi restaurants to try or ask your friends about, you have 285 companies shoving ads in your face, all insisting they're the "best", when obviously they all can't be.
In fact, having to sort through 285 ads is worse than actually trying 285 products, because the advertisements are completely disconnected from the quality of the actual products.
Offer a good product and people will come back and tell their friends. That's the alternative to advertising, because it's what people will do anyway.
>> I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood
Neither do I. I'll just pick one arbitrarily.
It's almond milk.
I might even just skip it entirely.
I don't even really need milk, if giving up advertising meant I had to drink water that's fine.
I think the issue here is that you're approaching this from a consumerist viewpoint to begin with - it's difficult to explain exactly what's wrong because it's a completely foreign approach.
The subset of advertising the superposter is referring to is informational and educational promotion of products rather than advertising.
There is also the conflation that there is some lost potential when advertising can actually sway you into buying something - but the secret is, if you do not already have the necessary economic pressure upon yourself to seek out goods and services in your interest already, that advertising is actually detrimental because it subverts your internal alignment of values through conditioning causing you to make purchases against your base intentions.
The only aspect of advertising of worth is learning products exist, but I would quite easily argue that - especially in the age of social media - word of mouth informance about goods and services that can benefit your life are much more valuable and reasonable and much less detrimental to personal economics than advertising.
How many people bought smartphones because of a TV ad vs their peers telling and showing them how useful they are?
Since we are getting on this topic, I imagine in the case of the downfall of advertising - however that may happen - people would become sociable again amongst each other about what products are good and useful and which have quality. A thousand years ago you would not have known of the quality of rice from a country away but you would know who is the best and worst blacksmith in town and where to get the best ale. We could easily have that again, enhanced with technology to make it a truly global information market.
The private finance of product placement to cause emotional purchases rather than rational ones, by comparison, is dramatically more inefficient.
You're conflating the idea of broadcasting and advertising. One is the other, but the other is not the one.
Of course advertising has a use, but without advertising it's not like you would "have to research the 85 sushi restaurants" in your neighbourhood.
Put it this way: I use adblock, I do not watch TV nor go to places which actively advertise. My life is fine, and I don't have to "actively research" anything unless I specifically want to. In fact, compared to people who don't avoid ads, I tend to spend my money a lot better... something to think about.
On the topic of Sushi Restaurants, you have two fantastic resources available to you anyway - technology (Google Maps, for example) lets you find the closest restaurants and ratings for those restaurants polled from various resources. If you do not trust Google, use another mapping or restaurant critique service. Alternatively, you can use the ancient-as-human-civilization method of social web information about quality. The vast majority of purchasing decisions are still made through the influence of peers, rather than by advertising, because you trust your peers recommendations way more than what you see on TV - for good reason.
In either case, they provide broadcasting as well, and in all cases, they are inherent to either the Internet Age or human organization, and do the job better than emotional splurge-purchase decision TV ads ever could.
Most people realize that when you have 200 competing brands of Almond Milk, 199/200 times they are not telling the truth. There is no value in believing what advertising says.
I (mostly) agree that advertising is a good thing. I also think that there are many different kinds of advertising; some of the more blatant and intrusive perhaps being the kind that people are getting fed up with.
To run with your milk example, my wife and I recently learned of Danzeisen Dairy (http://www.danzeisendairy.com); a state-local dairy producer who recently started selling their milk in at our local grocer.
We didn't learn of them through an ad in the local paper, or a TV spot, or display ads on the web. The bottles were just there, in the local grocer.
But before anyone thinks they aren't advertising... the milk was in cutsey little glass bottles, adorned with their logo, the words "Local" - "delivered farm fresh" in retro script, and they "just happened" to be located at eye level on the milk shelf. Not advertising? Ha! ... but it wasn't blatant and obtrusive.
Advertising has little relation to quality or wellbeing. It's dangerous to be lazy about researching what products to consume. Junk food has great advertising. Other (not well known) brands have great quality but do not have big advertising budgets.
Maybe we (as society) should start to be less lazy about researching the products we consume instead of letting huge brands with different interests decide for us.
It baffles me that your (imho) perfectly valid and well thought out post is getting downvoted in this of all places, where advertising revenue (as the most straightforward way to monetise a web service) must underpin the employment of a significant proportion of posters.
