Submitted 17 hours ago by tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world to [deleted]
I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).
I don’t get it.
I think what you’re missing is the picture of a business that is doing pretty well and has extra cash but needs to grow even if it means losing some cash.
In the old world of brand advertising, the idea was to plant an image in people’s minds that would last a long time, earning back the price of the ads by raising customer awareness and loyalty.
In the new world of online ads, it’s more transactional. I can only sell t-shirts on my t-shirt site if I get visitors to it. How do I do that? Oh I can buy ads. And the ad network can target people interested in t-shirts. How does it know they’re interested? They clicked on other t-shirt ads. I spend $5.50 on hundreds of ads just to get one person to the site who buys. But I make $9 profit on each shirt.
If you had a machine that could pump out $9 every time you put $5.50 in, your only question would be how many times you can turn that crank per hour. That’s where all the ads come from. And did you notice the ad company gets $5.50 while the t-shirt maker who actually makes and sells the product only gets $4.50? It’s still a profitable deal for them. But the ad companies make bank.
Despite the hatred, advertising works most of the time.
If nobody knows about your product or service, you can’t make any money. Word of mouth doesn’t cut it beyond a local store.
I ran a local store and word of mouth wasn’t nearly enough.
I run a local renovating bussines and word of mouth is more than enough but advertising is what got it all started.
What’s this Coca-Cola thing the kids are talking about these days?
Man I can really go for a refreshing can of Coca Cola right now.
it succeseful because people will buy thier products, thats why the military aslo pushes out propaganda ads now and then on places like “business insider” so people would join, fund defense contractors and universities.
I started my own bussiness 3 years ago and 99% of my customers discovered me via an ad. Clearly not all people hate all ads. I don’t know how you imagine anyone to find out about a new product or service otherwise.
any brand that works with them by extension is hated and reviled by that.
That just isn’t true.
The advertising industry makes billions because ads make companies trillions. The advertising industry elects politicians and shapes public narratives and also rehabilitates public images.
I know this may shock you but people love ads. The Superbowl ads are almost as popular as the game. Some of the most successful comics troops working today are the troops that do insurance ads.
Hell there are company spokesmen who are international celebrities, The Most Interesting Man in the world, Lilly from AT&T.
You run a Webshop without ads. You make 10 sales per day from organic traffic. That’s $100 profit for you.
You pay $100 to an influencer to tell his followers about your shop. You get 500 sales and make $5000 profit.
Same with Google ads, it multiplies your sales and shows your products to new customers.
because people are morons and ads work.
You can take a small box of cat shit and in the right ad campaign, people will buy it. Catshit has electrolytes.
People would probably sponsor it or rent it these days. Buying was 5 years ago.
Subscribe to watch a cat shit in a box, also give me your ID to qualify for the chance.
Kylie Jenner won’t go anywhere without cat shit.
If ads were truly that reviled, adblockers would be more popular.
Ads work. People browse or walk by something, there's a logo, video, or picture or some company or a product, it stays in their head, and they just keep buying shit they don't need. That's why. So the more people browse or happen upon ads, the more they sell (sometimes).
The advertising you are seeing doesn’t work that well on you. I’m in the same boat. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. There’s a ton of advertising where I’m a net negative. That doesn’t mean the overall output is negative.
Most advertising is about building brand recognition. It doesn’t matter whether you buy their product or not - the fact that you can name the company whose product you’re not buying means the ad worked.
And it’s probably not even true that ads don’t work on OP. Everyone likes to think they’re built different.
That’s why I specified the ads OP was seeing. For me, there might be ads that are seemless with something else in doing that I don’t notice and might work. But in OPs example in his reasons to you, fuck any fucking company that puts an ad inside my goddamn car. Ads at the gas pump can get fucked as well.
Not my case at all, I can see the value of an ad made by a content creator I like. My complain is about things that falls into the enshittification spectrum, like ads on the media center of their brand new cars. I know I would be pissed off by it, but maybe I’m on my own bubble of ad hate.
What don’t you get? They advertise a product, they get paid for that. Some ads are liked, some aren’t. Most companies of any decent size advertise, and they pay for that in order to garner more sales. I don’t think the general public revile them for it at all.
I don’t get it.
EDIT:
YOU can evade them, but most people can’t.
It’s some weird % math. Sending BS spam, like the good old nigerian prince, costs nearly nothing, but it only needs to work in like 1 in 10 million cases for it to be profitable. Returns on random spam advertisement is abysmal, and google gets like 10-100x that because it’s more targeted. That is why people use google ads. But also not because they’re good. They’re just less useless, while still having a very very minimal effect.
The rest is scale.
I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads. The large part of it is im just unwilling to pay for anything that is unnecessary now. Mostly out of necessity but the longer I have to be like this the more all of it seems silly and I feel that even if I had discretionary income I don’t see wanting to use it. Still would like to renovate where I live but that is mostly around disability and reducing energy use. eating out nope. movies nope. any other paid entertainment nope. internet and computer yep. smartphone nope. linux yep. windows nope. mac nope.
I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads.
For the most part, I don’t even see ads at all.
The only ones I might be exposed to at all are:
Disguised Lemmy posts pretending to be normal users.
Billboards and other signs on the side of the road.
Every other kind of ad has basically zero chance of ever even reaching my eyeballs.
the stupid rhymes and jingles aren’t meant for anyone to like them, they’re specifically designed to get stuck in your head, regardless if the thing itself is relevant to you. JAY, GEE, WENTWORTH! BUMBADUMBABUMBUMBUM! you literally just sang that in your head. whether you meant to or not.
mind control and psychological manipulation are real and powerful things. they wouldn’t be spending the money on it if that weren’t the case. it’s about taking up as much space in your brain as possible, so that you have no space left for the competition’s jingle
This is not, in any meaningful way, mind control. It’s just making something memorable. You don’t become a mindless zombie because you listened to a jingle. Instead, it just means that when Jerry, who is really busy because of his kids and career and hobbies has State Farm hike his rates, he will think “those motherfuckers! Who else sells insurance?” And will then remember the jingle.
if you’ve deliberately changed someone’s behavior to align with what you want, then who cares what anyone calls it? the end result is the same- the ads worked
We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.
I don’t inherently hate advertising and have on occasion learned about products or brands through advertising that I then actually ended up buying. Without advertising, you too might not know a lot of the products you’ve bought in your life.
I do block most ads online, but still see plenty of advertising in public spaces, or on television or radio when I watch/listen to those.
If everyone is so concerned about smartphones and social media ruining our attention span than where is the moral panic around advertisements slicing up everything into smaller and smaller chunks seperated by unrelated maximally superficial content?
hmmmm
The power of suggestion is intense. That’s why propaganda works so well too. They make money because it works. They manipulate the masses to buy products and it works really well.
I will tell you, as someone who runs a business and doesn’t really advertise, you need ads to actually make money. I do not make enough to rely on my business as a sole source of income. I also do not have enough money to spend on effective advertising. So basically I’m stuck unless I want to take venture capital money (I don’t).
I think one other thing is people associate ads with the old way, something posted, flashing at the side of a screen, rather than the full range from product placement to shilling and influence online. No one can avoid ads but you can certainly take steps to, and to also not be so swayed.
I have really started to practice anti consumerism. I try to only buy when i have to, and question what i need/want…do i really or is it an outside influence making me want it. Even trips etc. I feel like i am going backwards a bit but i wanna be my own person. If i cant trust ads just vote with your economic power.
Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.
Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.
This sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. Communicating with potential customers that your product exists and is good isn’t some concept that the advertising industry has somehow wrested from the hands of good hardworking people in return for their wages. It’s what marketing and advertising IS. It’s like saying the cheeseburger industry controls our access to cheeseburgers - like, kinda. But also, that’s kind of definitionally true. You can, of course, raise and slaughter your own cow to subvert the cheeseburger industry. And you can hand out fliers you made yourself advertising your business on the streetcorner. But it is a lot less work, and you’ll probably get a better product, if you outsource the work to a specialist
I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.
LongMember69@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
You are not immune to propaganda