Every time I see an ad, I make a mental note to avoid the brand.
I would do this but I don’t see any ads
I don’t understand ads. Do people actually use services and buy products because of a shitty advertisement?
You do, and don’t fool yourself that you don’t.
You probably don’t click on ads, but they stick in your brain. You might see a half-dozen ads for Doritos, and then when you go to the store a week later, you’re slightly more likely to buy Doritos.
The vast majority of advertising is just getting a brand or an idea into the back of your head so when you’re looking for something in that product category, regardless of it’s a VPN, a web host, a snack food, a car, or whatever, you’re going to have a bias towards what you’ve seen in the past.
Most of my ad-blocking isn’t to stop myself from buying some herbal supplement/spray tanner combo, it’s to stop myself from being biased by the capitalist propaganda machine.
I am not immune from advertisements, and neither are you.
I’ve certainly heard this said before. Lately I’ve been thinking more about it as ads seem to be infecting more and more aspects of my life and so I’ve started to question it.
I’ve started to think that the whole “it makes you subconsciously think about the product when you’re in the store” thing might just be made up by marketers. You know, the people whose jobs entirely depend on advertising being a good investment. That does kind of self-prove the point though, because if marketers just made it up and a bunch of people now think it’s true, it follows that people will just absorb “information” if it’s fed to them from the correct place.
I figured I’d see if I could find some science research on the subject. I managed to read through six studies (at least the abstracts and the methodologies) before my eyes glazed completely over and I needed to stop.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498694/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8199559/
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2021.2000697#abstract
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02650487.2022.2143098#abstract
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249457
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440221093042
First I will say that none of them are able to draw links from advertising consumed to purchases made. The methodologies tend to focus on the immediate, how the ad makes a person feel in the moment. Generally this is done by asking people. Surveys and the like. The first one measured facial expressions and emotional responses. The PLOS one (fifth link) just asked marketing managers if their marketing was effective or not (and wow do they ever use a lot of words to say that, they turned their thesaurus up to 11). The second one is actually a bit of a side-bar in that it’s specifically looking at the effectiveness of gamified advertising, but it does investigate brand memory based on different exposures. Again, just brand memory, not actual purchase behaviour.
And all that makes sense. It would be extremely difficult to build a study that manages to track every motivation for purchasing a given product, especially if some of those motivations aren’t known by the purchaser. So what I’ll say is that while it’s likely that advertising can prod us one way or another, the wisdom that it’s an effective subconscious driver of sales is not evidence based.
Do with that what you will.
I actively avoid buying anything I’ve seen being advertised.
You are not immune.
There are more reasons than that, but it’s definitely near the top of my list.
Yukhk. I hate how so many of these services spend most of their efforts on marketing instead of making a decent product or experience. Isn’t mullvad one of the actual best VPN providers out there? NEVER seen them run an ad, hell, I only found out about them on accident due to mental outlaw, some ordinary gamers or the linux experiment. Can’t remember which tho.
Until you self-host funny cat videos, OP, you’re just a leech. Maybe like a poor kid or something.
Where do you get this attitude that everything should be provided to you for free and you’re entitled to it?
I will block any and every ad I possibly can using all technology available to me. Does that break someone’s business model? Too bad. Do I care if all this glorious ad-sponsored content goes away forever because of the actions of me and others like me? Not even a little bit. In fact, I will welcome the day that ad blocking gains enough momentum that it causes businesses to go under or restructure their entire operational model. If ads are the only way something can exist, then it deserves to die.
In case it wasn’t clear enough: I don’t care.
I’ve been working in the IT/Internet industry for over 30 years, in one form or another. I understand how things work and I probably have a better perspective than most on how dysfunctional we have become.
The f are you on about? YouTube has a fairly affordable ad-free tier with a transparent revenue-share model that multiple top content creators have openly endorsed.
This ad infested hell only exists because most of the internet users think it’s outrageous to pay 10$/month for an all-you-can-eat VoD service. Some top creators did branch out to create their own streaming services, and spoiler alert, it’s more expensive, or just as expensive but with muuuuch less content.
I do care if all that YT content is gone. It’s a fuckin goldmine.
I’d really wish they actually had the audacity to just paywall the entire platform. Pay or fuck off, no ads.
And then people like you can go back to the good old days of some other random free video hosting service where a 360p video with a cat meme was buffering for a minute on a good day, or was completely unavailable on a bad one.
Pay or fuck off, no ads.
Contrary to what you seem to have understood with my previous post, I’d be absolutely fine with this.
Where do you get this attitude that everything should be provided to you for free and you’re entitled to it?
From (non-capitalistic) utopic ideas, where humans try to be excellent to each other.
So, is OP donating to lemmy? Or self-hosting some content?
Or only leeching while explaining to everyone that this is how communism is supposed to work?
The level of your argumentation:
Are you a firefighter or a medical doctor? If not, you’re obviously in favour of fires, death and disease.
Why aren’t you donating all of your stuff to homeless people? Or are you happy all those people don’t have a home?
Why aren’t you saving the world already???You know, demanding change and maybe showing some sort of protest does not mean you need to do those things exactly as you would like to see them, especially if those efforts wouldn’t change anything on the larger scale and rather lead to a bunch of problems in your life.
