this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
The reason we're absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that's enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There's also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they're shilling anyway.
Advertisers claim that it'll work eventually which is how they can justify companies paying them to display ads, and how they can justify paying for ads on a service like YouTube or even a website. In a sense they are being hung out to dry, many of the big companies seen in ads these days don't actually need to convince you to buy their product because they have an almost complete monopoly on the market, they're only technically not monopolies, so you're going to buy their products anyway or live without the convenience. This is why among other things Ad-funded internet is considered a bubble in a sense, because advertisers are spending money paying websites to show people things they don't think or care about, but somehow this translates into profits? Seems like the only one profiting is the site being paid, and the creator on it.
I'm sure Nestle, Pepsi Co. P&G, CocaCola Bottling Co. Walmart, Amazon, and the other big boys really need to tell others about them or people wouldn't know they exist and buy from them. Get real, these companies have their foot in the door, when it comes to the whole consumers buying from them. You can't not buy from them and live as anyone else would, it takes effort to cut them out, and in many cases living without the convenience they bring.
That's not how it works. Or, rather, that's not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven't bought before. Very likely you'll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I'm probably in the minority
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn't try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
You can fool some of the people some of the time… right? :)
I’d expect nothing less than executives at a number of the Fortune 50 to be ruthlessly cutthroat, including when it comes to vetting the claims of their marketing teams.
(I know I’m speaking about studies I only assume to exist by the way, will have to research it later)
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can't actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there's not a guarantee it's unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they're familiar or if they just don't have much option.
The main point I'd like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren't wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don't, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That's why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it's not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they'll stop dumping money into a hole.