Advertisements are not there for you to immediately buy something or even buy something in the next few days. Advertisements are there to associate a company with a product or service.
If you see an advert for washing powder the advertisers are not expecting you to head to the store and get some, just next time you think you should try a different brand of powder a memory circuit fires off in your brain saying “what about Fab or Omo?”
There was a show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation years ago called The Gruen Transfer where advertisers would discuss each other’s ads and kinda pulls back the voodoo on advertising.
Yeah some jackass I’m at once in marketing tried to explain it to me. I haven’t seen an ad in ages so I call bullshit. It’s all mostly psychobabble nonsense.
are not expecting you to head to the store and get some, just next time you think you should try a different brand of powder a memory circuit fires off in your brain saying “what about Fab or Omo?”
That’s still secondary, I think. Advertising is mostly about getting the stores to stock it so that you can buy it.
People learning about your product or service is the big battle of commerce.
At one end of the spectrum, you have a company like Sriracha, $0 spent on advertising. They had faith that word of mouth would suffice.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have McDonald’s. McDonald’s was advertising on billboards in videogames, in the 2000s. Ask 1 billion people to name 5 burger joints.
And the problem is, when those of you who aren’t susceptible to ads start blocking them, the service has to force a subscription model on everyone.
At one point most things on the internet were free because of advertising.
That’s free as in “free”. Our eyes were the cost.
Older folk will remember the insane pop ups, the animated gif banners, misleading links… But ultimately it let anyone, no matter what monetary status, enjoy the same content.
And now we pivot to a subscription based internet as traditional advertising falters. And then, the crazy thing that will happen is they will start advertising in the subscription services too.
I also remeber the plague of malvertising with drive by viruses and Trojans. I haven't had a single positive virus on my systems in over a decade thanks to adblockers.
It's insane, because the internet looked entirely different as well. Not these monolithic sites but scattered around.
I use a content-blocker to block ad-networks that track me. It was never about blocking ads, but taking a necessary security measure against being tracked. They could still put ads in videos, like on TV, that aren’t part of ad-networks and don’t invade privacy - but they don’t do that, they want to invade users’ privacy instead.
I’m not sure why I got downvoted for saying that. I’m not anti-ad blocking, just describing the economics of it all.
But I have been thinking about the situation, specifically with YouTube.
I think that the problem is that the adverts, as they are, interrupt the content, whereas they should be part of the platform instead.
Like old Google search results, you could be offered sponsored content that you can choose to engage with.
That would force companies to come up with things that people want to watch, and would effectively kickstart the creativity in advertising again, rather than the brute force interruption.
Also, the branding of the platform and content. Shows “sponsored” by a company don’t need to run a two minute advert within a video to gain association. A logo, brand awareness, links and a decent service should be enough for them to get value in backing creators…
The more a company spends on advertising, the more they sell. You might be annoyed by the ads, but somewhere someone pulled out their credit card watching the exact same thing.
It’s the same way with telemarketing and scams. If they didn’t work, then they would go away. Obviously they are successful. That’s why people keep using them.
Ads work way better than you think. Perhaps the most important thing they do is to make you aware the brand exists, and to keep it in mind when you're looking for a service/product. You're way more likely to buy something you've heard of, even if it's from ads.
Oh I’m aware. Hell, I just recently got convinced to buy something because of an ad. I’m not so arrogant that I think I’m above that. But I try to at least have my own mind about it (and usually am able to resist the siren’s call at that).
(If you’re wondering, it was for a band. Shittily designed ad though as it didn’t say what band it was. Lol. The one ad of the year I get swayed by and I don’t even know what it was about. xD )
Kinda like the shitty YouTube ads that don’t mention anything identifiable in the first 5 seconds before I skip that shit. Thanks for the non-descript idyllic scene with absolutely no indication what your product is!
Not really, it just has to work on a few people.
With how cheap online ads are, if just 1% of people are stupid enough to act based on ads, it makes them worth it.
I’m not immune to advertising. I make a point to never purchase anything I’ve ever seen advertised. If you spend 30 seconds telling me about your product before I watch a 1 minute clip that I will probably regret watching anyway, then I will make a point to never buy anything from your company.
I hate this line of reasoning. I hate what advertising has become. Whatever advertising gimmicks might work on me, way more is wasted on gimmicks that at best I ignore, and at worst actively deter me from purchasing whatever they’re selling. I’m a net negative as far as advertising is concerned.
That may be true, but for every you (and me) that are deterred by some ads rather than inspired, there are more others. If it’s didn’t work, companies wouldn’t spend the money.
I think ads could work better if YouTube didn’t use them to make the free experience awful. They usually have neither to do with me nor with the content I tried to watch.
And I think that’s some of the issue that has grew to an uncontrollable mess. Advertising companies only care about getting ads in front of the most eyes. Sure some try to target specific audiences, but the terrible and predatory practices have led someone like me to actively avoid any messaging from ads. I’d hazard a guess that trying to limit advertising to people like me, might actually have a positive effect on advertising as a whole. Less wasted resources on such a disenfranchised segment that will not buy what they’re selling.
The problem is, that impression is negative. And it extends to all advertising. I’ve actually trimmed my Facebook feed down to not having any ads. It’s kinda funny looking through my feed as opposed to my wife’s that’s filled with ads as every other post.
Even negative attention is attention. If it bothers you then you’re thinking about it. If an advert bothered you enough to complain about it online or to someone irl then even though you’re not a customer, you’re a vector of transmission increasing their organic reach.
But I don’t specifically discuss certain ads. My comments on this post are basically my thoughts on it. I hate the way advertising has infested every aspect of life and take active measures to avoid or ignore it.
Yeah, like how nestle kept advertising to me so it made me look up all the dirt on their company, and now I’m a free advertisment for boycotting nestle. I pretty much bring up how dogshit and unhumane and criminally unethical they are on a daily basis.
Also, did you know that the guy Kelloggs is named for was a proponent of circumcision because it was supposed to make it to where your kids can’t mastrubate?
Did you know that most chocolate and sugar are farmed using slave labor?
Did you know that asparatame, the leading artificial sweetener for diet drinks, is wayyyy worse for you than actual sugar?
Dont advertise to me or i will make it my lifes mission to sabotage your company in every way i possibly can.
This might make you feel better, but the Kellogg’s company was co-founded by two brothers, one a batshit puritan that thought masturbation, or anything that was enjoyable for that matter, was sin and one who didn’t really care about that but thought easy breakfasts were a great product to sell.
The crazy one was so focused on keeping their products as bland as possible because sugar was also a sin that he vetoed adding sugar to sell more and then didn’t notice his brother quietly buying shares of the company until he was able to do a hostile takeover and kick the puritan out.
So while he did start the company with the intent of making food so boring people would stop masturbating, he was relatively quickly forced out of the company for those beliefs. It’s one of the few cases of capitalism fucking someone over that I don’t disprove of, because fuck puritans.
Not that their cereals are particularly good. Despite not being as bland as buddy wanted them to be, frosted flakes are still pretty boring.
Remember when Subway had that annoying jungle “If you give a card you’ll get a sandwich.” or something like that? A long time ago right? It annoyed me SO much I have not even gone into a Subway since. Before that I had Subway for lunch probably 4 days a week.
I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven’t done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.
And I went on 4 seperate days to buy 4 seperate cards and get a free sandwich with each. I also used to rarely eat there, but am once or twice a week now.
But why then are we even getting ads “not aimed at us”? Doesn’t a platform like youtube, which has access to basically all data on the google account, know us better than ourselves? Why all the tracking, only for us to be eternally bothered by stuff we’ll never buy? I’ve lost count of how many “atlas VPN” ads I’ve been bombarded with, and still no intention whatsoever of ever getting it.
If you turn off ad personalization at every turn, which most of us do, then most ads probably aren’t relevant to you. If you want the ads you see to be relevant to you, you have to let them collect the data. It’s one or the other when you see an ad that doesn’t get blocked, so make your choice.
edit: if it makes you feel any better, I have targeting turned off as well, but I still get the same ads over and over for a local surf shop on the other side of the island, and for two local dudes who will lift your truck 6-9” for a good deal, brah.
The thing is, it’s quite easy for a marketing department to measure their success. They release an annoying unskippable YouTube and and change nothing else in their marketing and their profits go up by 1% or whatever. As much as I basically do no shopping where the day to day advertising I see can influence it, that’s a pretty abnormal lifestyle pattern. Plus I’m still susceptible to choosing specific items inside a shop, and I definitely susceptible when I’m looking for specific products and come across secret ads disguised as advice.
The beer Carling Black Label was specifically NOT advertised because It was determined that’s what drew the customers to the product
Edit: I should clarify that over the years it has been variously advertised and not advertised. I was referring to a specific period in Canada. But then like all things, different brand managers take over, strategies change, and they went back to advertising it. They lost a lot of the customers that appreciated the fact that it wasn’t advertised, but they gained manyfold more.
You know how there’s often three sizes of something, say coffee, for example. Small, medium and large. Alternatively it could also be three price tiers; iPhone cheap, iPhone normal and iPhone expensive. Well more often than not the most expensive one is there so that people can go like: “$1499 for a phone?!? Absolutely not, I’ll go with the more affordable $999” version" - just like Apple wanted you to.
Customer behaviour is among the most studied psychological phenomenoms out there. No matter how stupid you think some ad is, it still works. It might not make a noticeable difference on individual level, but when you show an advertisement to million people, then it starts showing effect.
But what you described isn’t really an advertising gimmick. I’m aware of the pricing gimmick but how will I know what price an iPhone is of I never absorb an ad? In fact I almost ditched samsung last time I bought a phone (due to their bullshit bloatware which I consider an extension of advertising). It was only because it was the cheapest that I got another one. Advertising didn’t positively affect my choice in any way.
Because a ton of people are still influenced by ads, and even if they didn’t exist ads serve to keep the product/company in the public conscious. It keeps people talking about the product or informs people that the new movie/phone/whatever is coming out soon.
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