alt Hacker NewsAdvertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction (2019) [pdf]
Comments
Nobody in the comment section is apparently reading the paper, because the only subcategory that reached p<0.05 significance was newspaper advertising expenditure.
When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold.
TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold.
The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.
Between adblock, piracy, and generally avoiding services, and things that make me see ads…
it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.
As Charlie Munger pointed out, our economy does not run on greed, it runs on envy. Why? Because advertising discovered insecurity as the most effective crowbar. Advertising is the bedrock of the consumer value system, which has been the basis for the US economy since the end of World War II.
What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization.
Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.
Whenever I read anything like this, I am reminded that everyone should see Adam Curtis' "The Century of Self" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4) which is about how Sigmund Freud's nephew created the cancerous style of marketing that is ubiquitous in our society.
Yet how many of our jobs wouldn't exist without advertising ... I'm not saying it's right or wrong just a fact. Advertising is foundational to many modern industries, especially digital ones. Social platforms, media companies, search engines, news, free apps, podcasts, streaming tiers. A ton of your daily internet exists because ads bankroll the whole mess. Without advertising, half the tech economy collapses into subscription-only fiefdoms. Unfortunately if advertising vanished tomorrow, lots of companies would die, tons of jobs would evaporate, and the economy would contort into something unrecognizable.
OMG. This is like reading a headline that says "Cigarette Smoking is a source of dissatisfaction"
It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you.
Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered.
Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong.
Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent.
You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.
Social Comparison and the Idealised Images of Advertising (1991)
https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison...
Lower Life Satisfaction Related to Materialism in Children Frequently Exposed to Advertising (2012)
http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opre...
It should not be surprising that advertising is a source of dissatisfaction, since that is literally the point: inducing a feeling of unfulfilled desire is the mechanism by which ads generate sales. It would be more surprising if advertising were found not to be a major source of dissatisfaction, since we would have trouble explaining why businesses spend so much money on it.
Thats why I singed out from ads everywhere I could. Adblocking everywhere it's possible, no legacy radio or tv - only add-free subscriptions or free alternatives, alt-apps for youtube, no social-media like f...book, twitter or (Thor forbid) tictok. I always reject any discounts, special offers when it require to agree to "marketing cominication". I block all robocalls and if any pass throu I chase down the company behind it and file complain to authorities (in my country it's illegal to contact anyone without him/her agree for it). Not everything works of course and only ads I cannot block are OOH like billboards. I support creators directly where it's worth and pay or donate for all sites/services/apps I use frequently (if applicable).
When I realized how much ads manipulate me and my thinking, I stopped consuming radio/TV stations that send ads. This was >= 25 years ago. Additionally, I never surf without ad blocking and use DNS based ad blocking on all my devices + in our home router (nextdns). Besides this, I like to pay for the content I am interested in - which helps against ads. This is my personal mostly ad free bubble, I couldn't stand it any different.
There is a basic correlation which doesn't need data or research. Advertising is about gaining people's attention and creating familiarity for a product. People's satisfaction is about gap between their expectation and actuals. Since advertising tends to increase expectations, it would lead to more dissatisfaction. This is a direct consequence.
I maintain a healthy depression without ads, the old fashioned way.
This doesn't even address the disastrous effects of overconsumption that inevitability follow from advertising. Advertising is destroying the climate and our planet.
Before a product can solve a problem, advertising must create the problem.
"what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness. You don't want most of it, you want all of it" - Churchill
Interesting finding from the paper:
Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect
I'd be in favor of significantly taxing advertising for the same reason that we levy "vice taxes" on booze, cigarettes, gambling, etc.
It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.
Capitalism (at least our form of it) requires consumerism. Consumerism requires advertising. You may think it's just an annoyance, but it's the foundation of our economy. A dissatisfied consumer wants more; a satisfied consumer doesn't.
Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.
this isn't a "credibility revolution" paper, it doesn't show causality, it doesn't use randomization anywhere, and it is very much a post hoc ergo proctor hoc sort of thing
some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475
not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012
another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/
there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising.
i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes.
instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.
Advertising for content-creators is just a tool to capture value provided to people. The vast majority of people would rather pay in advertising than pay in dollars. In fact, if you use hn.algolia.com and look around you'll see that paywall complaints are far more common than advertising ones. This also applies on Reddit and Instagram and so on.
So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators:
* subscriptions/paywalls
* advertising
* micro-transactions
Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff.
Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff.
For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want.
To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined.
And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for.
Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance.
Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.
I'll take this opportunity to get on a soapbox and preach: We need to shift our understanding of digital programmatic advertising to basically the pimp/hoe model.
It's population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/YouTube/Gmail/article.
It's exploitative, dirty, exposes the bitches (i.e. you and your kids) to risks, and on a population scale it poses a serious safety and national security risk to our country. RTB bidstream surveillance means that all the data used in the pimps' matchmaking services can be used by many nefarious actors to physically track and target people, including spies, politicians, and other politically-exposed persons.
Would you let your kid turn tricks for a pimp to get a Gucci handbag? No? Then why would you let Alphabet pimp your kid out to get a YouTube video?
Advertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.