Advertising in the US doesn't create demand. It just moves it around.
America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.
Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many prescription drugs, the advertising cost exceeds the manufacturing cost.
This is an argument for a tax on advertising. Advertising expenses should not be deductible business expenses at all.
Note that neither Amazon nor WalMart advertises much, compared to other large businesses. Target spends more on ads than WalMart does, although WalMart is much bigger.
> There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.
This is why any economic recovery plans that don't focus on growing the income of middle- and lower-class americans is doomed to fail. The rich can already buy anything they want, and they're saving like crazy. Until we unleash more demand from the lower- and middle-class, all efforts are futile.
It's also why we should be focusing on, and supporting, raises in the minimum wage, reductions in work weeks (more demand for leisure goods and services), and decreased tax burden on the middle class.
This necessarily implies a (potentially dramatic) increase in taxes on the wealthy. They can afford it. If someone claims they'll cut and run to a tax haven country -- let them. We'll do better without them around.
The savings rate being low is insufficient to justify your claim that advertising does not create net demand. It's also possible that people choose to work more to afford more goods.
I see Americans working very hard when I feel they would get more life satisfaction out of cutting expenses, primarily the big three: transportation, housing, and food.
I have always been suspicious of advertising, for a number of reasons. Can anyone come up with an example of something funded by advertising revenue that has not in some way been corrupted by it?
I have often suggested that the financial benefit of advertising seemed unconvincing. Advertising spending certainly has been shown to increase revenue, but how often does it come to pass that the revenue gain from advertising translates to a sufficient increase in gross-profit to cover the advertising expenditure?
Google is a company that is built on data and advertising. Surely they have the required information and the skills to analyse to give an answer.
>America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.
Though potentially you could persuade people to work harder.
Take me, for instance. I could theoretically retire, if I were happy to live, Mr Money Mustache style, on a very modest income. But every time I pass one of those Jaguar billboards I am reminded to keep working so I can retire later with shinier objects.
Advertising can also be helpful -- it is possible to develop a new product which is useful while not being intrinsically viral. Advertising makes it possible to have such a product actually exist and benefit people.
But impression or persuasion based advertising is generally unhelpful or actively harmful.
In 2012 walmart spent 1.89 billion dollars on advertising while target spent 1.6 billion. Only about a dozen companies spent more than walmart. Amazon wasn't in the billion dollar club, but it isn't a slouch either.
As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.
While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.
By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.
If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.
The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient.
Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
Certain types of bullshit (if not all) are built on the phenomenon of Eternal September[1]. There are always those who are clueless enough to trust a spam/scam email or who'd believe that the hamburger on the billboard would be as beautiful in reality. The rest of us who already have the experience and skills for separating the seeds from the fluff, suffer only losses from the bullshit that surrounds us. But the profit made on the few clueless ones keeps the bullshit economy going.
> As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
> Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit,
I don't think that's necessarily true. Just because deception is effective doesn't mean people want to be deceived. Just because alcoholism is "effective" in getting people to drink doesn't mean people want alcoholism. (A weird analogy, I know, but it logically parallels your conclusion, to an admitted extreme.)
> As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
Are we sure of that? It might depend on our definition of "work". A lot of the people responsible for doing this stuff may just be doing it because if they admit that none of it works, they'll have nothing else to offer and will be out of a job. It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Whether it's profitable, or profitable enough to be worth doing, is anyone's guess. Given how cheap impressions are, especially the kind of ultra-low-value impressions that bullshit provides, it's pretty difficult to imagine this stuff paying for itself, even if most of it is autogenerated or written by the world's most desperate English-speakers.
It might help more to come up with other jobs for the people who are putting the bullshit out there. Jobs they can do well, ideally. As it stands, I'm not sure the bullshit is serving their employers as much as it's just something for them to do so they keep getting a paycheck.
Bullshit doesn't work so much as it works slightly enough to see a better return on investment than other kinds of promotion (and certainly a better success rate than a complete lack of promotion, a strategy many small websites apparently employ).
You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.
Simply put, we live in a world of bullshit. People are - by and large - bullshitters, or at least they don't care enough to figure out and implement non-bullshit solutions, because bullshit gets the job done so they can go do other things.
I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to fight millions of years of inertia across our whole species (look at the advertising industry, how huge it is, you think we're going to put a stop to that by simply appealing to people's senses of beauty on the Internet or whatever? And that's just one piece of the bullshit).
Also be sure to note the infinite-scrolling "you may also like" section, which starts with regular clickbait, then starts repeating "stories", then... gets worse.
This page talks mostly about interface bullshit, but people are also tired of content bullshit. To paraphrase from Harry Frankfurt, this is content produced not to conceal truth, but without regard for for it whatsoever. If to lie is to murder truth, to bullshit is to manslaughter it.
Producing bullshit is more profitable because it still attracts eyeballs (and therefore ad revenue), but is much less costly to produce. Thats why the presence of large amounts of ads, needless pagination, and interface bullshit are a reasonable indicator of content bullshit.
The vast majority of working adults in the US are employed in the making and selling of things people don't need. A world without bullshit is total, utter economic collapse. It's the end of capitalism. It's hundreds of millions of people with nothing to do all day and no way to sustain themselves, an inevitable civil war with the landlord class, and a revolution that manages to install a government's that quite possibly worse.
Every piece of bullshit you see is how a great many people pay their mortgages and feed their children. Casting them out to the street is unlikely to make things better.
My way to avoid bullshit is to only read a very highly curated twitter feed. Anybody who mentions a "big" news story gets booted. Like if it's on the front page of the New York times, you get booted. I'll find out about it just by looking at the random media device blaring mainstream bullshit from every airport and doctors office waitimg room, so quit thinking you're the new Paul Revere by retweeting. I value niche information very specific to things I am trying to accomplish.
People's capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing
Even though this proposition is in bold 20-pt type, no arguments were offered to support it. It isn't obviously true, and indeed there are reasons to suspect the converse. Dare I say it, but a bald emotionally-appealing assertion of this sort seems sort of like... bullshit?
I recall only one person in dozens not having an ad blocker installed on his computer (how painful it was). Also many people pay for premium accounts on music streaming services instead of hearing ads once in a while. I think that, when given the choice (which is sometimes a few technical skills away), people would opt for less bullshit.
Of course that's only a valid argument when bullshit is not the main product. I don't doubt websites such as buzzfeed and 9gag will keep on thriving.
I was just thinking yesterday how inundated we are by ads these days. You see ads on television, the radio, the internet, billboards, public transportation, sports stadium/jerseys, magazines, guerrilla marketing, product-placements and celebrity endorsements, and not to mention PR (which is just advertising by other means). Talk about mental pollution!
So I got my start in ad based websites. If it wasn't for ads, I would have never really gotten into what we do. I'd have done something away from the internet because I never grew up with a computer and wasn't fascinated by them as a young child.
So because of that, I had always been in favor of ads. Not as in I'd plaster my site with ads, but if a site displayed ads, I would endure them because if I wanted the content that's the trade off. Otherwise I could find similar content somewhere else.
Then The Verge's article about slow browsing came about, and the retorting articles about things and I realized ads have gone way to fucking far.
17 years I have been online. 17 years I had never installed an ad blocking plugin or anything. Last month I installed uBlock Origin and turned it into blacklist mode.
I still feel sites who have ads in place that aren't intrusive and annoying deserve to be displayed, but sites like The Verge, or CNN or anything like that which blast you with 300 requests where 90% of them are ads. Or sites where ads become more important than the content; These sites get instant ad blocking enabled for them.
As a couple other posters mentioned, be sure to try out the understated "Turn bullshit on?" link on the upper right of the page. It really sells the point.
I sort of hoped that after clicking "I am a racist" to dismiss the "Like us on Facebook" page, that the popup chiding my brazen admission would have hijacked the OK button to post my admission to all logged in social media sites.
But unfortunately Brad seems to be to honorable for that, even after people doubly-confirm that they want the bullshit. And counter-to-reality, the pulsing read "Turn this bullshit off" link works as advertised.
Anybody know if there actually are any studies that show that these ads (1) help businesses attract clients and (2) do so without alienating more clients than they attract? Or are they all just for businesses that don't care about keeping customers anyways (e.g. weight loss fads)
Good ads generally require more effort and investment. On some occasions, companies will try to look cheap and affordable with shoddy ads, but generally shoddy ads come from tightarse clients trying to DIY or hiring average designers, etc. Or because that's what's been tested to be more effective with their audience.
Companies often take the cheap approach because they're cautious about the return they're going to get, don't know any better, are cheap themselves and don't appreciate design.
I couldn't help but notice that the blog associated with the site (linked at the bottom of the manifesto) is hosted on Tumblr and runs all of its offsite links through Tumblr redirects so that the clicks are all tracked. Surely that qualifies as exactly the sort of bullshit that this person is inveighing against.
This book should have a spot on everyone's desk in hard copy. Use it as a coaster, walk around with it in the hallways, take it to meetings.
No need to preach from it though - its very presence will be enough of a sign to others re: your tolerance levels of the amount of bullshit stinking up the current situation.
EDIT: BTW, I do indeed have a copy of On Bullshit, but I use "The Elements Of Style" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style ) book in the exact same way as I suggested above for On Bullshit. I think they are two sides of the same coin :)
Perhaps it's a solved problem. Must it be framed as a binary thing where there's either bullshit or no bullshit? What if there's a middle ground: those who find bullshit interfaces and/or bullshit content abhorrent use tools to improve it or completely avoid it, while those who aren't the wiser continue to go along with it?
You want to argue that bullshit content is what's keeping people uninformed? I say no, it takes a certain innate sense to rise above the natural flow of misinformation. Some people can only be guided by rhetoric - they make their decisions based on consensus in their local network and too easily trust people who claim to stand for it.
What we have is a war: between those who guide the senseless and those who exploit them. Take your pick.
This isn't just about advertising. It's equally about bad or distracting design.
But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc.
> As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Marketing and design are surely down to a psychological science by now.
This is by far the most ironic discussion in HN history! To be fair, i cant back up that statement with evidence...but wait, none of the comments here or for that matter content in this death to bs website are backed up by anything other than personal opinions and anecdotal theories.
You would hope that a rallying cry of Death to BS would invoke a slight bias towards withholding BS and focusing on facts that make a difference.
Do I agree that there is way too much noise online? Yes, but complaining about it is as noisy as things come!!!
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.
Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many prescription drugs, the advertising cost exceeds the manufacturing cost.
This is an argument for a tax on advertising. Advertising expenses should not be deductible business expenses at all.
Note that neither Amazon nor WalMart advertises much, compared to other large businesses. Target spends more on ads than WalMart does, although WalMart is much bigger.
[+] [-] killface|10 years ago|reply
This is why any economic recovery plans that don't focus on growing the income of middle- and lower-class americans is doomed to fail. The rich can already buy anything they want, and they're saving like crazy. Until we unleash more demand from the lower- and middle-class, all efforts are futile.
It's also why we should be focusing on, and supporting, raises in the minimum wage, reductions in work weeks (more demand for leisure goods and services), and decreased tax burden on the middle class.
This necessarily implies a (potentially dramatic) increase in taxes on the wealthy. They can afford it. If someone claims they'll cut and run to a tax haven country -- let them. We'll do better without them around.
[+] [-] davemel37|10 years ago|reply
What? Amazon is googles largest advertiser and walmart outspends target almost 2:1 ...
http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-tops-list-google-s-2...
[+] [-] spacehome|10 years ago|reply
I see Americans working very hard when I feel they would get more life satisfaction out of cutting expenses, primarily the big three: transportation, housing, and food.
[+] [-] Lerc|10 years ago|reply
I have often suggested that the financial benefit of advertising seemed unconvincing. Advertising spending certainly has been shown to increase revenue, but how often does it come to pass that the revenue gain from advertising translates to a sufficient increase in gross-profit to cover the advertising expenditure?
Google is a company that is built on data and advertising. Surely they have the required information and the skills to analyse to give an answer.
[+] [-] hugh4|10 years ago|reply
Though potentially you could persuade people to work harder.
Take me, for instance. I could theoretically retire, if I were happy to live, Mr Money Mustache style, on a very modest income. But every time I pass one of those Jaguar billboards I am reminded to keep working so I can retire later with shinier objects.
[+] [-] avivo|10 years ago|reply
But impression or persuasion based advertising is generally unhelpful or actively harmful.
I recently ran across a fascinating (and scarily dystopian) take on the future of that sort of advertising: http://escapepod.org/2013/05/16/ep396-dead-merchandise/
[+] [-] chrismcb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frame_perfect|10 years ago|reply
Wait, WHAT!? Advertising is a tax-deductible business expense? Why on earth?
[+] [-] shostack|10 years ago|reply
Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.
While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.
By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.
If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
[+] [-] mojuba|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[+] [-] a3n|10 years ago|reply
> Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit,
I don't think that's necessarily true. Just because deception is effective doesn't mean people want to be deceived. Just because alcoholism is "effective" in getting people to drink doesn't mean people want alcoholism. (A weird analogy, I know, but it logically parallels your conclusion, to an admitted extreme.)
[+] [-] fredkbloggs|10 years ago|reply
Are we sure of that? It might depend on our definition of "work". A lot of the people responsible for doing this stuff may just be doing it because if they admit that none of it works, they'll have nothing else to offer and will be out of a job. It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Whether it's profitable, or profitable enough to be worth doing, is anyone's guess. Given how cheap impressions are, especially the kind of ultra-low-value impressions that bullshit provides, it's pretty difficult to imagine this stuff paying for itself, even if most of it is autogenerated or written by the world's most desperate English-speakers.
It might help more to come up with other jobs for the people who are putting the bullshit out there. Jobs they can do well, ideally. As it stands, I'm not sure the bullshit is serving their employers as much as it's just something for them to do so they keep getting a paycheck.
[+] [-] dmschulman|10 years ago|reply
You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.
[+] [-] resu_nimda|10 years ago|reply
I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to fight millions of years of inertia across our whole species (look at the advertising industry, how huge it is, you think we're going to put a stop to that by simply appealing to people's senses of beauty on the Internet or whatever? And that's just one piece of the bullshit).
[+] [-] gress|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|10 years ago|reply
Thank you for not echoing some of your colleagues' ridiculous "if you block ads there will never be any more art ever" arguments.
[+] [-] twic|10 years ago|reply
Really? People do do an awful lot of stuff which doesn't work. Is there good evidence that this stuff works?
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Encosia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halotrope|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnevets|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|10 years ago|reply
Producing bullshit is more profitable because it still attracts eyeballs (and therefore ad revenue), but is much less costly to produce. Thats why the presence of large amounts of ads, needless pagination, and interface bullshit are a reasonable indicator of content bullshit.
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
Every piece of bullshit you see is how a great many people pay their mortgages and feed their children. Casting them out to the street is unlikely to make things better.
[+] [-] narrator|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xd1936|10 years ago|reply
Video and transcription: http://leoherzog.com/jon-stewarts-incredible-bullsht-speech
[+] [-] kristianc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|10 years ago|reply
Even though this proposition is in bold 20-pt type, no arguments were offered to support it. It isn't obviously true, and indeed there are reasons to suspect the converse. Dare I say it, but a bald emotionally-appealing assertion of this sort seems sort of like... bullshit?
[+] [-] hiq|10 years ago|reply
Of course that's only a valid argument when bullshit is not the main product. I don't doubt websites such as buzzfeed and 9gag will keep on thriving.
[+] [-] interesting_att|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Killswitch|10 years ago|reply
So because of that, I had always been in favor of ads. Not as in I'd plaster my site with ads, but if a site displayed ads, I would endure them because if I wanted the content that's the trade off. Otherwise I could find similar content somewhere else.
Then The Verge's article about slow browsing came about, and the retorting articles about things and I realized ads have gone way to fucking far.
17 years I have been online. 17 years I had never installed an ad blocking plugin or anything. Last month I installed uBlock Origin and turned it into blacklist mode.
I still feel sites who have ads in place that aren't intrusive and annoying deserve to be displayed, but sites like The Verge, or CNN or anything like that which blast you with 300 requests where 90% of them are ads. Or sites where ads become more important than the content; These sites get instant ad blocking enabled for them.
It's time to take a step back.
[+] [-] nkurz|10 years ago|reply
I sort of hoped that after clicking "I am a racist" to dismiss the "Like us on Facebook" page, that the popup chiding my brazen admission would have hijacked the OK button to post my admission to all logged in social media sites.
But unfortunately Brad seems to be to honorable for that, even after people doubly-confirm that they want the bullshit. And counter-to-reality, the pulsing read "Turn this bullshit off" link works as advertised.
[+] [-] nickledave|10 years ago|reply
Anybody know if there actually are any studies that show that these ads (1) help businesses attract clients and (2) do so without alienating more clients than they attract? Or are they all just for businesses that don't care about keeping customers anyways (e.g. weight loss fads)
[+] [-] prawn|10 years ago|reply
Companies often take the cheap approach because they're cautious about the return they're going to get, don't know any better, are cheap themselves and don't appreciate design.
[+] [-] segphault|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyidsinga|10 years ago|reply
This book should have a spot on everyone's desk in hard copy. Use it as a coaster, walk around with it in the hallways, take it to meetings. No need to preach from it though - its very presence will be enough of a sign to others re: your tolerance levels of the amount of bullshit stinking up the current situation.
EDIT: BTW, I do indeed have a copy of On Bullshit, but I use "The Elements Of Style" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style ) book in the exact same way as I suggested above for On Bullshit. I think they are two sides of the same coin :)
[+] [-] icanhackit|10 years ago|reply
You want to argue that bullshit content is what's keeping people uninformed? I say no, it takes a certain innate sense to rise above the natural flow of misinformation. Some people can only be guided by rhetoric - they make their decisions based on consensus in their local network and too easily trust people who claim to stand for it.
What we have is a war: between those who guide the senseless and those who exploit them. Take your pick.
[+] [-] tpeo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanpg|10 years ago|reply
But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc.
> As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Marketing and design are surely down to a psychological science by now.
[+] [-] davemel37|10 years ago|reply
You would hope that a rallying cry of Death to BS would invoke a slight bias towards withholding BS and focusing on facts that make a difference.
Do I agree that there is way too much noise online? Yes, but complaining about it is as noisy as things come!!!
[+] [-] cm2187|10 years ago|reply
General de Gaulle's comment on a similar slogan: "a vast programme".
[+] [-] rythie|10 years ago|reply