Yeah, the classic example is serving me with ads for the thing I just bought (which won’t need replacing for >10 years). But then advertising is in general very wasteful. Slightly improving efficiency is something people will pay for it seems.
It’s been said in other comments, but a lot of advertising is for products which are useless or unpalatable or unhealthy. Just look at how much alcoholic drinks and soda drinks advertise. Maybe we should tax advertising revenue.
It's even more wasteful if you look at it at a societal level. There's an incredible amount of economic output that's devoted to advertising, so much so that there are large secondary industries (broadcast television, radio, social media, etc.) built around being advertisement delivery vehicles. Yet all of this economic activity is going towards something that's a net negative to society - an enormous amount of distracting material meant to manipulate a persons actions so that they're more beneficial for a company, and often less beneficial for themselves.
Advertising isn't alone in this. It seems like parasitic industries take up a large and growing part of our economic output.
You are conflating the role of advertising in general vs specific kinds of advertising and consumption that you view as a waste. Our entire industry (tech) relies on advertising to boost awareness of our products. Is it overconsumption that I saw an ad yesterday for Load Impact & subsequently tested & paid for their (very cool!) service?
Overconsumption can be true on an individual level (person X did not need to buy Y). On an aggregate, consumption is "the economy" and advertising is the primary way of informing potential buyers about an offering.
The technique is designed to encourage consumption. This does not necessarily make society more efficient; having frequent nags to consume product one does not need is wasteful.
It's more than likely that targeted ads make humanity less efficient, due to the widespread coercion to consume products and services that are not necessary for a healthy and happy life.
This is a bit how I feel about advertising in general. Human beings' time is being taken and mouths are being fed not to increase overall output, and thus lifting the overall well being of members of society. Instead, Company A hires advertisers to convince the public to buy their product instead of a competing product to Company B. Value is created for Company A, but entirely at the expense of Company B. At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.
I'd say the biggest problem with advertising is it increases perceived value and utility where none exists, and overtime makes people think certain products are cheaper, environmentally friendly or just benefitial
Sorry, I think you misunderstood my point a bit... I think I am agreeing with you.
My point was that advertising's purpose (from a consumer point of view) is for the ADVERTISER to waste money, to signal that they have confidence that their product is good enough to recover the cost of wasting money on advertising.
Advertisements are more manipulative than informative. But the bigger point was that they are far less of a benefit to humanity than other things, yet they get far more resources allocated to them.
As somebody who lives a mostly ad-free life, I totally agree. I think it's somewhat hard for people used to ads to appreciate how pervasive and manipulative they are. And it seems impossible to get people in the industry to see that maybe, just maybe manipulating people for a living is kinda sinister.
Even if it weren't, it's certainly wasteful. Advertising is mostly an arms race. Pepsi spends to challenge Coke. Coke spends even more to maintain hegemony. Neither is informing consumers, the perennial econ-theory justification for advertising. We all know those products exist. If we banned advertising tomorrow, consumers would be no worse off, and all those people could be doing something actually useful.
Good advertising might also be making people buy things.. and word of mouth, and having a good previous experience with the product. So what? Ah, I see, it's easier to blame it on the instrument than the handler this time.
Let's blame the beneficiary instead, it's their purse and final decision. If we're worried about the environment, we should totally tax or outlaw bad practices, but do this at the appropriate level, not in software.
How much worse could it be, compared to getting money for working hard on pointless zero-sum advertising pipes?
Don't get me wrong, there is a certain base demand for advertising where it adds value to an economy, but beyond that it is just zero sum redistribution. I do like my ad-money and the skills I maintain working for it, but like much of the services economy it is mostly a redistribution scheme, one where everybody attacks the pie with a vastly different size of spoon. Massive amounts of resources (at the end of the chain: limited natural resources) are spent on those spoons.
We are living in a world where resource depletion is a serious concern on the health and well-being of humanity. Advertisement encourages resource depletion. Therefore we shouldn't support advertisement at all.
Users, given the choice between paying for things and being inundated with ads, overwhelmingly choose the ads. I don't get it either, but advertising isn't some conspiracy, it's giving the people what they want. Ambitious social reform programs have left enough literal and metaphorical bodies in their wake that I want none of that.
Your linked argument that advertising makes things more expensive doesn't work out; ultimately businesses need to create awareness of their products and there's a zero-sum game for attention to be won. These costs will be borne by the purchasers of products no matter what you do. As technological progress makes design, manufacturing and distribution cheaper but advertising no more cost effective, there's a sort of Amdahl's law pushing advertising's share of costs up.
That said, advertising and advertising-supported products sound like an incredibly dreary thing to work on, so I'll continue letting someone else do the "stuff for which users are not willing to pay" thing.
It’s been said in other comments, but a lot of advertising is for products which are useless or unpalatable or unhealthy. Just look at how much alcoholic drinks and soda drinks advertise. Maybe we should tax advertising revenue.
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