I suppose by definition efficient advertising only informs me about products I need and/or want when I want them. The result being the highest possible conversion rates and best customer experiences also ensuring that customers will rave about it.
Inefficient advertising takes advantage of law of large numbers low-cost spammy channels, inundating a large majority with crap they don't care about, wasting their time and even successfully selling people who don't want or like your product.
So in that sense it would seem to be more "moral".
But lying, manipulating your emotions, etc. are efficient ways of doing ads. If something is OK when done poorly and harmful when optimised, maybe it was a bad thing in the first place?
Advertising is the art of manipulating people into spending money. When they are made to spend in a way that is harmful to themselves or society, you could argue that it's evil, and I would.
I'd go farther and say the economic system we have which elevates people to demigod status pretty arbitrarily and is ravaging the Earth is by extension evil. No one with any sense has control sufficient to stop us from spiraling into cataclysm or at least an unnecessary dystopia. Malicious advertisements don't have any right to exist, they just happen to be allowed because of our prevailing principles.
I'm not going to say advertising harms society in and of itself but too much of anything is harmful. Unchecked, advertising serves to create an insatiable consumerism where enough is never enough and a general feeling of discontent in the target audience.
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.
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.
This article has quite a cynical tone that I can't say I agree with. The argument that advertising is the business of harvesting customers' attention, while not necessarily incorrect, is disingenuous. The ad industry is not some diabolical entity that conspires to brainwash citizens of the world.
I would posit that the advertising market is actually quite efficient as opposed to being a market failure. Let's examine a paragraph from the market failure section:
> Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, bill-board operators, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - namely, how easy it is for you to escape their predations. This is often much lower than the value to you, or to others, of directing your attention to something else.
The author makes the implicit assumption that advertisements automatically garner 100% of our attention. They don't. When was the last time you went to a movie theater before the previews started, sat silently, and stared at the advert loop? You probably have never done that! Instead, you give your attention to your loved ones or your phone. And maybe you'll watch the previews, but if you're even somewhat into watching newly released movies, those add value to you.
Some advertisements do capture our attention, and those are priced appropriately. Super Bowl commercials cost more on a CPM basis than a commercial to be aired during the Walking Dead, which in turn costs more than an Instagram sponsored story. This is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
Moreover, people do avoid advertisements when they deem it necessary. Some people buy the premium versions of iPhone applications, some people only watch new TV shows on Netflix, and some people pay extra to watch live sports events on an ad-free Internet stream. Again, this is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps the world would be better off without advertising. (I'm not even sure that this is true, given that advertising does benefit people.) But if there are no advertisements and a single company ran a TV spot, it would be at a huge competitive advantage. So everyone runs marketing campaigns. I really think this benefits the consumer more than the author gives credit for, however. Marketing is the field of creating value for a specific segment of the population, who in turn will enter into a long-term relationship with your firm and give you economic value in return. Advertising is an important part of this.
Also, to be clear, I don't advocate for marketing strategies that themselves are disingenuous. Moreover, there are perfectly valid arguments to make that inference-based advertising are immoral, or that Internet tracking is immoral. But the author is painting with absolutely massive brush strokes against the entire field of "advertising," and I feel the need to strongly qualify his argument.
There's a lot I want to say about this piece, because it seems that the author fundamentally misunderstands marketing. The entire bit about advertisers charging consumers directly is a terrible business idea, for example, for the same reason that we have grocery stores and shopping malls. However, I don't really want to spend all afternoon on a point-by-point response.
The default position should be that advertising is bad for you. Therefore more effective advertising is worse for you. Personalized ads are more effective, thus they are worse for you.
Effective advertising isn't information, it's manipulation. Ads "work" by creating a sense of lack that didn't exist previously, or by co-opting your decision making process with gratuitous associations.
On top of that, advertising is effectively forced on people. Given that many people actively try to avoid advertising, it seems clear that this is a negative point.
If advertising was objective and unbiased, and it was only presented to people actively seeking information about products, it would be a net benefit to society. As it stands, I believe it is a net detriment.
Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL.
One example is advertising toys to kids during kids programming: most of this is done in a way that makes kids feel left out for not having the toys, relies on FOMO, envy, and molds susceptible children into more jealous and materialistic people. It misleads them with its imagery into thinking they will be extremely happy if they just have that thing.
I think that perhaps even the majority of what is done as accepted practice in advertising (across all its forms) is harmful, and further, it will stay that way because the $ales a campaign generates are the only measure of success as far as success is rewarded.
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.
Okay, sorry for the confusion. Your response didn't seem pro-advertising per se, but it seemed to suggest that advertising was a necessary evil maybe. I wanted to clarify that it isn't actually necessary systematically, it's just necessary in a race-to-the-bottom zero-sum game where each player has to accept the necessary evil given the assumption that others are doing it.
I think that's the point of disagreement. Advertising is often inane and wasteful, but in my opinion it's not fundamentally evil.
If we serve more relevant ads resulting in clicks/sales/etc, we get more revenue. We get happier advertisers, and give users access to things they demonstrably want. There is a clear alignment of incentives to have good standards and to try to square that circle. There are other "crosswinds" which make this task hard, but also (to me) a very interesting optimization problem.
People can (and should) complain when we fail to do it right. But to assume the worst, or to write off the entire industry because we make money from advertising, leaves no room for a meaningful discussion.
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.
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