I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).
I don’t get it.
EDIT: just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a special snowflake immune to ads ffs. I’m talking about the ads in the enshittification spectrum, like the ones that blare inside the media center of your brand new car, the ones that makes sites unreadable, the ones shoved every minute in your 10 minute videos, things like that. But I understand that I may be inside my own ad hate bubble, I really dislike ads in general and I try to avoid them them best I can.
Despite the hatred, advertising works most of the time.
If nobody knows about your product or service, you can’t make any money. Word of mouth doesn’t cut it beyond a local store.
I ran a local store and word of mouth wasn’t nearly enough.
What’s this Coca-Cola thing the kids are talking about these days?
because people are morons and ads work.
You can take a small box of cat shit and in the right ad campaign, people will buy it. Catshit has electrolytes.
I think people have lost the disconnect.
Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it,
The question is where does THAT money come from? And then ask yourself why everything is so expensive… because ad money isn’t plucked out of thin air. It’s added to pretty much EVERY product you buy.
So until people boycott ad products more than buying then nothing will change and everything will just keep getting more expensive as they all outbid each other for ad space because they don’t care how much it costs them because it’ll always get taken out of your wallet!
I think what you’re missing is the picture of a business that is doing pretty well and has extra cash but needs to grow even if it means losing some cash.
In the old world of brand advertising, the idea was to plant an image in people’s minds that would last a long time, earning back the price of the ads by raising customer awareness and loyalty.
In the new world of online ads, it’s more transactional. I can only sell t-shirts on my t-shirt site if I get visitors to it. How do I do that? Oh I can buy ads. And the ad network can target people interested in t-shirts. How does it know they’re interested? They clicked on other t-shirt ads. I spend $5.50 on hundreds of ads just to get one person to the site who buys. But I make $9 profit on each shirt.
If you had a machine that could pump out $9 every time you put $5.50 in, your only question would be how many times you can turn that crank per hour. That’s where all the ads come from. And did you notice the ad company gets $5.50 while the t-shirt maker who actually makes and sells the product only gets $4.50? It’s still a profitable deal for them. But the ad companies make bank.
All of this is going on all the time. Your post seems to be saying “but I hate ads.” I can’t disagree with you there. But unfortunately they actually work as long as you have some profit margin to spare on them.
I don’t get it.
EDIT:
YOU can evade them, but most people can’t.
It’s some weird % math. Sending BS spam, like the good old nigerian prince, costs nearly nothing, but it only needs to work in like 1 in 10 million cases for it to be profitable. Returns on random spam advertisement is abysmal, and google gets like 10-100x that because it’s more targeted. That is why people use google ads. But also not because they’re good. They’re just less useless, while still having a very very minimal effect.
The rest is scale.
I will tell you, as someone who runs a business and doesn’t really advertise, you need ads to actually make money. I do not make enough to rely on my business as a sole source of income. I also do not have enough money to spend on effective advertising. So basically I’m stuck unless I want to take venture capital money (I don’t).
The advertising you are seeing doesn’t work that well on you. I’m in the same boat. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. There’s a ton of advertising where I’m a net negative. That doesn’t mean the overall output is negative.
And it’s probably not even true that ads don’t work on OP. Everyone likes to think they’re built different.
That’s why I specified the ads OP was seeing. For me, there might be ads that are seemless with something else in doing that I don’t notice and might work. But in OPs example in his reasons to you, fuck any fucking company that puts an ad inside my goddamn car. Ads at the gas pump can get fucked as well.
Not my case at all, I can see the value of an ad made by a content creator I like. My complain is about things that falls into the enshittification spectrum, like ads on the media center of their brand new cars. I know I would be pissed off by it, but maybe I’m on my own bubble of ad hate.
Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.
Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.
This sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. Communicating with potential customers that your product exists and is good isn’t some concept that the advertising industry has somehow wrested from the hands of good hardworking people in return for their wages. It’s what marketing and advertising IS. It’s like saying the cheeseburger industry controls our access to cheeseburgers - like, kinda. But also, that’s kind of definitionally true. You can, of course, raise and slaughter your own cow to subvert the cheeseburger industry. And you can hand out fliers you made yourself advertising your business on the streetcorner. But it is a lot less work, and you’ll probably get a better product, if you outsource the work to a specialist
I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.
I’m just saying
They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control.
You can hear the creepy piano music when you read this
If everyone is so concerned about smartphones and social media ruining our attention span than where is the moral panic around advertisements slicing up everything into smaller and smaller chunks seperated by unrelated maximally superficial content?
hmmmm
