Effect of Advertising

Whenever I use adblock, or visit a place that bans roadside billboards, I'm dipping a toe in your imagined world. By your argument, that should make me worse off. But to me it feels better.

Maybe I am too negative about advertising, but it seems like its major strategy is to annoy me. Like that advertisement I won't mention that I have recently seen (the first five seconds of) perhaps several hundred times, because YouTube plays it at the beginning of almost every video I see.

I feel quite helpless, because even if as a policy I would never buy a product I associate with such annoying campaign, it doesn't matter at a larger scale. If only 1% of targets would buy the product, it may still be profitable to annoy the remaining 99%. My suffering is an acceptable negative externality for people who cooperate on making sure I hear about the product several times a day.

Yeah, one could argue that my suffering is not an externality; it is how I pay for having access to YouTube. Anyway, the explanations how "the advertising provides me useful information about a product" feel completely alien to me. Telling me the name of the product several hundred times, whenever I want to listen to a song, I don't call that "useful information". Yes, I know already, it's a fucking spellchecker, you already told me. (Or should it be "more than a spellchecker"? Because in ads, every X is "more than X" in an unspecified way.)

I would probably be quite happy if some artificial intelligence would provide me relevant information about the products I might actually want. Well, not at the beginning of every song, of course. But the current state of advertising feels more like spamming everyone with random stuff. Despite all the information that Google et al. collect about me, the products they are trying to sell me are very generic. After having read all my e-mails, the only information they seem to actually use is my sex and age group.

So... my guess is that the world without "targeted advertising" would be almost exactly the same as the world we have now; except you wouldn't suddenly get dozens of ads for a product you have already bought (because apparently the strongest evidence for "being the kind of person who buys X" is having bought X recently).

I find it unlikely that you couldn't capture reviewers in a system where advertising was banned. Inviting a reviewer to an all-experience paid trade show in the Maldives isn't advertising.

If you want a trustworthy review that isn't paid for by affiliate commissions you currently have the choice to go to ConsumerReports and pay for their subscription.

It's not clear to me what counts as advertising for the purpose of this scenario. It seems to me that without all the things I would call advertising, I would never discover many of the things I would want to buy.

A nicely presented shop window (or, for that matter, badly presented) is advertising. A book listing on Amazon is advertising. The web site for a business is advertising.

If reviewers would indeed be more trustworthy, I don't see why they couldn't take over the function of letting interested people know about new products etc. that you say would go away.

I don't disagree with any of the object-level claims, but I think the framing is confused and could be greatly improved.

One way to think about this is, what would the world would be like if we didn’t al­low ad­ver­tis­ing?

I don't think that is what you are doing in this essay. Instead you are proposing other methods by way which advertising could work. That's what Kevin does and I think his essay is better because he is explicit that this is what he is doing. Once you have explicitly said that ads contain information, maybe then it is good to talk about the hypothetical to explain how important information is. But asserting your hypothetical using your model of the world seems to me rhetorically poor. If you don't understand how you disagree with other people, perhaps there is no other approach, but in this case you do know.

Asking people to make open-ended investment in hypotheticals could be useful, but how? If people have coherent theories, then they should find it easy to think about hypotheticals without changing their minds. If people have incoherent theories, maybe it is useful to get them to notice that by having them consider hypotheticals. But I don't think that you're doing that. Also, this seems very difficult, probably only viable in an interactive way. If the writer of a static essay knows exactly how the audience theories are incoherent, eg, because they hold two contradictory theories, then it is probably better to write down the contradiction explicitly. For an example of this logical structure, Kevin does this with tricking vs Homo economicus. But that's not the same rhetorical structure, because his audience doesn't actually believe that. (I dub this rhetorical move the Robin Hanson.)

I’ve re­cently had sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions around whether ad­ver­tis­ing is harm­ful, and speci­fi­cally whether ads pri­mar­ily work by trick­ing peo­ple into pur­chas­ing things they don’t need.

It would probably be better to expand on this. There are several separate questions. Ads have two obvious costs, the cash to the advertiser and the attention to the audience. Why do advertisers buy ads? Is it to trick the audience, or to inform? That is the topic of the essay, explicitly bracketing off of the attention cost. But, reading the responses, not explicit enough.

Advertisement is a component of the cost of a product, right? Some percentage of the total cost associated with producing and selling a product is ads. If they're no longer allowed, that component disappears.

I'm not saying this leads to a net decrease in cost, but it is a factor which leads to some decrease in cost, so if you want to argue that a net increase in cost takes place, you have to argue why the decreased competition matters more than the direct savings.