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posted by martyb on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-know-what's-best-for-you dept.

Advertising is a cancer on society

I know it's a blog post, but you're not going to get this kind of thing in a news article. Hopefully SoylentNews' many advertisers won't be offended.

[...] Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.

The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services. This, unfortunately, is impossible for humanity, and so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.

The blog/article goes on to describe Robocalls, telemarketing, Spam, Leaflets, snail mail spam, SEO, and much, much more, all for the same low price! (Now how much would you pay?)


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:45PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:45PM (#874363) Journal
    There's so much wrong with the piece. Such as the author claiming that advertising can't be resisted and that there should be "trust" in markets in the absence of advertising (right there, are two warning signs that maybe they're already heavily compromised), conflating a bunch of practices and phenomena with advertising (exploiting customer data, for example, is not advertising), proposing solutions that are either already done (adblockers and "Refuse to do business with companies behaving abusively") or just jingoistic nonsense (like "fair business practices" and "raise awareness").

    The main problem is simply that the author attributes a lot of woo to advertising not only it's direct effect of influencing our helpless minds, but also being blamed for all sorts of things. And then proposes a bunch of shallow ideas to combat this.