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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.

Advertising Makes Us Unhappy

The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.

Oswald: We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.

HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?

[ . . . ] I can't help noticing the increasing amount of ads we're bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture [ . . . ] In a sense they're trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more

[ . . . . ] exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate.

[ . . . . ] we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years.

So always take two ad blockers before bedtime.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:51PM (6 children)

    by Nuke (3162) on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:51PM (#943990)

    I don't agree that people are made unhappy because they realise that ads have fooled them into buying crap. They don't realise it's crap; they think it's normal for a hedge-cutter (for example) to stop working shortly after the guarantee period (isn't that what a guarantee period means? they think). They consider it acceptable for their PC operation system to crash with a blue screen every so often. They are made unhappy when the next version comes along and the marketing droids start decrying the one they already own, and telling them they should buy the newer one or else they are idiots.

    Case in the UK - for years the ad droids pushed us into replacing single glazed windows with double glazed ones. But now practically everyone who would buy double glazing has done so, leaving the droids with not much to do. So now we are told that double glazing is rubbish and we should rip it all out and replace it with triple glazing. Seems we are ruining the environment by not fitting triple glazing. This worries some people.

    <sarcasm>This must explain why I'm so happy.</sarcasm> I rarely see an advert, far less than most people in developed countries, and the ones I do see have a negative effect on me from the advertiser's point of view.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:04PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:04PM (#944039)

    My windows are almost 40 years old, but they keep the cold out much better than the single glazed windows that still have high prevalence around here.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:31PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:31PM (#944074) Journal

      So you're using . . . (calculator clickety click) . . . Windows 80. It sounds like it keeps things out better than Windows 10.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 1) by wArlOrd on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:38PM

        by wArlOrd (2142) on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:38PM (#944180)

        I'm now using Windows 95, I think it's almost ten times better than Windows 9

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:17PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:17PM (#944117)

    One interesting conversation I had with a family of immigrants I had befriended: They had escaped from Bosnia to Germany, then came to the US as refugees, and the mom of the family was complaining about the household goods. In summary, she said that the German and even Yugoslavian governments would never have allowed such shoddy products to get to the store shelves because their consumer protection agencies would have stopped it. The US basically has no consumer protection to speak of, so most of what's sold as supposedly durable goods is worthless crap that will break if you breath on it too much.

    As for why the ads make you feel bad, that's very much intentional: People buy products because they have been convinced those products will solve a problem. But the advertisers need to sell as much as possible, even if people don't actually need the thing they're selling. So the ads both tell people that they have a problem and that their product will solve the problem. Some people will be fooled into buying the product, while many of the rest will be fooled into thinking they have a problem.

    An example of an extreme version of this is the number of guys who think something is wrong with them if they aren't surrounded by scantily-clad and very willing beautiful women. The reality is that beautiful women don't look like models until they've had their hair, makeup, and clothing professionally done, and had the images digitally manipulated, and they don't bother doing all that unless they have a reason like getting paid (this is something I've verified from personal experience socializing with women who get paid to look beautiful). And of course these false images of how ordinary women supposedly look are also used to convince beautiful women that they aren't beautiful unless they buy a bunch of expensive products.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @04:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @04:03AM (#944405)

    > So now we are told that double glazing is rubbish and we should rip it all out and replace it with triple glazing.

    The increase in insulation from the third pane is primarily from the extra air space. We added a layer of plastic window film inside our old double pane windows (Anderson wood frame windows, from the 1960s). While the instructions on the 3M film package say to remove the film every spring, we have found that the film is good for five years or longer if we carefully clean the area where the double stick tape is laid down.

    After a few years, some of the film loosens up (wrinkles) and we take five minutes to tighten it with a hair dryer. We also tried an off-brand film kit, but concluded that the extra price for 3M was worth it--lasts longer so we don't have to re-install so often.

    The advantage is obvious on cold days when cooking (high inside moisture) -- the double pane windows formed condensation (and started to mold), windows with the extra layer mostly stay dry.

    If I was building new, I'd probably future-protect (against high heating costs) with triple pane from the start, perhaps with suitable IR reflecting coatings. For our 50+ year old house, the plastic film is a useful improvement, without throwing away perfectly good windows.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Saturday January 18 2020, @03:08PM

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday January 18 2020, @03:08PM (#944982)

    That seems to be one of the problems with our system. Once a product has basically been perfected and market has matured - then where does a company go after that? The pressure is to keep on growing, and one way to do that is to keep adding increasingly useless features to the product and market the hell out of them to try to create demand. And if you don't do that, your competitors will.

    Software is probably one of the biggest examples of that, as software never goes bad or wears out so software companies don't have replacement sales to rely upon. There's so many commercial software packages - Windows, Office, anything Adobe makes - that were pretty much perfected 10-20 years ago and everything since then has been mostly useless features, extra bloat, eye candy, and change for the sake of change, mostly to try to convince people to pay money for upgrades. That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional minor feature or tweak that wasn't an improvement, but the problem is those aren't enough to get people with the old version to shell out money.

    Of course, there are other ways software companies have come up with to try to keep money flowing in - only offering paid subscriptions, planned obsolesce, deliberate introduced interoperability issues, putting ads into software I paid for (I'm looking at you Windows 10), and other bullshit that mostly just pisses me off.