SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilsa on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:34PM (1 child)
There's another aspect to that bombardment that I don't think is being considered. If you put out the occasional ad to advertise whatever, ok, great. You may well be introducing a new product that never occurred to me would even exist, and I can appreciate that.
But that's not what happens. We're *bombarded* with ads. Every street corner. Every form of media. And because of the sheer number of ads being displayed, they feel they need to compete for eyeballs. Depending on the media you're consuming, the quantity of advertising can outweigh the actual content by an order of nagnitude (spelling intentional). Ads now pop up and cover your whole screen. Or are loud videos. If you watch TV, you'll notice that commercials play at double the volume of the show you were watching, with the express purpose of jarring your attention.
Advertisements have been come an insatiable jarring drain on everyone's psyche, constantly and permanently demanding your attention as if they were somehow entitled to it. Advertising has become a relentless mental war of attrition that is guaranteed to wear us down. It's the attention economy even before you start factoring in the shenanigans that Bookface et al have been playing.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:24PM
And it's important to remember that political ads are still ads. And have the same, or worse, effect.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.