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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:41PM (1 child)
You miss one of the major points of ads - something that is literally marketing 101. The point of an effective ad is not to make somebody rush out to buy something, it's to put a positive perception of a product in somebody's mind. This has a subconscious effect such that people associate the given product with being, as you said, "good quality" even if it's not really true. Apple is the perfect example, though perhaps they're who you're referencing with the planned obsolescence mention. They actually started obfuscating [cultofmac.com] their exact advertising budget in 2016 as it's skyrocketed into the billions of dollars.
I think many people would view Apple as good quality. Yet ask them why and it will rarely be based on anything technical or logical. It'll generally just devolve to an appeal to 'everybody knows' Apple is good quality. That's the result of billions of dollars of highly effective marketing. Nike is another example with the same story. They make good quality shoes but they're treated as being in a league of their own when, in practice, I suspect if you did a blind test of mid-range Chinese sneakers vs ultra-end Nike stuff with all labeling/indicators removed and a year of wearing, people wouldn't be able to reliably pick which is which. I have some of those Chinese ones. Bought them for $15 - absurdly comfortable shoes that have lasted me years. Same story for Coke and just about every major company.
Marketing is much more about psychological manipulation than people understand. In general very few people think they're actually affected by ads, yet hugely profitable companies continue to spend literally trillions of dollars on advertising. One side is wrong. Guess who.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:10PM
FWIW, I consider Apple hardware to be good quality, because the last Apple hardware I bought, and the previous also, was good quality. I'm a lot less impressed by the quality of their software for the same reason. But I won't buy Apple, because the last time I did they tried to slip a license change in to the system on a "security upgrade".
But I still think of them as making quality hardware, despite having avoided them for over a decade now.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.