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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.


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  • (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.

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