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: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday January 17 2020, @02:28AM
I don't know, it makes sense to me. Virtually all advertising is designed to generate a sense that you're lacking something, and that buying the advertised product will somehow fill that lack. Sometimes the lack is actually of the awesome product being offered... but there aren't actually all that many product awesome enough that just knowing it exists makes you want it. Most products instead take a more indirect approach, generating a sense of lack of some combination of sex, power, wealth, youth, beauty, social life, fun, happiness, etc., and then implying through context that buying their product will somehow satisfy that lack.
The more ads you watch (and the better-crafted they are), the more often and effectively the advertisers are able to reach inside your head and momentarily make you just a little less satisfied with your life than you were a moment ago. I can easily see how overall satisfaction would suffer under a constant onslaught of such psychological attacks.