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Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:
Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.
Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
A classic market failure
The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.
...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.
...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.
Why now?
First, as we have become more wealthy our consumption decisions have become more valuable...
Second, a shift in social norms has made it more acceptable to sell other people's attention.... Anyone in a position to access our attention, like the managers of pubs or hockey arenas, will be approached by multiple companies offering to pay a fee to install their advertising screens, banners, or cookies...
Thirdly, technology has made advertising even more intrusive. Not only is it now possible to print advertisements on grocery store eggs and to put digital displays above pub urinals.... Every moment we spend on the internet or with our smart phones is being captured, repackaged and sold to advertisers multiple times...
Counter-counter arguments: How economists defend advertising and why it isn't enough
- The direct value of advertising First is that advertising gives consumers valuable information about the sellers and prices of products they want to buy. The favoured example here is the classified ads section in newspapers.... Perhaps it was the case in 1961 that consumers struggled to find such information for themselves. But it is hard to see how this can still be the case in the internet age...
Advertising can be used to reduce competition: high spending by rich established players drowns out information from smaller newer competitors and thus creates an entry barrier, converting markets to oligopolies...
Second is the counter-intuitive claim that brands communicate their trustworthiness by their conspicuous expenditure on advertising not by what it actually says....[but]Companies wanting to demonstrate their confidence in their products don't have to waste so much of our time to do so. There are all sorts of more constructive ways of spending money conspicuously.
Third, is the social status that advertising can confer on a product and its consumption. What's the point of buying a Rolex or Mercedes unless the people around you know that it is expensive and are able to appreciate how rich and successful you must be? The business logic here is sound, but not the moral logic.
- Financing public goodsAdvertising is the financial model for many pure public goods like terrestrial television and radio, as well as club goods like newspapers, Google's search/email and Facebook... Advertising provides an alternative revenue source that makes it possible to profitably provide such services universally at the marginal cost of production — that is, zero.
There are alternatives. If these things are so valuable to society there is a case for supporting them from with taxes — grants, license fees (many national broadcasters) or payments for ratings. This is a well-established system for funding public and club goods...
Alternative models, like that of Wikipedia, are sometimes possible and are more socially — that is, economically — efficient. Wikipedia's value to consumers is in the hundreds of billions of dollars while its annual operating costs are only $25 million...
Obviously Wikipedia's operating costs are so low, like Mozilla's, because of its volunteer labour force. But that fact just makes one wonder why we couldn't have a "democratic" Facebook too, and whether that would not be superior from a social welfare perspective to the current "farming model" of extracting maximum value from its members-cum-livestock.
The right to preserve our attention
Advertising is a valuable commercial opportunity for businesses with access to consumers' attention, or their personal information. For the companies that buy and sell our attention it is — as all voluntary transactions must be — a win-win. But advertising lacks the free market efficiency that is claimed for it. Advertising is made artificially cheap, like the output of a coal burning power station, because the price at which it is sold doesn't reflect its negative effects on third parties — us.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:47PM
I spent 5 hours yesterday and 3 more today (so far) trying to clean the advertising crap off my brother's laptop. He downloaded 1 (yes one) program that he thought interesting and it offered no hint that it would proceed to install dozens of other crap programs that generate spam adverts in his browser. I "uninstall" a program only to find it re-installs itself on reboot (leaves a service behind to facilitate that).
All that's left is something I can't find that forces ads onto IE. I installed Pale Moon and will encourage him to use that instead. I put AdBlock Plus and Ghostery on it too.
I've only known one professional advertising person in my life - he was a pathological liar. Remember that Dudley Moore movie - "Crazy People" where none of the professional advertising guys can tell the truth even if forced? - yeah, like that in real life.
It seems that the only people intent on having advertising imposed on us are a collection of sociopaths that seem to think that we will spend money on anyone that annoys us a lot.
Fuck the lot of them.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 20 2015, @12:49AM
On the IE front, your probably dealing with something injecting itself as a COM object (also known as "Browser Helper Option" when dealing with IE). Unfortunately, there's no easy way to see what has hooked into wininet with stock Windows tools. Best thing you can do is change the key in the registry that prevents IE from loading them, and then setting registry permissions to prevent it from being written to (though this won't help if a service checks it running as LocalSystem). Here's a guide from Microsoft on the topic: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/298931 [microsoft.com]
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @09:19AM
Here's another piece of advice from M$ http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1029895/microsoft-says-fighting-malware-is-impossible [theinquirer.net]
While you're at this nuking business, you might consider replacing the legacy operating system family with something less likely to contract malware.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 20 2015, @01:32PM
I worked in professional advertising in NYC on the digital side of things, in what advertising tends to call "the studio," that is, the artists, programmers, composers, etc that know how to do things as opposed to sit around and have beautiful ideas as "the Creatives" do (ie., the copywriters and creative directors). I worked at McCann-Erickson (you'd know them from their famous Mastercard formula, "A day at the ballpark: $100. 2 hotdogs with mustard: $15. A day sharing the religion of baseball with your son: Priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard"); JWT ("Built Ford Tough"); Ogilvy; and Mediavest (they do harder to see stuff like product placements in movies). So I have a pretty good measure of the people in advertising.
The Account people are pathological liars, but then, they're salespeople and so are they all no matter the industry.
The Studio people are like technicians and craftsmen in any field. They know their work and do it well with their heads down.
The Creative people are narcissists. Very creative, at least at the bigger agencies that can pay them top dollar and attract the best talent. They are all fundamentally frustrated, though, that their genius is yoked to the crass and vulgar task of selling shit to people on behalf of corporations and MBA clients who are as dull as dishwater and just as torpid and whose only throughline is greed and the desire to kiss up to advance. Creatives live and breathe pop culture. They are always chasing trends. They worship musicians and artists and directors and see themselves as their little brothers. They dream of breaking into music or writing or film. But they almost universally don't because they're too afraid or too compromised by the nature of their work.
I can say that nobody thinks about advertising on such a deep philosophical or economic theory level as in TFA. Why? They don't have time. They're usually juggling a score of accounts and campaigns, shooting from the hip and trying to get the client to bite on a concept. They're not worrying about meta anything, at least, not meta in this way. They bill their time by the hour, and no client wants to pay them to sit around and think deep thoughts about the Economic Value of Advertising in the World. The clients want the creative funny smart people to hand them something memorable on a silver platter that will boost sales of Widget X that they'll then personally take credit for with the CEO of company X and win them accolades at cocktail parties at their summer cottage in the Hamptons.
That's it, and that's all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Monday July 20 2015, @06:02PM
Hi, copywriter here. You're pretty much mostly right.