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posted by martyb on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the averse-to-adverts dept.

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.


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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday July 20 2015, @03:49AM

    by Francis (5544) on Monday July 20 2015, @03:49AM (#211273)

    The more I read up on willpower and decision making, the more convinced I am that we need rules against most forms of advertising.

    You may not fall for one particular ad, but if you're subjected to enough of them across the course of a day or a week, you'll eventually run low on willpower and buy the product. Even if you don't buy the product, the willpower you're using to avoid buying things that they're tempting you to buy is a resource that you have a right to exploit for yourself.

    One thing I've learned is that when I get a high pressure sales pitch in my inbox to go to the bottom and read the price first. In most cases I'll then stop reading, but if the price is within my budget, I might go through and read the rest of the email. It makes it a lot easier for me to say no than if I were to read the conventional way from the top down. But, usually I refuse to buy thing just because they think they need a high pressure sales pitch. If they need to pressure me into buying it, it's not likely to be a good deal for me.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday July 20 2015, @07:41AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday July 20 2015, @07:41AM (#211321) Journal

    Even if you don't buy the product, the willpower you're using to avoid buying things that they're tempting you to buy is a resource that you have a right to exploit for yourself.

    So true. Right now, I am exerting all my energy and strength to not buy a Microsoft "Surface". Yes, I rationally know it is a piece of tech dreck (hey, is that a word? Dibs if not!), but the ads make me subliminally think that if I had a laptop with a detachable keyboard, somehow young people would find me hip and cool and fun to be around. Some of them may even want to . . . Wait, that is just the ad talking. I really need to get a grip. OK, I will go to Distrowatch and see what new Linux distros are out. Not doing it. Alright, I will work on that driver for German Equitorial Mounts that needs some tweeking. Nothing says "cool" like astronomical mechanics, dude! Still not working. I am having to consciously expend effort to resist Microsoft ads. It is almost like the Verizon ads where they admit they are an asshole company, but ask you to come back, because birds hate buffering. "Birds hate buffering"? Do you know how much it costs me in thinking cycles just to process that as bullshit?

        No, advertising in classical economic theory was purely market information, things like what, where, how much. In the Fifties, with the rise of psychotropic warfare, the purpose of advertising was not to facilitate the satisfaction of demand that already existed, but to actually create demand, demand for things you had no idea you wanted, like Microsoft and Apple, Hula Hoops and Furbies, non-term life insurance, and an erection lasting less than four hours. Yes, at that point advertising became "information warfare", the rape of desire, run by Mad Men.

    So, instead of the internet being funded by the mind-rapers, how about we institute a reverse micro-payment regime? You want me to look at your propaganda? Sure, pay me for my time. No guarantee, expressed or implied. In fact, your advertisement may have the opposite effect. The Surface ad had done nothing but reinforce my hatred, and a deep and abiding hatred it is, of the Beast of Redmond, adding those seconds of my life that i will never get back to the years of the Blue Screen of Death I endured until I discovered Linux. I have never seen a Linux ad. Strange, don't you think? Those who do not advertise are the ones who will succeed, because, plainly, they do not need to create false demand.
        No, advertising i

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday July 20 2015, @03:38PM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday July 20 2015, @03:38PM (#211460)

      That's the main reason why I use adblockers. I make the decision once that I don't want to view ads and for the most part I don't have to think about it any more. That's why those direct to email ads are so much more effective. The people getting them are likely to read them, or at least not block them and they'll likely sit down and actually read them if it's something that's interesting rather than reflexively ignoring them.

      Of the things I buy online they area ll things that I was either searching out or that I received via email from a trusted source. In the nearly 2 decades I've been online I've never, not even once, bought something based upon an ad that I saw on a site. And these days I outright refuse to click on ads that appear to be targeting anything other than the content of the site with a text ad.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Monday July 20 2015, @09:28AM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:28AM (#211347)

    You may not fall for one particular ad, but if you're subjected to enough of them across the course of a day or a week, you'll eventually run low on willpower and buy the product. Even if you don't buy the product, the willpower you're using to avoid buying things that they're tempting you to buy is a resource that you have a right to exploit for yourself.

    It takes zero willpower, because advertisements don't make something tempting. At least to me.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:26AM (#211362)

      Think of it from a physics perspective. Making a decision costs energy in your brain that could have been used elsewhere. Just because it was an easy choice does not mean the energy was not expended.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Monday July 20 2015, @11:53AM

      by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday July 20 2015, @11:53AM (#211376) Homepage Journal

      I'm sticking with Firefox simply because the combination of AdBlock Plus and Ghostery works best on that browser. This pairing not only removes virtually all the adverts from the pages I visit, but also makes it nigh-on impossible for cross-site trackers to follow me as well. The only problem is those few small sites I find very useful who derive their entire income from advertising. You know the kind, usually a simple messageboard or basic blog template set up by the two guys who look after the whole shebang and made that awesome little program/tool/whatever that you've been using for years, developing it as a hobby and giving it away for free. I can honestly say I envisage myself doing something not too dissimilar myself in the near future. They ask you to whitelist them so they can make the money they need to survive, which I'm all for, but I can't do that without revealing myself to all the agencies I've been so studiously avoiding everywhere else. I could spend some time contacting them and sending them five quid or whatever to express my gratitude - I already frequently do that on Twitch or Soundcloud when I've found someone worth watching/listening to, and I understand I'm far from alone in this habit, so how do we get that habit transferred from the higher perceived value media of music and video streaming down to the lesser-appreciated web page?

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 20 2015, @01:49PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 20 2015, @01:49PM (#211413) Journal
      • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Monday July 20 2015, @09:34PM

        by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:34PM (#211595)

        Yes, a predictable response. But there are exceptions to everything.

        If you don't even believe what I tell you about myself, there's not much I can do or say. My purchasing choices simply do not show advertising influence; that's not what I base my decisions on. If people choose to listen to advertisements (which is silly), that's their problem.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:03AM

        by TheLink (332) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:03AM (#211820) Journal
        And that sort of research is based on samples of people who responded to an advertisement or invite or similar right? Think about it. ;)

        Seriously. It may be true that people in general are susceptible even if they say or think they aren't, but I don't think the research proves it yet. I doubt they randomly selected people from a census list and _forced_ them to participate in the research. So there's plenty of selection bias. It's not valid to pick from the pool of people who responded to ads or invites and conclude that people in general are susceptible to ads even if they say they aren't.

        You're not picking from the groups of people who'd go "fuck you, go away!" or people who just ignore you completely and do their usual routine; or people who prefer to stay very private (thus they're not going to let people do research on them, and they might even be able to avoid having their names on marketing/survey lists); or many other people who don't/won't respond to ads for other reasons.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday July 20 2015, @05:58PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday July 20 2015, @05:58PM (#211490) Homepage
      Indeed. Not just not tempted to buy, but not even tempted to read. More so, not even tempted to see - I normally don't even read spams that get through my filter as I delete them all at the from/subject stage. If I don't recognise the sender, or the subject isn't something specific that a stranger I'd want contact with would contact me about ("regarding your website" doesn't count), then it's the 'd' key. I have no idea how many people who were unable to write sensible subject lines I've trashed, and, to be honest, I don't care - that's their problem.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves