Advertising should be viewed through the same lens as code injection is in computer security (when an attacker gets a computer system to run a program that it actually shouldn’t and that usually benefits the attacker).

The point of an advertisement is literally to inject the idea of a need into your mind, a need that you didn’t already have before (“You do actually need a new car.”), or a more specific version of an existing need (“You’re need food? You should really eat this!”).

It’s an attack on the integrity of your very being and it should be defended against.

It’s also clear through the language that is used in making and distributing ads:

They are “aimed” at a “target audience”. They even have “penetration”.

These are words of warfare, and they aren’t there by accident.

@esther The car advertising thing is really weird. If I choose to watch a streaming service with ads I get an endless stream of repeated ads for cars.

But ... my car still works, so I don't need, and won't be buying a new one. Eventually my car will stop working, *then* I'll buy a new one.

This happens about once every twenty-something years. So about 99% of the models that have been advertised to me (and no doubt even some of the brands) won't exist any more by the time I next make a buying decision! What a waste.

And - a little hint for car advertisers here - when I *do* buy a new car I'm unlikely to buy one that's advertised in the UK by pictures of a left hand drive car being driven on foreign roads. If you can't even be arsed to make a UK version of the advertisement, how much care do I think you've put into getting the UK version of the car right?

@TimWardCam @esther
While individual manufacturers are trying to sell their particular model of car, as a whole they are selling car dependency to society in general.

@Naich @esther Oh, would that by why they don't show realistic footage of a UK spec car stuck in traffic on a UK motorway?

@esther I probably hate advertising as it is more than most people, but we have the old saying: "even the best wine needs a banner", and I can't dispute that.

Example: It recently crossed my mind that maybe I could rent cargo bikes when needed and turns out I could! This service would've been very useful to me, but I simply didn't know about it before. An ad in this case would've been beneficial for everyone.

My point is that ads don't necessarily "inject" a need but an option. Problem is that while the latter increases buyer freedom, the former increases seller revenue so guess which type of ads we see more frequently...

@buherator there’s a difference between making information available to people who actively look for it and shoving ads in their faces

@TimWardCam @Naich @esther cars are stuck in traffic in north America too, probably more than in the UK since it's even more car-dependent, but the car advertising from wide open dusty desert roads makes you think otherwise

@joat @Naich @esther I went for a bicycle ride yesterday. I didn't cycle past very many queues of stuck cars ... but that may have been partly because my ride was mostly off road.

@esther Presentation can be an important factor, but an ad is an ad. My prev example also shows that we don't necessarily know what to look for in the first place.

I think we should ask questions like "What is the proper way to distribute information about different classes of products/services?" (the answers for medicine and fancy cars surely must be different) or "Why do we have ads in the first place?" so we won't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

@buherator @esther So you decided you wanted to rent a cargo bike and then it turns out you can so... what would an ad have helped?

And yes, consider that we all see ads for cars all the time but most of us rarely see ads for bicycles. The medium is hardly neutral. There aren't ads for good deals, good deals advertise themselves. There are only ever ads for shitty deals.

@esther @buherator As search engines have been made largely useless, however, the "actively looking" avenue has become the somewhat less effective "ask folks in group chat or social media", and that has really driven the ad business for the last couple of years.

@sidereal @esther Rn I need to move heavy stuff in the city, without a car, and I came to this solution. I had to perform similar tasks previously, but at those times I was simply less smart and it would've been helpful if someone (even an ad) told me that this service exists.

Re your 2nd point, the general usefulness of ads is undoubtedly bad. I still wouldn't say that "good deals" are nonexistent: shows/events come to my mind as another example.

@buherator @esther This is a really common argument I hear, but it falls flat when actually scrutinized: because advertising, in the sense that it is meant here, is fundamentally based on *asymmetry*.

The whole point of advertising, and advertising spend, is to elevate your presence above that of the competition. Which is to say, every dollar you spend on advertising is a dollar you spend on *reducing* the discoverability of your competition, ie. of other options.

Since there are more competitors (who lose discoverability) than there are "you"s (who gains discoverability), this means that every dollar towards advertising is a net-loss for total discoverability; most things become *less* visible, only one thing more so.

If we designed our society around discovery of options, it wouldn't look like advertising. It would look more like an ad-free phone book, or perhaps a consumer-reports-style comparison table or facet-based search engine. Crucially, there would fundamentally be no relation between ad spend and discoverability.

TL;DR: Advertising does not actually serve improved discovery of options and in fact does the opposite, that's just the moral fig leaf the industry uses to justify its "social license to operate".

@joepie91 @esther Let's say you promote $BAND's show. $OTHERBAND is also in town. As a potential guest I could easily handle knowing about 10 different shows for a weekend but I won't go to one that I don't know of.

In other words I don't think your money-for-presence model is a zero-sum game.

@buherator @esther This doesn't really engage with my point at all, though - this is basically arguing "but if you kind of squint, with the right conditions, then the current model *can* work like an index of stuff".

And sure, that's true, but the part that matters here is how the system behaves when those conditions are *not* met, and we're *not* living in the optimal case. And in that case, it behaves exactly like I described, and that is considered desirable in the industry because it's what keeps the money coming in.

@joepie91 @esther First, I think I described a pretty realistic scenario, so I don't think this is idealism.

Second, my point with this whole discussion is exactly to avoid potentially harmful generalizations, so naturally I will point to examples where having ads makes sense and where proposed generalizations (ads inject need, zero-sum discoverability) fail.

Do I think the current ads ecosystem is anywhere near good? Absolutely not. But without identifying the *actual* problems we won't get workable solutions.

@buherator @esther This is not a "harmful generalization". This is literally *how the advertising industry works*. It *is* the "actual problem". Why do you think that practically every single advertising platform has some kind of bidding mechanism nowadays?

It doesn't matter whether you can think of scenarios where it "isn't that bad", regardless of how "realistic" they are. You measure the impact of a system on society by measuring its *worst-case* scenarios, not its *best-case* scenarios. And that is what I am trying to illustrate here.

The model we have for advertising is optimized *for* that worst-case scenario, in that it always converges to it at scale. This is a choice as a society. We can choose not to accept that, and instead pick models that behave respectfully towards society *even under worst-case conditions*.

But to do that, we first need to acknowledge that this model is bad, and that it's not actually optimized for discovery; it's optimized for the *suppression of* discovery, and the "discovery" component is just used as a moral fig leaf.

Once this is understood and acknowledged, we can select models that *actually are* optimized for discovery, without this worst-case failure mode.

@joepie91 @esther Yes, the current model is bad.

@buherator @esther Thanks.

As for a concrete example of other models (but definitely not the only possibility): to take your example of festival posters, there's a long-standing practice in many places in Europe to have the city's tourism board manage event posters across the town/city, which lists all of the events for eg. the coming week with some description.

This practice has somewhat died out in some places, it seems, but it would be an example of "how to make sure people are aware of the events, without the asymmetry".

@joepie91 @esther We had a magazine (free, as in paid for by the ads btw) like this, then a website. FB killed both ofc...

@buherator @esther I think I disagree here (not positive)

A public service announcement differs from advertising in that there's no profit to be had

So a PSA about borrowing/renting cargo bikes, from say your local bicycle advocacy group, is different from an ad from a company that rents cargo bikes for profit

@peterbutler @esther You are right, and in this particular case it is a non-profit thing. But that's beside the point, as their business model doesn't really affect my situation (I will donate to them just as I would pay for a for-profit service).

@esther Advertising shits in your head.

@delve @esther
...rent free.

@esther this is a basic truth that we need to step away from to cast doubt on our common sense worshipping of the #deathcult

Ad blocking is revolutionary first step, what the second step is I talk a lot about here http://hamishcampbell.com what do you think a good second step is?

@hamishcampbell @esther IMO the next step is spraypainting over physical ads in public, destroying billboards, sabotaging the buildings where ads are designed/printed, publicly shaming people who work in the ad industry & encouraging their friends/families to do so as well, etc

@sidereal @hamishcampbell @esther That was the genesis of Adbusters, though I think the effort may have gone astray ... haven't seen/heard much from that group in decades

It would be a herculean effort to destroy all advertising

@sidereal @esther that plan might work, but you would have to be fast on your feet to sustained it.

@sidereal @hamishcampbell @esther oh yeah, they got into the whole sneaker business, which was a mess. Still around

https://www.adbusters.org/

@buherator @esther yeah discoverability is a problem

Paper catalogs are a good model because you could just leaf through them and find stuff or you could look up exactly what you wanted

I’m imagining extending existing web technologies similarly. So like we have sitemaps we can have a well known /catalog url for any site and a strict standard for the information listed (json schema?).

Then browsers and aggregators can can make this visible for us with reviews

@buherator @esther and this works whatever the economic model so long as you can make final vendors follow standards

@TimWardCam @esther There's less money to be made off of you than off of the kind of people who replace their car every three years to keep up with the Joneses, so the advertisers really don't care about you that much.

@danielmclaury @esther But these days ... three years isn't even long enough to read and understand the manual for the computers in a new car!

@TimWardCam It's true, my car has this weird three-state "on, off, kinda on" setting that the power button sort of cycles through in a way that I don't 100% understand.

@danielmclaury Went round to see a mate several years ago now. Found him sitting in his new car in his garage trying to make sense of the manual.