[HN Gopher] Ads Don't Work That Way (2014)
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Ads Don't Work That Way (2014)
Author : rahimiali
Score : 15 points
Date : 2021-08-31 13:33 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meltingasphalt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meltingasphalt.com)
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Even though I understand that differentiating a strictly
| pavlovian conditioning with "cultural imprinting" might be
| interesting, the two proposed modes are still extremely similar.
| A "cultural imprint" is useless unless it eventually evokes a
| feeling in the customer. The only difference is that the
| "imprint" works by extra steps.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The big difference is that the imprinting mechanism favours
| widely shared experiences (like prime time broadcasting) over
| targeted advertising.
|
| I suppose the ultimate combination would be targeted
| advertising inserted into broadcast streams, to fool you into
| thinking it's a shared experience. That already happens with
| the sideline billboards at big sporting events.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Very interesting! Tangentially I've worked a lot with video
| streaming, and one technology that there was a lot of buzz
| around was to splice personalized ads into regular linear TV
| broadcasts. Basically it replaced the original broadcast ads
| with personalized ones, completely seamless and unnoticeable.
| I don't know if it was ever implemented, but it sounds like
| it would tap into the same mechanism that you propose.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8344345 - Sept 2014 (98
| comments)
|
| one other bit here:
|
| _Melting Asphalt: Ads Don 't Work That Way_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342073 - July 2019 (1
| comment)
| iainmerrick wrote:
| This is great and I hadn't seen it before, so thank you
| rahimiali for reposting!
|
| I found this comment from the 2014 thread interesting
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8346265):
|
| _First off, advertisements definitely do work via simple
| association. Humans use liking as a heuristic for virtually all
| decisions (we decide in favor of things we like), so increasing
| liking increases purchases fairly reliably. A warmth appeal
| like a Coke ad with smiling faces will reliably create an
| association between Coke and positive emotions just because
| that 's how humans are wired. If you activate two concepts
| together, you link them. This is just how humans work and is
| the basis of most of cognitive psychology. Many, many things
| make sense once you start to see things in terms of co-
| activation and priming._
|
| I think the article has aged much better than that comment,
| given the recent replication crisis in science. Unless I'm
| misunderstanding, much of the published research into priming
| and the like has turned out to be heavily exaggerated.
|
| The article's theory of cultural imprinting nicely explains why
| advertisers pay a premium for Superbowl ads. Unless you assume
| that not only consumers, but _advertisers_ are highly
| irrational...!
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Advertising is corporate propoganda. Often quite effective in all
| kinds of ways, but that doesn't change the fact that it's
| supposed to distort markets. We're just so used the status quo
| that we can't imagine an alternative. Imagine billboards had
| positive and encouraging messages.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I am pretty stubborn. And I stubbornly believe that advertising
| is a bane of society and has been for far too long.
|
| But then I recently was pointed towards
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf8mZVmof2g by twitter. It's a 2
| minute ad I don't regret watching, and it has changed my opinion
| a bit.
|
| If a company wants to spend $x million on paying artists, I find
| that a worthy thing to do.
|
| Somehow, if I imagine how Coca-Cola would have spent the same
| money to make a generic "<sports personality> praises product in
| an extremely generic manner" ad, 95% of the money would have gone
| to the celebrity.
|
| I don't know why to me, that makes a difference. Maybe I am just
| baffled by actually enjoying an ad.
| amelius wrote:
| The world is not black and white. One good example of X does
| not make X good, whether X is ads, sugar, pain, or whatever.
| But you can look at X as a whole and decide whether it is a net
| good or not. And you can always make exceptions for particular
| types of X.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| The relation between advertising and art is a bit similar to
| that between war and technology.
|
| > _If a company wants to spend $x million on paying artists, I
| find that a worthy thing to do._
|
| If the US army wants to spend a few million on "search and
| rescue" drones that might also seem like a worthy goal. But
| just like military money is ultimately spent to kill people
| (ahem, "project force"), advertising money is ultimately used
| to manipulate people. One could even argue that if the
| "technology" to do this is genuinely beautiful art, that
| exactly makes it worse.
|
| I realize I'm exaggerating a bit with this comparison, I don't
| mean to hammer on you while you gave a helpful counterexample
| :)
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