My feeling is that 3) is the main result of advertising. The main point seems to be to drive a demand for something, not to inform people about market differentiation.
Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see:
* 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store
* a window cleaning product
* KFC ad
* "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store
* an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains
* "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store
* Powerade ad
I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?
I may be in the minority here, but I am extremely skeptical of suggestions regarding the ability of ads to truly compel one to desire something they really don't want.
Anecdotally speaking, I've seen hundreds or thousands of commercials for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and the like. And I watch a lot of football at sports bars, where I have plenty of opportunities to drink that stuff. Heck, they even have hot girls in skimpy outfits come in to the bar and give away random freebies, run silly contests, blah, blah, etc., to advertise those brands. And yet, while I am a (light) drinker, I have never felt any desire whatsoever to drink Coors, Budweiser, Miller, etc. When I do drink, it's almost always either a Sam Adams product, or a microbrew / craft beer.
Yeah, n=1 and all that, but if advertising were as powerful as some people make it out to be, surely I'd be drinking at least a little Coors or Miller by now.
So .. are you saying those companies are wasting their money by producing advertisements? Maybe you should inform them that they could be saving money by not putting effort into producing those ads.
They may very well be. It's a pretty well known issue in the field that it is very hard for firms to definitively attribute any specific revenue increase to their promotion efforts.
It may be that all the ads are doing is reinforcing preexisting biases, and not inducing any new demand.
Maybe so, but that's still pretty far from where this line of discussion started, which (as I interpreted it anyway) was the idea that ads can compel you to desire something that you really don't want to desire.
I'm not saying ads are totally wholesome and good, and made of puppies and sunshine and rainbows or anything, mind you. I'm just skeptical of the degree of power that some people seem to attribute to advertising. To hear some people talk ads are just short of "Manchurian Candidate" level brain-washing.
Even if it is just a case of "reinforcing preexisting biases" (I don't think it is), I think it should be highly questionable when companies are spending money/time to maintain those biases of the population.
It's not like the vast majority of ads encourage some rational thinking about a product. It's just some content that someone is paying you to watch.
You have to learn about KFC or powerade for the first time somehow. I, for example, don't think I've ever drunk powerade or gone in to KFC in living memory. I wouldn't even know that the C stands for Chicken except for their extremely effective global advertising.
The birth rate in the US is something like 8 persons/minute of which presumably at least one 1 would be very happy to eat KFC and drink powerade. They are a good target for advertising, as well as people who are borderline about where they eat today.
There was an xkcd comic that really summed this idea up well. There is population turnover. Just because you know what everyone knows doesn't mean the new entrants to the world do - they have to learn from somewhere. Advertising makes sure it happens. I can vouch that it is working well for me even though I don't eat fried chicken.
You know the names of those brands, and recognize them over $generic_brand, and mention of them immediately brings to mind their marketing pitch (sports, skimpy clad girls, etc).
Even if you didn't buy, the advertising worked. You may have built your self-image around beer with the twigs and beaks left in, but others will have a self-image that fits the story and will be vulnerable to being persuaded to buy beer-oid swill.
Why do “we” all have to work less? If you want to work less you can, you don’t need the whole world to join you to get started. If you’re a developer, the field pays well enough that you could make a subsistence level wage by doing part time contract work. So why haven’t you done it yet?
As a developer, sure, I feel more privileged than most, but I'm not complaining for myself. I'm complaining because we seem to have built a society which unnecessarily overworks to produce stuff where the value added to people's lives is questionable.
I wouldn't be complaining if we were instead allocating that surplus working potential to solving real issues like climate change, or improving our understanding of the world, or making good software for the sake of having good software.
> The beauty of the market is that you have the freedom to reward your value producers.
Sure, you could do that, or you could go the easier route and just spam people with advertisements that trick them into buying your non-valuable product.
Without a hospitable environment or accessible, natural resources there won't be much of a market.
Still, you make a good point: it all comes down to what we value individually. ... At least until that whole collective consciousness thing takes over.
There is a social-economic effect such that the side with leverage (usually the company) can detrmine how long everyone works. The company will prefer to hire people to work longer. Because the worker is more replaceable than the company, some people will have the choice of whether to work at all, or to work the same amount as everyone else.
Looking at the first ad break I see on a recording I happened to make of TV, I see:
* 30%–60% off various products at a popular homeware store
* a window cleaning product
* KFC ad
* "massive half yearly sale" at a popular home appliances store
* an outdoor shelter installation service, claiming they can add curtains
* "half-yearly clearance" sale at a furniture store
* Powerade ad
I would rather not desire KFC or Powerade, and all the other products are things that I would be able to look up trivially when I have a need for them. I don't see how advertising here helps with anything other than getting rid of oversupplied stock. If people need to advertise to get people to buy their stuff, maybe we should simply be producing less stuff. We were certainly producing less stuff 100 years ago. If we produced less stuff today, we could be working less. How about we make that deal, instead of the "buy more stuff that we probably don't need" deal?