Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement?
Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:
1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.
2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.
3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.
However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing.
I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.
Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.
We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.
It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think that’s what you are talking about.
Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore.
I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools. It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.
HN does have a section for job ads [1], which are exempt from the usual voting mechanism and don't stay on the front page for long. I think that's a good compromise.
I don’t know much about ads but that’s something I have noticed. When online ads started they are actually sometimes useful to me because of context. Now they are totally useless to me. They are just noise.
On the plus side, this means that a website operator of a low-profit topic can still earn a living.
When I was blogging a decade ago I would write almost exclusively about finance because it paid the best. With this system, I could write about other topics and still capture some of that finance-context revenue.
> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it.
The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was. The whole site is basically a giant ad/referral scheme, but as long as you're aware of that then it's not bad as a starting point for research.
I used to just do a search on Amazon and start from there. Now it's 1 or 2 big brands followed by 20 pages of the same identical Chinese clone product with names like "Wootoo" and "Yungoo".
Agree, you can't trust reviews anymore. 10 years ago I would go on Amazon and I can trust a 5 star product. Now a days, any product is between 4 and 5 stars. The dynamic range literally is 4.0, 4.5, 5.0.
Look at Japanese restaurant review site called Tabelog. Anything above 3 is good. 3.5 is excelltent. 4.0 is rare, probably expensive. 4.5 is michelin star category, mostly sushi places. I've never seen a 5.0 rated restaurant on Tabelog.
Yep it has been incredibly difficult to buy anything of quality from Amazon for the past 2-3 years at least. I will likely cancel my Prime membership this year, it’s just no longer worth it.
We publish office design projects and the advertising is based on the content which usually ends up being office furniture, products, and services. We also sell and host our own advertising to make sure they are high quality and that they load quickly.
Your digital trade show note is interesting too as we work with furniture manufacturers who can have a digital presence on the site to highlight their products.
One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print).
> Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.
Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.
"What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend.
In modern society, we have INSANE...I mean insane amount of deceit, psychological tricks, store smells, layout optimization, there is a huge industry built around deceiving people and not playing by level rules. Instead of focusing on quality, businesses are spending money on marketing.
> Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.
or rather evolved into a monstrous industry worth billions of dollars if not trillion+ dollars. You didn't have Aztec farmers shot by an arrow every 5 mins that had a note attached to it "BUY THIS NEW FUCKING PLOUGH" in ancient times.
You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).
There are invasive ads and less invasive ads. I am sure some "ads" are actually just to click-inflate a site.
Thinking of newspapers for example the problem is that the dynamics are very complex.
A few years ago, many sites started splitting in maybe dozens of weirdly specific topics just to artificially inflate the number of readers (if one user visit ten site it can be counted as 10 users) or even just buying click.
A billboard owner can do similar trick, but usually on a smaller scale.
Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail. That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work.
If you're worried about the well-being of these people or believe their service is a public good that should exist regardless of profitability on the market, you should allocate public funding for them.
> That's how capitalism and the free market is supposed to work.
It's wrong to talk about how a market is "supposed to work" because markets aren't a Platonic ideal; they're how people get together and deal with scarcity in aggregate. Some markets can be highly competitive, some are monopolies or monopsonies, some are more or less regulated, and so on.
Capitalism is an ideology so it has a way it's supposed to work, but I think they'd broadly agree that banning a category of volunatry transactions is not capitalist.
> Without advertising, these people would be forced to implement a profitable monetization strategy, or they would fail.
Very true, if the government intervened, businesses would be forced to work around it. That may wind up being worse than what you started with. If ads weren't allowed, you'd probably have more people recruited to do direct sales, for instance.
More likely, though, they would lobby the government and point out the massive human cost of large numbers of businesses failing.
Advertising allows those who have fleeting excess brain-seconds of attention to convert it into non-ephemeral money.
People give away their brain-seconds of attention based on interest, and the interest-providers are profiting on the difference in interestingness between advertisements and their own content. If they maintain interestingness above the boredom threshold, they can dilute their product with ads and pocket the difference.
If the advertisements were interesting in themselves, the advertisers wouldn't need to pay to get views.
Ad-tech is currently trying to shave ever closer to the boredom threshold. But people who value their own time are trying to maximize their interest-per-brain-second ratios. So they block ads, or multiplex their attention so they can switch to a different interesting thing while an ad is pre-empting another interesting thing.
So ad-tech should instead be focusing on making exposure to and information about the product on the market more interesting and useful.
Nothing stands out in my mind more as an example of doing things not just wrongly, but as the perfect antipode of correct, than the network-dependent insert-ad-here spots currently on DirecTV Now streaming video channels, that is literally nothing more than three static images paired with LOUDNESS-ENHANCED boring annoying synthetic music. It's the same ad, in every commercial break, on every channel, and it was boring and annoying to begin with. It only gets more boring and annoying with every repetition. It eventually generates antipathy in the viewer, toward the advertised products AND the advertiser. The natural reaction, of course, is to hit the mute button and switch to another attention sink until interesting content returns, or long-term to cancel DirecTV Now and switch to something with fewer or less-intrusive ads, or no ads at all.
The attention-reseller has to be aware that giving up control to someone else can possibly lead to a hostile advertiser that pushes negative-interest, such as audio of multiple babies screaming, over a video of Adolf Hitler shoveling kittens into a sausage grinder, or perhaps something else with less hyperbole. If the reseller cannot establish a minimum standard of interestingness, they risk a rogue advertiser killing off their audience. Again, the answer is more interesting ads, tailored to the channel audience--and not the individual viewer, because that's creepy and intrusive, which is anti-interesting.
In short, the advertisers are being too lazy, and too greedy. Pay the content creators to advertise the products themselves, in a way that they know will be above the boredom-threshold for their audience. Stop trying to figure out how to match prepackaged ads--that the attention-resellers have never had the chance to review--to audience members using tracking, profiling, and spyware.
> One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print).
That money comes out of the pocket of customers. Without advertising, products would be cheaper because their producers would not have to spend money on adverts.
> Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.
If people need a product, they will find it. If they want to know about more products they might find useful, they will inform themselves — hopefully using a neutral source whose interests are aligned with theirs. Not from an advertiser which is interested in making them buy whatever garbage their customer wants to sell. Which does not educate and inform customers, enabling to make good decisions, but to manipulate them.
Oddly enough, PETA’s website does a great job with this. They have a whole section of their site that’s just paid listings of vegan products. It’s actually fun to browse; it feels like you’re in a shop and seeing new things you hadn’t considered (like vegan travel packages or a cork briefcase). I felt very strange that I was enjoying looking at ads.
> "However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it..."
Isn't this similar to what Amazon Marketplace does? Of course, they do allow advertisers to promote their stuff, but apart from a top few sponsored content, rest all are ranked by reviews (or so they say).
Funnily enough this kind of advertising has an adverse effect on me: Showcasing your product as sponsored content at the top of the search results at Amazon, as well as Google or the App Store, suggests that this is a subpar product that needs to pay to be relevant. I’m not sure how common this attitude is, but by now I subconsciously ignore these ads.
Of course there are also brands and products I know and like, which appear in these ads, but I see them as an exception, as a shining pearl in a sea of mediocrity, and continue to regard sponsored content as a strong indicator for lacking quality.
> 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.
To be a devil's advocate, doesn't that mean that advertisers should get MORE of your personal data, so they know every product you own and won't suggest you buy something you already have?
Whenever you see a bad ad, it means whatever privacy precautions you're taking are working. The advertiser would love to not spend money advertising their thingie to someone that already has it. But you didn't let them. That sounds like a success to me.
That's kind of true but that's only because adtech is siloed. Let's say you're identified by Facebook as having an interest in the Sony headphones. User clicks an ad and heads over to Amazon to purchase. The purchase is made and Amazon knows the conversion happened but Facebook does not.
Facebook does purchase credit card usage information but it's not nearly as perfect as having a conversion pixel on the site.
Future laws should really focus on cross-site / app tracking and the legality of purchasing third-party data.
A big part of the article is about how all the middle men want to spend more money, not less. For all the "tech" in AdTech, it's surprising how much gets canceled because it increased efficiency and made revenue go down. Even efforts to align incentives end to end like CPA (cost per action/conversion) don't do well for the same reasons.
There's a DFW area startup I once interviewed for called iuzeit (not affiliated) that is trying to solve some of the problems of consumer items and reviews. I am unaware of whether they could solve your pressure cooker conundrum, but I know they intend to increase the breadth of the type of items they cover.
Like it or not, there is a large swath of people (engineers, designers, workers, etc, etc) whose jobs would simply go away if masses of people didn't buy useless stuff they didn't want or need and couldn't afford. We all work for someone, and we all feed this system in some way or another. The only way to escape this is to go off the grid completely.
And so, I think that advertising is not the root cause, its consumerism, which has been anointed as this engine that drives positive economic growth under capitalism. And like any other macroeconomic theory it falls in this contradicting category of 'thats bullshit' and 'that totally makes sense'. "Studies show X" whoop-de-doo. Advertising simply enables consumerism, and the people who you're calling dickheads actually enable a TON of software developers to even have jobs. Where is all the tech we're building being used? To build websites to sell stuff. To build databases to store all this info, to build entertainment platforms to sell you more stuff, to build logistic systems to organize this useless selling of stuff, etc, etc. Unless you're somehow connected with selling things or otherwise generating economic activity, why would anyone pay you to build it?
I'm not sure that line of argument holds up terribly well; people working in an industry I consider immoral aren't really my primary concern. How would you respond to an analogous argument like "landmines are made by people in factories - if we stopped making landmines, all those poor people would lose their jobs, is that what you want?" (side note, the answer to that hypothetical is also 'yes').
I am talking about convincing a consumer to buy something like a headphone or a smartphone or a laptop that they don't need... not about selling weapons to kill people. Personally, I have never seen an online ad for a landmine.
Edit:
Sorta off topic, but our little conversation reminded me of a quote from Lord Of War.
>Yuri Orlov : I don't want people dead, Agent Valentine. I don't put a gun to anybody's head and make them shoot. But shooting is better for business. But, I prefer people to fire my guns and miss. Just as long as they are firing. Can I go now?
Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:
1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.
2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.
3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.
However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing.
I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.
Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.
We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.