The reason we’re absolutely fucking blasted away with ads is because even if they only have a 0.01% success rate, that’s enough to make them super profitable. So if you and 998 other people all pay zero attention to ads, they still make money.
There’s also lots of people (like one of my family members) who become absolutely irate by ads but still buy the shit they’re shilling anyway.
vvvvv@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s not how it works. Or, rather, that’s not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven’t bought before. Very likely you’ll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 1 month ago
If it makes you feel any better, I intentionally never use products that have intentionally repetitive messaging or earworm tendencies out of spite. Though I know I’m probably in the minority
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Do we unintentionally use products we didn’t realize repetitively messaged us?
We’ll never know…
Just kidding, we can be sure it’s incredibly well studied given the billions and billions of dollars going into ads!
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Totally no bias in these studies at all either, they totally wouldn’t try to skew these studies for personal gain and to try and justify the huge spending on ad money right?
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think the main problem is that this type of reasoning can’t actually be proven scientifically, even if we have a study there’s not a guarantee it’s unbiased (who do you think funds research on advertising effectiveness). Then there is the problem that every product or brand in modern advertising is likely one of the handful of pseudo monopoly brands. One might argue that a person bought their product because they heard it in an ad, but in reality they might not have really had much choice, that makes it hard to say if people buy the products because they’re familiar or if they just don’t have much option.
The main point I’d like to make is that advertisers would like to believe they aren’t wasting money or time, they need people to believe it in some capacity, because if enough people don’t, eventually the dumb and blind companies who give them money will realize it too and stop giving them money. That’s why the ad-funded internet is considered a bubble, it’s not worth it, or necessary in a lot of cases, and the moment the dumb and blind corpos realize that, they’ll stop dumping money into a hole.