It’s not about buying, it’s about staying in your head, even if you don’t remember it explicitly.
This kinda boring, menial, repetitive propaganda doesn’t try to make you buy something straight away, it’s to make you numb to it, to know it, to receive it without thinking, so then it tries to affect you. It tries to turn nothing into anything resembling truth, it turns advertisement and news, into an endless cycle of boring things that get hammered by the “a lie told 1000 times turns into truth” line.
It doesn’t affect you when you’re watching it, it affects you when you see or do anything relating to it.
When you need to buy new tires, you know what to buy, you don’t buy based on technical sheets, you buy it knowing it, even not explicitly.
(A take from Adorno and Horkheimers “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, the part where they talk about the media, culture, art, etc)
That’s the neat thing, they don’t.
Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it’s a well-known fact that this doesn’t work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it’s not worth the money.
So what are ads actually there for then?
First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone’s too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.
Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.
They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse.
I hate that I’m going to defend marketing here, but if they do stop marketing then things will collapse (for many businesses). Do I like marketing, personally? No. That’s why I got out of marketing and am becoming an elementary school teacher to help others rather than spit propaganda but I digress…
Marketing isn’t always about generating a sale. Many times its reach and brand recall. We’re a global and digital economy now, so reach is massively important for survival. Stopping marketing limits who is exposed to your brand and the repetition makes your company synonymous with a product.
Why do we call tissues Kleenex? Why do we call cotton swabs a Qtip? Why do we call small sticky notepads Post-Its? Why do we call searching “Googling”? Why do we gravitate toward those brands even when cheaper and more generic options exist that are perfectly on par?
Making those brands the prime thing you think of when you use a specific thing so that no one thinks of using something else even when they have money. You want people to mention your product or think about it even if they aren’t buying it.
You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.
I mean, I’m too stingy to pay for premium but I do buy detergent.
I don’t know what to buy till I got to the store and see the prices.
Not to sound like your mum but that may be why you don’t have money.
Shouldn’t this save money?
How would that SAVE money? Buying groceries without knowing what you have at home and what you need?
I interpreted it as meaning they decide on the specific brand when they’re at the grocery store and are able to compare prices. They’ve already decided beforehand that they needed detergent.
Huh. Okay, even then, prices don’t fluctuate so wildly you’d have to make that decision every time.
But sales man
People keep saying that ads are to get the brand into my head, but they dont realise thats a bad thing for the company. I specificly buy brands i DONT see ads for because i believe if they arent spending money on ads but are still being sold in storesz they must be spending that money on bettering the product instead.
Sadly, you’re not the norm. Getting the brand into peoples’ heads actually works in most cases, which is why they keep doing it.
Yes, this has been proven experimentally.
It’s insane to me how little thought people put into things in their daily lives, because you’re right. So many people see a thing and they’re like “Oh, I see the thing. I’ll do the thing. Coke flavored mouthwash on my TV? Yeah, let’s do coke flavored mouthwash.” Literally just the first unfiltered, uncritical reaction they feel.
I had someone the other day tell me they didn’t want to use Firefox because when they did it gave them a bunch of security issues. When I asked what they meant it turned out the security issues in question were the browser asking them if they wanted to let different websites know their location, have access to webcam, etc. “Well I just don’t like that it does that”
I don’t want to stray into XKCD territory, but it does seem like people in general tend to be less…conscientious about such things than I. However, I’m oblivious about plenty of things myself that others are more aware of, so I guess it’s just how different priorities work.
Yeah, I am very oblivious to many civil rights issues for instance. I guess it’s probably safe to assume I’m that kind of person to somebody out there, isn’t it?
Yeah, I instantly felt Myself feel judgy when you said you’re oblivious to civil rights issues. If you wanna learn about them, I’d be happy to answer questions or just tell a story.
Here’s one story. Australia doesn’t technically have marriage equality. We have gay marriage, but that’s not what I’m talking about. See, if you’re on a disability pension, and you live with a partner, you get less money. They assume your partner will cover for you. So lots of disabled people can’t afford to get married.
I find it wild that people are still under the impression that advertising doesn’t work. I get it, you block ads, you aggressively ignore them, you feel like they never influence you. Same here. But they do influence us. A little bit here and there. Then consider that most people are way more suggestible than we are. If ads didn’t work, they would’ve never been a thing.
You might think you cannot afford to buy most things advertised, but the numbers don’t lie. They’ll get you eventually. Even if it’s just $3. Not having money never really stopped people from spending it anyhow.
It’s unlikely that you’re exceptional in your resistance to advertising.
It’s just that 95% of all advertising fails to hit its intended target.
