Advertising, and especially targeted advertising, is widely hated. Something pretty interesting to me: insofar as I'm a rational agent, the amount a given advertiser should pay to show me their ad is positively correlated with how much I want to see that ad. On paper this sounds like an amazing situation, with positive sum trades all around.
But it's easy to observe that most ads are annoying and bad, and that people hate them. wtf is up with this? I don't have time to think about it today, but maybe someone here already knows. @Jeff Kaufman maybe? Or @Daniel Filan ?
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JP Addison
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •I think broadly I think targeted ads are better? Like, you'd probably rather your experience was ad-free, but I like the ads that meta shows me better than the ones on my podcast feed.
If you want those dynamics to lead to a trade where basically an advertiser's preference to show me ads is greater than my preference to not see that ad — I don't think there's a reason to think that should be the case.
If you're instead asking, like, "why are they annoying, shouldn't they specifically try not to be annoying?" I think sadly while there's a factor pushing them to be pleasant, etc., there's a greater factor pushing them towards annoyingness: By default ads don't leave an impact. First and foremost they want you to notice them, and remember them. Given that you'd rather direct your attention away, noticing and remembering are actually things you're trying to avoid! So they're adversarial to you, in large part, and will use things like images that are hard to ignore, and repeat themselves ad nauseum.
In conclusion: I've found the way to get the best
... show moreI think broadly I think targeted ads are better? Like, you'd probably rather your experience was ad-free, but I like the ads that meta shows me better than the ones on my podcast feed.
If you want those dynamics to lead to a trade where basically an advertiser's preference to show me ads is greater than my preference to not see that ad — I don't think there's a reason to think that should be the case.
If you're instead asking, like, "why are they annoying, shouldn't they specifically try not to be annoying?" I think sadly while there's a factor pushing them to be pleasant, etc., there's a greater factor pushing them towards annoyingness: By default ads don't leave an impact. First and foremost they want you to notice them, and remember them. Given that you'd rather direct your attention away, noticing and remembering are actually things you're trying to avoid! So they're adversarial to you, in large part, and will use things like images that are hard to ignore, and repeat themselves ad nauseum.
In conclusion: I've found the way to get the best ads, which is to be susceptible to photos of shirtless guys trying to sell me clothing, which hasn't yet worked, but has put me on to generally things I want to buy. 😁
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Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to JP Addison • •The thing I'm trying to say here is something like:
Ads are fundamentally informative. Sure, it might be that they're less valuable to me than the content they displace, but I don't see an obvious reason why that must be true, and yet it seems nearly universally true.
Maybe the problem is that if an ad were predictably more valuable to me than the displaced content, I would actively seek out the advertised information above whatever other thing I'm doing, at which point we stop calling it advertising and start calling it search or shopping?
I guess maybe I should go read something by Herb Simon about the details here.
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Satvik
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •I would be pretty happy if ads were better. I regularly come across e.g. toddler products that I want to buy, and am very willing to spend money to save time/stress. But these things are almost never advertised to me.
I see *lots* of ads for things I already have, and lots of ads for things that are appropriate for parents of much younger or much older children. I can't actually think of the last time I bought something from an ad, which is shocking considering that I'm in a bunch of baby-related Facebook groups and often get products that people recommend there.
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Sam FM
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Advertisers understand that humans are very manipulatable, and are very down to use dark-arts manipulation tactics. I don't suspect the correlation of values to actually be very high at all. (Intentionally annoying ads can be very effective.)
I hate having to be constantly on guard from all these attempts to hijack my attention and influence my beliefs/desires. I opt out of targeted marketing whenever I can because I don't want advertising systems to have *even stronger* memetic hooks to grab me with.
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