Not so fast. The idea that “if companies spend that much, they must have a reason” isn’t any good either.
Some ads obviously work, some ads obviously don’t work, and most of them aren’t in either of those categories.
Fair point.
But recently I encountered several people with the opinion that ads don’t ever work on them. And while not all ads work well and some people are more susceptible to them than others, I think very few people if any can claim ads don’t work on them at all.
The only ad that works on me is when steam emails to say a game on my wish list is on sale
Meanwhile to me this is another piece of exasperating spam. My Steam account hasn’t been active in close to a decade but they never stop
Can’t you just disable steam email notifications or unsubscribe from mailing list? You ideally shouldn’t have to login for the later.
To disable, I’d have to login.
I usually don’t like unsubscribing because it results in more spam. Even legitimate sites seem to sell your “verified email address”. Nowadays everything has a unique generated email so I can turn it off at will, but that was long before I started doing that
So, laziness, inertia, excuses
Ads don’t work on me CMV
Though it’s probably because advertisers never promote things I actually want.
Companies spend hundreds of millions on lots of shit that doesn’t work. There have been plenty of studies saying that ads are not nearly as effective as companies think they are. Do you think that companies are somehow smarter than the people outside those companies?
I definitely bought a lot of things because of ads. Not directly though, I don’t go around clicking on online ads even if one slips through the blocker.
Just being exposed to the idea that some product exists is an ad. Reviews and comparisons. Seeing a brand name in the wild. A product being recommended by someone I consider an authority in that specific field.
It all provenly works on me.And I don’t really regret it, how else would I even find out what exists? Go to the store and just buy whatever the seller recommends? Did people do that in the past before mass advertising?
Edit: I just realized this is exactly what Amazon is trying to do. Push generic “amazon option” products which have no independent sales outside of the platform.
Being exposed to a product that exists is not an ad. An ad is explicitly something that a company has paid to make visible to people. If a company isn’t paying for it then it’s not an ad, no matter how much it sounds like one.
And yes, going to a store and trying shit out is exactly how it should go. Reading reviews and talking to others is exactly how it should go. Companies paying to manipulate people of the world using psychology is what ads are. Not seeing a product being used in the wild.
a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)
And then there is the whole 'we got all their products for free for review purposes. But it totally did not affect our review score. Even though they will stop sending us free shit ahead of release if we give them a bad review. Pinky promise
People generally don’t realize how many ads are actually on pages. It’s way more than just some search results. Carousels are entirely ads. Home page is almost 100% ads. The men’s pants page, mostly ads. Product comparison or review sites are almost all ad based. Affiliate links are just a way to make ads not look like ads.
I made my life so ad-free that I almost never see any anyway
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Hard to be influenced by ads if one avoids them in the first place. I do a fairly good job at limiting my exposure to advertisements. Some are unavoidable, like outdoor advertisement, or going to a website with ads, but simply tuning out broadcast TV and radio, free streaming services and cable, with a few exceptions of course, eliminates a lot of wasted time on ads. I do pay money though to keep them away on some services. When someone brings up a funny ad that they saw on TV, I often have no clue what they’re talking about, and that’s great. My adversion to advertisement has been around since at least the early 2000s. I believe it was triggered when I sat down and watched the Weird Al movie “UHF” on Comedy Central and it took 4 hours to the end because of all the ads.
going to a website with ads Use Firefox. Install uBlock Origin. On your phone too. You can now tick that one off the list too.
I don’t have enough money to buy stuff because it’s advertised.
If you wanna waste Ad companies money use the ublock fork https://adnauseam.io/ that clicks on all the ads to dilute the dataset, it also shows them all in a little ‘collection’ which is cool
They pay per click on the ad ~1$ for 1 click so by clicking on 2,000 in 3 months for me is a lotta wasted money.Also, use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/ to search random stuff on Google and Bing, and to take their money download the Google app “rewards” and you’ll get surveys on search results and get money in the form of Google play money for them (make sure to actually use it). iirc Bing does the same with their points.
This one doesn’t waste a lot of money, but it’s money you can use to support a cause you like or just buy something for a game if you want.I didn’t believe that cost so I looked it up. It’s seriously a dollar per click. That seems SO expensive to me.
The only ads I’m exposed to are influencers and product placements. I recently bought something because of an influencer the second time in my life (excluding their own merch). I think I can manage.
I do fall for sales tho. Bad impulse control.
I don’t buy stuff
Fuck no, I do my best to avoid adds and shitty algorithms promoting what I “want”, because it never is what I want! It’s always hot garbage! Finding anything meaningful is becoming harder and harder as adds become more prevalent. I ditched Google and YouTube for those reasons. I hate how it picks up on what I search for and shows me similar things in the future. I’m looking up stuff to find new things! Not the shit I’ve already seen!
I specifically will boycott places if their ads annoy me enough.
There’s a stark difference between a braindead teenager flicking through ShitTok all day, 20% obvious ads, 50% hidden ads/sponsors, and not questions anything once. Then there’s me, who, in the rare case I am forced to see an advertisement, purposefully remembers it to boycott that product.
If I realize that I know a product through an ad of some kind, I go out of my way to not buy that product. And if I don’t remember, I still choose objectively - who treated the animals the best, what works the best etc. So if you want to sell me something, just don’t fuck me over, and give me a nice experience, eg. open source drivers.
