this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Damn, another total fuckup, you are probably right!
It's alright, it happens. What were you saying?
The goal of ads isn't obviouse because it's subconscious influence on you that often shows up ages after you actually watched the ad. It's not a "buy now" but rather produce E.g. good feelings around a brand or product by showing you feelgood content and the less you care about the actual ad the more likely you are to ultimately fall for it. The by far biggest issue is that you won't notice once you fall for it tho because you just made a choice between multiple products and the influence only showed up subconsciously rather than "I noticed that in a ad" which is why they still work, everybody likes to think they are the exception it doesn't work on but that's not how exceptions work!
If you think you have the money to afford buying things on a whim, sure.
I don't think I'm an exception, I think there are plenty of people who think about how they spend their money. I also think there are a lot of people who don't. Y'know, with 8 billion people out there, if the split was 50:50, there would still be 4 billion that could be swayed by ads... and I wouldn't be an exception in not being one of them.
It's not about smart or stupid, ads use various mechanisms to manipulate you and noone is completely immune to them, when you spend your money it's too late already because you have bias no matter how slight it is and once you are presented with two idendically good products that bias starts to show. Here is a great German video on the topic, I don't know if the subtitles are usable but it's far too big and complex to explain in a single comment and I don't care to try rn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etkeGVNRVYA
Where did I say it was? Different people are allowed to think in different ways, live their lives however they want, and take their decisions on a whim... or not.
Fun fact, I used to work in ad design for some time, pretty sure I know the basics.
I can even tell you a trade secret: when an ad for product A convinces 20% of the people to buy it instead of product B, while the rest buy them at random... the ad is a huge success! Now 60% of people are buying product A, with a market share 50% larger than the competition! It means you can increase markups 200% or more and still have revenue soar even as most people switch to product B.
That video keeps talking about the input (ad watching) effect with a mindless output (product selection) action.
I keep telling you the input effect is irrelevant when the output action is not mindless... none of which has anything to do with whether an ad "works" or not.