Advertising's Value Debate
This cluster centers on debates about whether advertising informs consumers of useful products, enables discovery, or primarily manipulates people into unnecessary purchases and harms society.
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A lot of those wants wouldn't exist without advertising
Advertising helps people. Why are they paying for it then?
the main legitimate purpose of ads is to make people aware of products they didn't know about before. If the user actually wants that product but didn't know it existed, then the advert was a net-positive to both parties.
Because ads are about selling you something you didn't think you wanted.
What are ads if not influencing people?
but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?
You don't need advertising if you have a useful product. You only need discoverability.Advertising is an industry of mental pollution. It exists explicitly to convincing people they need to buy a product. If they don't know they need to buy it without being convinced, they don't actually need to buy it.It is literally not worth $2 to me to have your junk injected into my brain. This isn't personal of course. I don't even know how useless your junk is. But the fact
And people say advertising doesn't add value to the world...
An ad is designed to make you buy something. It's irrelevant to them if that makes your life better or worse. We're emotional creatures and I want to minimise companies taking advantage of my emotional state to buy shit I thought I needed. I want to buy less stuff in general. There's more to life than the dopamine you get from spending money.
Everyone thinks advertising doesn't work on them. And everyone is wrong.