Why people think Ads are bad:
— The cached thought¹ that ads are bad.
1.Two things:
(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meanings e.g 'impregnating' a girl.
(ii) Deliberate framing: death tax vs inheritance tax, pro choice vs pro life, undocumented immigrants vs illegal aliens.
— They may hinder ideal UI/UX.
— Often bear a weak relevance.
What Ads are:
— Ads are tools that aid problem-solving by matching people to tools that solve their problems. People are notoriously bad at solving their own problems, or even realizing they have solvable problems.
Ads should be a net positive for consumers since they (consumers):
(i) are getting a product for free.
(ii) have an opportunity to passively discover solutions to some of their problems.
The only way they might not be is if ads are either poorly designed, or bear a weak relevance to a user. The solution to which isn't castigating ads as being bad; the solution is making better ads by:
— Destroying the cached thought that ads are bad.
— Designing ads that do not disrupt UI or UX, but instead align with the default context within which they exist. Cc: Reddit and Quora's native ads.
— Better data collection to improve relevance.
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Notes -
I'm not fundamentally against advertising in some form. What I'm against is the form it naturally takes where rather than informing me their purpose is transparently to try and use every trick in the book to subvert my interest to push the maximum number of units at the highest price for the lowest cost. Advertising I'd actually like needs an adversarial component where some agent on my side aggressively curates the recommendations that I receive in a way that I can trust their objectivity. There are certain product reviewers in spaces like board and video games that I think achieve this but it's vitally important to their credibility, and they know this, that their revenue stream is never even suspected of crossing paths with the marketing departments of the products. What ads reddit pushes to me has nothing to do with whether purchasing the product advertised is a good idea for me and everything to do with how much the ad company paid to have the product pushed and thus it has no useful signal to me.
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