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 wish the rise of 'targeted ads' lived more up to the stated potential.
As others have noted ads are a tolerable intrusion to the extent they make you aware of a product you hadn't previously heard of but might in fact purchase, or about deals on stuff you would normally purchase, or possibly provide some pure entertainment value.
Under ideal circumstances, you would ONLY be exposed to those sorts of ads and this would be a net benefit for both sides since you now have some additional useful information AND this ad is more likely to convert into an actual sale for the advertiser.
I've talked about my confusion as to why well-established brands feel they need to maintain a strong advertising presence. But almost universally such brands avoid being obnoxious with their ads.
So really, advertising is a problem because it intrudes into spaces where they are unwelcome, provide no useful information to the vast majority of viewers, and are often obnoxious in nature. And advertising/marketing as an industry seems to be trying endlessly to find ways to intrude into more spaces, and become more obnoxious (so as to grab your attention), and don't really care if their information is useful to the viewers so long as they can snag a few more sales out of it.
Arguably worst of all is when you get 'fooled' into interacting with an ad on the assumption that you're getting a 'genuine' interaction out of it and only after you've already committed some time and effort to the interaction does it reveal that in fact they just want to extract money from you. I fear with LLMs this will become more universal.
I think the problem as it exists is that Advertisers are aggressively optimizing for grabbing attention. There is some subset of the population who are very negatively impacted by ads and aren't likely to actually convert into sales. But some large majority of the population accept advertising and actually make purchasing decisions based on what ads grab their attention. So in their zeal to get access to the latter group, there is a large deadweight loss borne by the former group.
So basically, advertisers are acting in ways that don't really consider the total impact of their actions, and arguably they produce many externalities, and their behavior might be changed if they were forced to internalize those costs, but the incentives don't quite align for this to happen.
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