Jeez enough with all the Ads

[Iron E]

Originally Posted by billreilly

Yes, it's the same for me... There are very few ads and only up at the top of the page... I've never seen a pop-up ad or a video ad on this website.


If you were to ask me what the ads are for I couldn't tell you without scrolling to the top and looking at them... To me they're just white noise that I don't even notice.


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Open your browser in incognito mode... It may surprise you

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by CaptTom

Actually, I would want to get into it. To me, that angle would be the most interesting part of this discussion.

Admit it or not, we're all influenced by advertising. Sure, a sale with 50% off some product we were going to buy anyway gets us into the store. But that's not really what most advertisers are going for.

It's that basic human instinct to prefer familiar things. If we hear the brand name often enough, we get comfortable with it. We come to think of it almost as a member of "our tribe." Tribalism, as anyone paying even a little bit of attention to politics throughout history, is a very powerful instinct.

For whatever reason, I grew up in a time when conformity was a bad thing. This anti-establishment sort of thinking gives me the opposite reaction. I make a conscious effort to fight the tribal instinct.

To me, excessive advertising only tells me that the company is putting more money into their marketing than their product. Form over function. I resist buying any clothing with a company logo on it. At elections, I pay close attention to the side opposite that which mails me the most glossy brochures.

I ask myself, why is someone spending all this money to convince (con?) me into buying or voting their way?

This skeptical approach isn't natural. It has to be learned, and practiced. It's very easy to just go with the flow and do whatever we're told by big money advertisers. But I think it's worth it.

The human mind mostly runs on autopilot, using a series of heuristics to process the world. This is why it is pretty easy to influence and manipulate people with advertising, marketing and propaganda. The reason advertisers repeat the same ad, over and over, is because it ties into the availability heuristic which tells us that the more often we see something, the better it is.

In-group/out-group, or pack mentality, is also a huge influencer of human behaviour. But there is a whole range of biases and mental blind spots that behavioural researchers have identified.

Here's a nice list of common human heuristics and biases: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases

Advertisers and marketers and propagandists have long understood how to manipulate people using this knowledge. Of course, all of this is measured on the statistical curve. Some of us are more, or less, susceptible to various biases than others. The point though, is that we are ALL susceptible to some or all of these. Unless you're not human .

While this research reveals just how easy it is to manipulate people using advertising and other techniques, other research show that most people will report that it doesn't apply to them. Maybe... but one of the strongest biases we carry is the ability to fool ourselves. So while I believe I'm pretty skeptical in my approach to all this stuff, I also know I'm great at self-deception.

This is why the only sure fire way of not being influenced by advertising is to avoid it.

[billreilly]

Originally Posted by Iron E

Open your browser in incognito mode... It may surprise you

I just tried incognito mode (in Firefox it's called a private window) and there's no difference, it's exactly the same.

[billreilly]

Originally Posted by Iron E

Open your browser in incognito mode... It may surprise you

I just opened this page in both Chrome and Edge (In neither of these browsers am I logged in) and there's also no difference, it's exactly the same as in Firefox (where I'm logged in).