I live in São Paulo (the city mentioned in the article) and I always find it amusing how you can tell exactly where São Paulo ends and the neighboring city (Guarulhos) begins just by the billboards.
Here’s São Paulo’s welcome sign coming from Guarulhos. There are lot of billboards before it, but exactly none after.
“Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.”
— G.K. Chesterton
The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
> “Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.”
> — G.K. Chesterton
> The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
Wow. That was perhaps the most eloquent thing I've ever read on the hacker news. Thanks for posting it!
I don't think advertising is the right way to raise awareness about products and services - it is biased, untrustworthy and obtrusive. (Non-shill) reviews, word of mouth and other grassroots methods are both more effective and less obtrusive, the problem is if you've got a half baked product and you're burning money you need to ram your junk down people's throats RIGHT NOW or you'll go out of business, and thus advertising.
> we all like finding out about things which will actually help us
That's pretty easy to achieve with a pull model rather than push though, especially with modern technical advances Chesterton couldn't have dreamed of (search and ubiquitous internet). Under the backdrop of restraining advertising except insofar as it offers a legitimate discovery service, given how easy it is to operate such a service, is it still reasonable to populate websites, billboards, and magazines with intrusions into unrelated aspects of life?
Around here, the Reservations are not covered by state billboard laws. There's one billboard on the Res that is adjacent to and faces I5 and is composed of light bulbs that are blinding to drivers.
I very, very rarely take conscious notice of billboards. If every one within a 100 miles of me were to disappear without a trace over night I'm honestly not sure I'd notice.
Do you ever do anything outside at night? The digital billboards are not something you'd miss. They're too bright and attention grabbing to be anything but obnoxious.
But what I find the worst these days are ultra-bright large LED screens. At night they are blindingly bright. One in particular in my area installed at a shopping plaza, is so bright I need to look away when walking by. Its "ad light" floods the whole area.
There is literally a billboard on the highway in British Columbia that is a pair of skidmarks descending into a valley with large font that says "KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD". During the night this sign is lit like a christmas tree, very bright.
I could never get over how difficult it was to ignore that stupid billboard every time I crossed it.
At a gut level, I would love for outdoor advertising to be banned in my city. I resent the constant intrusion into my mind when I encounter them on the street.
That said, I do recognize that from the perspective of advertisers and consenting property owners having the (assumed) right to do trade however they wish, this may not be a fair or reasonable policy to enact. Truth be told, I haven't thought about this very much.
But the thing that I'm MOST interested in is what will be the secondary consequences of banning outdoor advertising? If advertisers cannot use billboards or posters, how will the space change and where will their behavior be compensated for elsewhere? Are there any unwanted secondary side-effects that might occur do to this prohibition? Like online advertising intensifying, or paid sponsorships for online content creators, or perhaps something completely different?
A city could set limits for the quantity, size, and prominence (eg no digital displays, illumination must be lower than X nits) in a reasonably fair and neutral way, so they're not banned altogether but the excesses are trimmed.
Restricting huge intrusive ads seems very close to the building code and zoning laws which cities seem to have no problem going completely overboard with.
They should be banned, and not because people are automatons, but because advertisements are invariably objectively distracting and increasingly garish as firms attempt to outcompete one another for attention. It's really just a question of what kind of society we want to live in - my own view is that people should have the option not to be bombarded by hawkers, whether it's homeless people, Mormons, or corporate shills, while they move about public spaces.
I would support some kind of Right To Not Be Accosted. I don’t know what that would look like exactly but people who want to sell or market something to me ought to have to obtain my consent first. It doesn’t seem right that you can go out and try to mind your business and be constantly under assault by things and people looking to take your attention. Like pollution laws, we should have a right to live life without all that in our environment.
And not just billboards. Did I ask to have ads put on my gas pump? No, I did not. (I didn't ask for Maria Menudos to be put on it either. Why, every time that I pump gas, do I have to watch her on the gas pump?)
I didn't ask for ad-blaring TVs to be in airport waiting areas.
In fact, both of those are worse than billboards. Billboards mostly don't move and talk.
I went to Cuba and there was no advertising allowed on the roads. It was really refreshing, and it made our excursions feel a lot more engaging. The government did have some propaganda billboards on the roads, but it was ridiculous stuff like Uncle Sam getting punched in the face. I found those pretty entertaining…
> Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for another trade organisation, the Advertising Association, says that "all advertising plays a crucial role in brand competition, drives product innovation, and fuels economic growth".
You know what actually drives product innovation? Not being able to lean on advertising to drive sales, so you're actually forced to improve your product and get the benefit of positive word of mouth instead.
Sounds like the position of a developer who has never had to advertise. Building things doesn't automatically make people gravitate toward them. Believe it or not, you have to go places and promote things.
Yes, talking about or inserting something into conversation is promoting. It's advertising. And guess what--almost none of your users or buyers are going to say a word about your product.
People need to stop believing this stuff and just accept the dirty fact that if you want something to get used, you HAVE to advertise. You HAVE to promote.
Edit: You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.
Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.
You know what word of mouth is? Word of mouth is a signal you have already won. It is absolutely nothing for growth.
Spoken like a marketer / salesperson. I am indeed a developer and run a successful, bootstrapped software business. I agree that you need to initially get the word out that your product exists at all. However, this can be so targeted and the scope so small that I doubt most people would put it in the same category as the advertising practices that many find objectionable.
Once you've got some interest bootstrapped, you CAN in fact rely on unprompted word of mouth for growth. My users and buyers spread the word about my product simply because they find it useful. Many bring it to their new employer when they switch jobs.
So no, I disagree with the blanket position that you have to advertise -- especially in the intrusive fashion that's the subject of the article -- to get people to use your product. (Though I don't dispute that doing so can be a good shortcut.)
But all that is irrelevant to my claim above: my position is simply that a dearth of advertising options is what drives product innovation, by necessity. And hence, limiting advertising is likely to actually be good for consumers.
> You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.
As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.
> You know what word of mouth is? [...] It is absolutely nothing for growth.
When I joined the company some years ago, we were the 5th largest in our sector. We since grew to 2nd largest using almost entirely word of mouth for sales. We didn't have any dedicated sales people, and did hardly any advertising.
Instead, users would call friends in the industry and tell them to get our software. If they switched jobs they'd persuade their new boss to get our software.
Since reaching #2 spot we got some sales and marketing people, and we're now at the top.
So while I'll disagree that word of mouth can't be used for growth, I've seen first hand how good sales and marketing can put you on a steeper curve.
> Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.
Easy. This morning in the "Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?" thread I saw multiple users mentioning a open source project I have never heard of but seemed very close to what i was looking for. I have it now running since 12 hours and I already recommended a friend to check it out.
I reckon about 70% of things I use are from recommendations of people (but usually not from the internet). From what command-line shell I use to what music I listen to.
Well there is now a massive group of people that never sees online advertising anymore. Due to adblockers and piholes. Thanks Raymond Hill <3
For me the only advertising I see is on billboards because I never watch live TV either (and haven't for years). And many products are way too niche to advertise that way.
This group will get ever larger because it's just a great thing to live in an advertising-free world. If your business can't cope with it I would suggest making that a priority to adjust to :)
Food for thought: The user you're responding to is the founder of Reviewable. I use his product and found it through word of mouth. It is not the de facto solution in the space.
> Building things doesn't automatically make people gravitate toward them.
No, but the two barber-shops in towns spending $X each on net-even advertising is a net-negative for me, because the only thing I get out of it is a higher bill when I cut my hair.
Some advertisement creates new markets. Some is a negative-sum game. None of it can be assumed to be honest, because of the obvious profit motive involved.
You are begging the question, in the logical fallacy sense. You have to advertise and promote because advertising has been allowed to grow unbounded like a cancer and drown out everything else. It's a tragedy of the commons.
If advertising were toned down a couple orders of magnitude, word of mouth might actually get more traction.
While that's obviously true, I'm not sure it's some sort of optimum state. I think if you're in the ocean, it is understandable that you would keep treading water to stop yourself from drowning, but perhaps a better solution is to look for ways to leave the ocean. I'm entirely unconvinced that this isn't a local maximum that we're stuck in.
Even if I leave room that advertising (and capitalism) is the only stable system, that doesn't mean it can't be limited and restricted for better outcomes for people on the whole.
I get if you're trying to starve for a buck out here in a crowded space like tech, but on the consumer side of things I have never put deep use in any product that was marketed (i.e. someone paid for it to get to my eyeballs.)
It may be true that for a bunch of you to make money, you need to put money in marketing. But for us who want good products, marketing mostly only gets in our way. Good products really do sell themselves with word of mouth, or me actively seeking out good things.
Look at Rockstar's Red Dead 2. Cost about $540 million to produce. Split almost down the middle for advertising and development costs. For every dollar spent on dev, a dollar was spent on advertising.
It's now one of the most successful games ever made. The advertising did nothing to hurt innovation, and in fact proved Rockstar's hypothesis that the market is ready for this kind of innovation, but needs to be sold on the idea.
The boundary between useful advertising and word of mouth is exceedingly thin and contextual. When Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth, had it already won? Clearly not then and not now; it's barely posted an operating profit and it still a couple billion away from positive net income. Rather, it's in a duopoly in the US and an oligopoly in some other markets and facing a pretty gnarly advertise (defect) or not (cooperate) prisoner's dilemma. Word-of-mouth can be a form of promotion. Most products have obvious entry pathways which smart and experienced marketers will readily identify; few of these are display ads, fewer still are billboards.
The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.
Those two notions aren’t the same, nor interchangeable. Advertising is about pushing something to a public and expanding the attention the product receives. “ There's no such thing as bad publicity” is advertising.
Promoting is about making a product’s (alleged)merits better known and enticing people to use said product for their benefit.
As a society, we want promotion, not advertisement.
Not all advertising is the same. Yes every product needs to promote itself, but there are countless organic ways to do so, most of them being industry dependent. How many of the most popular tech products today got to where they are because they put up billboards in the middle of cities?
Would you be in favor of, in principle, obtaining consent from the people you market to? If what you say is true (people want to learn about new products) then surely most people would consent to these promotional messages.
Word of mouth is increasingly the only source I trust for product recommendations. Once advertisers figure this out I imagine they'll start sponsoring my acquaintances to lie to me about their products in person and I'll have to narrow the field even further.
Why don't you want to tell more people about it - wouldn't that help them? (and you?)
Seriously asking - like I get it if you only want to make $x and call it a day but can you help me understand why you wouldn't want to help more people with your superior offer?
That's an easy one: your product is good only for some people, who happen to have the problem you're solving. You could tell everyone about it, but you'd reach a lot of people for whom wasting time hearing about your product is a net negative, and it's entirely possible that the overall value to other people's lives of advertising in that way would be negative as well. Of course you could try more targeted advertising to mitigate the negative externalities, but that carries its own costs in terms of invasion of privacy, etc.
So yes, it's certainly possible that advertising raises the overall well-being of the recipients, but it's by no means a given.
There could be per-unit CapEx costs that mean that you actually can't scale up to serve traffic very much faster than organic viral growth allows.
Imagine a small cake shop running a Superbowl ad. That'd be dumb, right? Even if they had the money to run the ad, they can't fulfill the number of orders that ad would generate.
Exactly. Advertising is an arms race. Coca Cola doesn't spend billions on ads because nobody had heard of Coke. They do it to suppress the more innovative competition.
Readit News
Here’s São Paulo’s welcome sign coming from Guarulhos. There are lot of billboards before it, but exactly none after.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Dw8AFJS2sNRW27PL9?g_st=ic
— G.K. Chesterton
The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
> — G.K. Chesterton
> The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
Wow. That was perhaps the most eloquent thing I've ever read on the hacker news. Thanks for posting it!
That's pretty easy to achieve with a pull model rather than push though, especially with modern technical advances Chesterton couldn't have dreamed of (search and ubiquitous internet). Under the backdrop of restraining advertising except insofar as it offers a legitimate discovery service, given how easy it is to operate such a service, is it still reasonable to populate websites, billboards, and magazines with intrusions into unrelated aspects of life?
Deleted Comment
It’s a relief to be free from the visual pollution billboards create and there are no downsides unless you own a billboard.
In a more urban setting, I don’t hate billboards. The absence of billboards is a definite increase in quality of life.
Possibly balanced out by general property value increases due to there being no billboards, but I kind of doubt it.
It is possible the stringent enforcement gets absurd ( see https://www.noozhawk.com/article/institution_ale_can_keep_it... ).
On balance I am in favor of banning most outdoor advertising.
https://mumbrella.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Ashley-M...
But what I find the worst these days are ultra-bright large LED screens. At night they are blindingly bright. One in particular in my area installed at a shopping plaza, is so bright I need to look away when walking by. Its "ad light" floods the whole area.
I could never get over how difficult it was to ignore that stupid billboard every time I crossed it.
That said, I do recognize that from the perspective of advertisers and consenting property owners having the (assumed) right to do trade however they wish, this may not be a fair or reasonable policy to enact. Truth be told, I haven't thought about this very much.
But the thing that I'm MOST interested in is what will be the secondary consequences of banning outdoor advertising? If advertisers cannot use billboards or posters, how will the space change and where will their behavior be compensated for elsewhere? Are there any unwanted secondary side-effects that might occur do to this prohibition? Like online advertising intensifying, or paid sponsorships for online content creators, or perhaps something completely different?
I didn't ask for ad-blaring TVs to be in airport waiting areas.
In fact, both of those are worse than billboards. Billboards mostly don't move and talk.
You know what actually drives product innovation? Not being able to lean on advertising to drive sales, so you're actually forced to improve your product and get the benefit of positive word of mouth instead.
Yes, talking about or inserting something into conversation is promoting. It's advertising. And guess what--almost none of your users or buyers are going to say a word about your product.
People need to stop believing this stuff and just accept the dirty fact that if you want something to get used, you HAVE to advertise. You HAVE to promote.
Edit: You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.
Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.
You know what word of mouth is? Word of mouth is a signal you have already won. It is absolutely nothing for growth.
Once you've got some interest bootstrapped, you CAN in fact rely on unprompted word of mouth for growth. My users and buyers spread the word about my product simply because they find it useful. Many bring it to their new employer when they switch jobs.
So no, I disagree with the blanket position that you have to advertise -- especially in the intrusive fashion that's the subject of the article -- to get people to use your product. (Though I don't dispute that doing so can be a good shortcut.)
But all that is irrelevant to my claim above: my position is simply that a dearth of advertising options is what drives product innovation, by necessity. And hence, limiting advertising is likely to actually be good for consumers.
As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.
When I joined the company some years ago, we were the 5th largest in our sector. We since grew to 2nd largest using almost entirely word of mouth for sales. We didn't have any dedicated sales people, and did hardly any advertising.
Instead, users would call friends in the industry and tell them to get our software. If they switched jobs they'd persuade their new boss to get our software.
Since reaching #2 spot we got some sales and marketing people, and we're now at the top.
So while I'll disagree that word of mouth can't be used for growth, I've seen first hand how good sales and marketing can put you on a steeper curve.
Easy. This morning in the "Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?" thread I saw multiple users mentioning a open source project I have never heard of but seemed very close to what i was looking for. I have it now running since 12 hours and I already recommended a friend to check it out.
I reckon about 70% of things I use are from recommendations of people (but usually not from the internet). From what command-line shell I use to what music I listen to.
I don't recall seeing TikTok billboards or banner ads.
I've never seen a Tesla ad.
Did Facebook advertise? Instagram?
GMail throttled demand with limited invitations.
Until this week you had to apply to get a Dall-E login. Heard of it?
Rolls-Royce and Tupperware do not advertise.
I'm not saying advertising isn't important for products. But it's easy to find enormously-grown counterexamples to your blanket claim.
For me the only advertising I see is on billboards because I never watch live TV either (and haven't for years). And many products are way too niche to advertise that way.
This group will get ever larger because it's just a great thing to live in an advertising-free world. If your business can't cope with it I would suggest making that a priority to adjust to :)
No, but the two barber-shops in towns spending $X each on net-even advertising is a net-negative for me, because the only thing I get out of it is a higher bill when I cut my hair.
Some advertisement creates new markets. Some is a negative-sum game. None of it can be assumed to be honest, because of the obvious profit motive involved.
If advertising were toned down a couple orders of magnitude, word of mouth might actually get more traction.
Even if I leave room that advertising (and capitalism) is the only stable system, that doesn't mean it can't be limited and restricted for better outcomes for people on the whole.
I get if you're trying to starve for a buck out here in a crowded space like tech, but on the consumer side of things I have never put deep use in any product that was marketed (i.e. someone paid for it to get to my eyeballs.)
It may be true that for a bunch of you to make money, you need to put money in marketing. But for us who want good products, marketing mostly only gets in our way. Good products really do sell themselves with word of mouth, or me actively seeking out good things.
It's now one of the most successful games ever made. The advertising did nothing to hurt innovation, and in fact proved Rockstar's hypothesis that the market is ready for this kind of innovation, but needs to be sold on the idea.
The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.
Those two notions aren’t the same, nor interchangeable. Advertising is about pushing something to a public and expanding the attention the product receives. “ There's no such thing as bad publicity” is advertising.
Promoting is about making a product’s (alleged)merits better known and enticing people to use said product for their benefit.
As a society, we want promotion, not advertisement.
Deleted Comment
Why don't you want to tell more people about it - wouldn't that help them? (and you?)
Seriously asking - like I get it if you only want to make $x and call it a day but can you help me understand why you wouldn't want to help more people with your superior offer?
So yes, it's certainly possible that advertising raises the overall well-being of the recipients, but it's by no means a given.
Imagine a small cake shop running a Superbowl ad. That'd be dumb, right? Even if they had the money to run the ad, they can't fulfill the number of orders that ad would generate.
Deleted Comment
Some things really don't need innovation.