Comment by sedawkgrep

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.

I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.

The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.

The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.

My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.

Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.

The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.

Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.

I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.

Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.

Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.

The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.

I disagree-ish because I've been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I'd say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it's on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.

> Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?

What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?

What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?

Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.

This. Ads are industrialized brainwashing designed to induce dissatisfaction in the viewer to stoke demand for shit you don't need. And because companies pay for ads and then pass the price on to you, you're getting taxed on everything you buy for the privilege of being brainwashed.

Since when were we the customer?

They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful

I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.

Sometimes people want to buy something.

"More helpful" to the person selling the ad, perhaps :)

> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.

Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.

And larger companies are more able to purchase ads, reducing a breadth of stores and options.

The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.

Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"

Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.

Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.

Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.

Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.

The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.

Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.

FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.

The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.