Comment by supriyo-biswas
9 hours ago
Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.
9 hours ago
Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.
One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what engineers and product teams do.
Yes and that would be completely correct in many cases.
> Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
You might very well be the exception, but for something like 99% of marketing content that reaches me, our interests aren't aligned. First of all, they want to generate "needs" where there weren't any before and probably shouldn't be. A pizza ad produces the wish for unhealthy food. A fashion ad produces the wish for new clothes (even though I have enough) and probably even changes the societal dynamics of individual expression and personal style to be consumption oriented.
Second, even if I have a legitimate need for a solution, they still want me to buy their product, consume their media, give my attention to them. I, on the other hand, want to be informed by a neutral third party about the pros and cons of some product. Sure you can say "but unhappy customers are bad for us", but there are actually very few niches, where this signal is powerful enough to align incentives, because information and power asymmetry limit the customers understanding of product quality and their leverage to correct harmful market dynamics.