Quote Originally Posted by Atmosfear View Post
well here is another thread derailed.

First, economically speaking, any argument for advertising tends to be reinforcing the status quo and the impracticality of eliminating it from the market. I understand this, and I understand it will never go away. It's a prisoner's dilemma, so firms have no choice but to advertise because it is possible.

Second, realize that there are some benefits to advertising that are both more cost-effective and non-unique to mass advertising. Advertising is an effective means of differentiating products and establishing a brand; you know that a bottle with a red label and the white Coca-Cola script is going to taste like coke. Second, advertising is an effective way of conveying facts of the products (again, look on the bottle and know the nutrition facts.) These are important to consumers, but both of these examples were realized without mass advertising. I'm not advocating that every product needs to be devoid of labeling or aesthetic appeal.

Third, advertising is, by its very nature, either unnecessary for consumers or misleading. Take a hypothetical situation in which there are two vacuum cleaners, A and B. Brand A is top-quality, a great value, and works perfectly. To improve sales, they pour millions of dollars into advertising for their product. Brand B is low-quality, a poor value, and does not work as advertised. To improve sales, they pour millions of dollars into advertising for their product.

A month later, both products are reporting great sales figures; the advertising is working. Two months later, product A is still going strong and B is leveling off. By the end of three months, product A is established in the marketplace and product B is putting even more money into advertising to help their sales numbers. By the six month period, product A has cut its advertising budget in half and its sales are strong. Product B has disappeared.

This is exactly as the free market would have the situation play out. The inferior product is gone from the marketplace. However, what about all those consumers who received advertising for B and purchased B, only to wind up with an inferior product? What about all the money that Firm B made on the sales of their inferior product, driven not by the product itself but by good advertising? I would say it's unethical, but I understand why they do it. The free market is still successful, but not because of advertising, rather in spite of advertising.

Advertising also has a couple of other effects on a product: as my example illustrates, it doesn't really improve sales or profitability for any product in the long-run (in order to continue driving sales numbers, remember, product B had to increase its advertising.) Advertising is, by nature, associated with quality. The logic of the consumer is "if the product wasn't good, the company wouldn't waste the money to advertise." The act of advertising at all is a sign of quality to the consumer (compare: would you be more likely to purchase a product that you first heard about from an advertisement during the Super Bowl for $20 million a minute or a competing product that you heard about through advertising on a shitty forum with 300 active posters for half a penny per click?)

I get that advertising isn't going away. I get that it's a major industry in this country, and the major driver behind all of our entertainment. I understand that in a global market, even if we banned advertising in our country, it would continue in others. I understand why firms advertise (like I said, it's a prisoner's dilemma.) But if you could reset everything and establish a standard so that mass-advertising was never an option, the money spent on advertising would be instead spent on improving the quality of the products, not the quality of the sales pitch.
You should write childrens books.