Anyone who tries to manipulate anyone in any matter is a fool.
Sales is necessary to every organisation however. There is no "built it and they will come".
Marketing in my mind should be about providing easy access to the right information so that human beings can make informed decisions. Sometimes you have to "push" that information or your message to the people you want to reach. Not everyone will magically find your wisdom.
So in what category were those commercials for smoking? Clearly these campaigns were based on disinformation, manipulation, and they were highly successful.
If you were aware, you would never smoke. Same for interest. Why would you be interested in a black lung. Furthermore, desire. Not sure what a cowboy riding on a horse has to do with smoking.
So, none of those commercials teach you what smoking is actually about. It is about getting you addicted so you become an ATM for big tabacco.
It seems that your argument is, that some marketing is somewhat malicious - and I agree.
But to say that all marketing is ill-intended and manipulative seems way to extreme.
"Providing good documentation" could be considered a marketing move, if that was what would set a product apart, and make it interesting to buyers.
Making bad ad-copy and intrusive advertising in general is not something I find very interesting personally. That doesn't mean, that it doesn't work, or isn't morally wrong (you mention smoking).
Selling and promoting your product is necessary for most companies. And it can be done in a tasteful, informative and non-intrusive manner.
> Anyone who tries to manipulate anyone in any matter is a fool.
and provided a counter example. Of course, commercials don't have to be malicious, and can be informative and a net positive. But commercials rarely are honest sources of information.
I've managed tens of millions of dollars running direct respond ads and would never lie or mislead in ad copy. I've also never seen a lie in ads run by people I know.
Every conceivable thing on earth has some flaw or trade off. Good advertising communicates information about the product while illustrating the next best alternative's trade offs.
I dislike being sold to, but I enjoy getting info for products that are relevant to me.
So, capitalism is built on the idea of mutually beneficial trades. It's supposed to be a cooperative game, and in cooperative games you should always provide as much information to your counterpart as possible. Capitalism breaks down when too much guard labor is necessary: if I don't know what flaws you are keeping hidden, then I have to spend extra effort on every transaction, and will buy fewer things that I want.
What I see lots of advertisers doing is treating it as a competitive game. They're slightly right, as they are competing against the other advertisers for the same customers. However, if all advertisers could just agree to be brutally honest, everyone would be better off. That's the purpose of governmental regulation, and governments routinely strike companies for deceptive advertising.
To be blunt, any advertising that does not make a good-faith effort to give me all the relevant information--the good and the bad--is deceptive. Perhaps you won't get in legal trouble (though you should), and perhaps it's socially acceptable because "everyone else does it" (not everyone, just the vast majority), but that does not make it right. It just means society still has progress to make.
> The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.
Why is this bad? What is the preferable way one should advertise their services, if they choose to be an independent consultant? Should they sit quietly in a dark room and wait for people to find them, like some sort of monk in a cave?
Well there is marketing and then there is marketing. Given the fact most of us would be out of a job without advertising of some kind, I cannot condemn it the way you do.
However I despise deceitful marketing as well. I am also not a big fan of the way my company markets itself. It is neither deceitful nor misleading, but just ... irrelevant to people working in the space and thus hard to align with.
But I also know companies (that we have worked with) who spend their marketing budget on hosting small-ish conferences and choose to post content from their (technical) blog in their LinkedIn. For me personally, that way of marketing themselves just inspires more confidence than ... overconfident salespeople.
Exactly as the sibling said, you would have nothing to program for because nobody would no you exist. You don't randomly search for Reggy, the product I made. But now you know about it because I just told you. All advertising is, is telling people you exist. You can do that by posting your spec manuals, making memes, making a landing page or a website, whatever you want.
> All advertising is, is telling people you exist.
If that is all advertising was, I don't believe this conversation would be happening. People (ITT) dislike advertising because of the other parts (tracking, subtle manipulation, etc). There's a side to it that has obvious benefit: Knowing you reach your target market with truthful and engaging content is something ad targeting, seo, etc, enable. The problem is they also enable deceit, manipulation, spam, etc. When I see the impact that has on people I know, I start to wonder if maybe it is worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Programming also enables hackers, viruses, etc. Advertising enables good things like knowing there is a cure for your rare cancer (even if you search, there has to be information, which is advertising). It also enables the bad stuff you mentioned.
It is literally impossible to do anything without ads. You go to the store and it says peaches on a can of peaches. That’s an ad.
FYI I know about "reggy" and would never visit it because it was "advertised" by a random guy wanting to use a place for technical discussions to sell their product which is lame.
I would be very surprised if you, or anyone on this message board, had a use case for it. It was a niche example that I knew you wouldn’t know. But you made my point that advertising is about awareness first.
Maybe we wouldn’t even exist, nobody would use this mostly-for-webdevs website, because we’d all be busy programming machines in factories that make things.
OP mentioned that people have jobs because of advertising. sabbaticaldev mentioned that this wouldn't be true for more than a few hours because humans need jobs, advertising existing or not.
Yep. I have a low opinion of anyone who tries to manipulate others using deceit and trickery. Marketers just happen to have made a career out of it.
The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.