It's not, in any way, useful. Advertising is the least productive thing we do as a species, it's just lying to get people to buy something they don't need in the first place, because if they needed it, they wouldn't need advertising.
I need food. I like pizza. I would not know that a new pizza place opened a few miles from home except that they sent a postcard to my house in the mail -- an ad. Now I buy pizza from them.
Much of the most effective advertising is honest and factual. For a discussion of this by one of the advertising greats, see the book "Ogilvy on Advertising." [0]
> it's just lying to get people to buy something they don't need in the first place, because if they needed it, they wouldn't need advertising.
"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
In the real world, you definitely 100% need to get in front of people to convince them that your solution solves their problems. Or make them realize they have a problem in the first place.
Strongly disagree. If you have a crappy product, generally you won't be able to advertise effectively. People won't buy your product if it doesn't look useful, and even if you manage to trick some initial buyers, negative reviews and such will likely catch up to you.
On the other hand, if you create a great product but don't advertise at all, it can take a very long time to grow organically, since you don't have any initial users to share your product. Instead you can advertise to get that initial user base, and then your happy customers will help you to continue to grow. You could stop advertising at that point, but as long as your product is good you can probably grow even faster by continuing to market it to people.
Now sure, a lot of marketing is zero-sum. IE, Coke vs Pepsi and similar: ads whose purpose is to sway you between well-known competitors. But a lot of it does provide discovery for unknown products too.
And finally, most people expect it. I'm not exaggerating when I say at autotempest we get an order of magnitude more people complaining that we don't advertise enough than that we advertise too much. Often this will be new users who say something like, "This is great—wish I'd known about it years ago! You guys should do better marketing." Of course nothing would have stopped them from searching for a service like ours. We rank very highly on Google and such; but most people don't work that way.
None. Ideally someone would investigate the history of advertising and why it has become the multi-hundred billion dollar industry that it is. Ideally someone would investigate with curiosity: why do these businesses spend so much money on advertising? What benefits do they get from it? Given that it's such a significant industry, what would the economy look like in a world without advertising? They might also ask themselves with some degree of introspection, if they have ever been persuaded to purchase a product or service on account of some ad and been satisfied with said purchase.
It sounds like you aren't open at all to a perspective that challenges the efficacy of advertising, or is skeptical of the benefits of capitalism in general.
It sounds like you'd prefer these people don't make their views known in your presence.
Your comment indicated that you wanted to punish them by making the mistake of doing so.
