Blatantly false advertising is illegal. There's a lot of room between "blatantly false" and "valuable and informative". That's why we have upvote and downvote mechanisms.
Also, I understand not everyone believes this, but I think there is something morally wrong with the form and scale of manipulation that modern advertisement brings.
Advertising doesn't contain knowledge. It's like a stopped clock: even when it's correct, you don't know it's correct, because most of the time it's not correct.
And more critically, even when it is correct, it's not the complete story. I've never seen an ad that admits that their competitor's product is cheaper, or better. In fact, most ads don't even want you to know their competitor exists. So let's not pretend advertising is about "giving knowledge to the poor". That's just an odious lie. If it were about giving knowledge, you'd by trying to tell the whole story.
Flaws are subjective depending on how a product doesn't match your needs. What would a company consider a flaw? The product is released as designed, with no obvious issues.
Again, the knowledge is them telling you about the product. They don't make you do anything other than provide information. You're entirely in control of your decisions.
> Flaws are subjective depending on how a product doesn't match your needs. What would a company consider a flaw?
That's one part of the issue. A company's product might be the best product for some people's needs, but there might be another product that fits the needs of some market segment better. But the company doesn't care if their product is the best for that segment: a sale is a sale. They'll advertise the strong points of the product, ignoring the properties of the product which might make it unsuitable for some consumers. This doesn't benefit consumers.
This might all seem obvious, but there are people on this thread who think advertising benefits consumers.
> What would a company consider a flaw? The product is released as designed, with no obvious issues.
This is really, really not true, and I am not entirely sure you are making a good faith argument here. I work hard at my job, but I've never released a product that didn't have bugs and tradeoffs.
> Again, the knowledge is them telling you about the product. They don't make you do anything other than provide information. You're entirely in control of your decisions.
Your decisions are only as good as the information you have, and advertising deliberately gives you wrong or incomplete information.
> "I've never released a product that didn't have bugs and tradeoffs"
Bugs are not known flaws, otherwise you should fix them. What's the warning, that nothing is guaranteed to be perfect?
> "advertising deliberately gives you wrong or incomplete information."
Incorrect. False advertising is illegal. Trade-offs are subjective to you. What's considered complete information is subjective to you.
Consumers benefit from the knowledge of that product existing and its features. Whether that product works for you is your choice. If you need more info then go research it. Nobody is going to magically tell you what's best for your life, that's your responsibility.
> Bugs are not known flaws, otherwise you should fix them.
That's not reality. Sometimes you don't have budget, sometimes there isn't a clear solution, etc.
> Incorrect. False advertising is illegal.
Haha! Okay buddy. Not sure what country you live in where that even pretends to be true, but our US companies are happy to break laws in that country to lie to you.
> Whether that product works for you is your choice. If you need more info then go research it. Nobody is going to magically tell you what's best for your life, that's your responsibility.
Sure, but let's not pretend that advertisers are our helpful friends here. They are our opponents, whose misinformation we have to constantly combat in order to find useful information to make informed decisions.
Advertisers are just companies and people doing the advertising, and they're only trying to tell you about their product (which helps you in it's intended function).
Where did you get this requirement that they must help you with your entire shopping comparison? Why would they do that for free? It's your responsibility to learn about what you need and make the decision that's best for you.
Also there's plenty of marketing that does help, for example the entire field of content marketing where educational and informative content is posted with a minor sponsor mention.
> Where did you get this requirement that they must help you with your entire shopping comparison? Why would they do that for free? It's your responsibility to learn about what you need and make the decision that's best for you.
Agreed.
The problem is that on this thread there are a bunch of people trying to say that advertising is helping customers.
It is wrong to say that it doesn't contain any knowledge even if it is not the primary intent.
Incomplete and often deliberately misleading but there are actual gains to it. If you were in Cuba and saw an ad for the zero to sixty time of a mini-van which emphasised cargo space that was better than a hotrod.
Pretty much any interaction with reality even if pure lies can contain gleamable knowledge from analysis even if it is "they expect us to believe this crap".
Maybe we can just create a lower underclass that we make too stupid to care for growth by subjecting them to alcohol during pregnancy and provide them with drugs that will simply allow them to be content by being.
Likewise, poor educational outcomes not caused by FAS are also correlated with low socioeconomic status of the parent(s). And we already have the "content by being" drugs -- tobacco, alcohol, and television.
If that doesn't look like a permanent underclass that we're snowing with Soma, I don't know what would.
In all seriousness, Brave New World is an excellent book. It's quite startling how much Huxley got right (and also what he got wrong, instead of soma we actually got the complete opposite with an international version of American prohibition). The general premise that it's easier to keep the population ignorant by barraging us with endless trivial rubbish than than 1984-style authoritarian "Ministries of Truth" is spot on I think.
Huxley is definitely on my top ten list of favourite authors.
Yes, inequality only makes people unhappy if it is visible. Ergo, instead of asking developers to incorporate affordable housing, we should be encouraging more gated compounds.
I could put a /s here, but it could well be literally true.
