{"id":851,"date":"2020-01-18T20:26:27","date_gmt":"2020-01-19T01:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haidut.me\/?p=851"},"modified":"2020-01-18T20:26:27","modified_gmt":"2020-01-19T01:26:27","slug":"advertising-makes-people-unhappy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/?p=851","title":{"rendered":"Advertising Makes People Unhappy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Engineering demand is one of the main goals of marketing, and as such it is an indispensable tool for any for-profit company. In fact, these days, advertising is actually a crucial task in virtually any organization engaging with the public, be it non-profit, academic, government, local, etc. Yet, economic studies consistently demonstrate that advertising does not result in more optimal choices and in fact can lead to &#8220;analysis paralysis&#8221; with an overall decrease in optimal decision-making (at least according to the economic definition of such). The article below does a good job of reviewing the reasons for this &#8220;paradox&#8221; and largely echoes the words of Dr. Peat that &#8220;advertising is a dangerous cultural toxin&#8221; &#8211; i.e. in most cases it will be detrimental even when it tries to promote a beneficial product\/service. The study also managed to discover a surprisingly specific quantitative (inverse) relationship between advertising and happiness. Namely, <strong>for every doubling in advertising spending happiness decreases by 3%<\/strong>. Considering advertising spending in the US has been doubling on average every 5 years or so since the 1960s, this alone can explain the mental health decline of most young people today.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"VTNw7Xmg3Q\"><p><a href=\"http:\/\/haidut.me\/?p=794\">Half of Millennials and 75% of Gen Zers may be mentally ill<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" title=\"&#8220;Half of Millennials and 75% of Gen Zers may be mentally ill&#8221; &#8212; To Extract Knowledge from Matter\" src=\"http:\/\/haidut.me\/?p=794&#038;embed=true#?secret=eHnTgZeP1w#?secret=VTNw7Xmg3Q\" data-secret=\"VTNw7Xmg3Q\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Then what does make us happy? Well, according to the study &#8211; being healthy, feeling loved, and a sense of purpose\/community. Apparently, life is pretty simple if you listen to your intuition and not to whatever the latest ad is babbling about:-)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2020\/01\/advertising-makes-us-unhappy\">https:\/\/hbr.org\/2020\/01\/advertising-makes-us-unhappy<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;The University of Warwick\u2019s Andrew Oswald and his team compared <strong>survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011<\/strong> with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. <strong>The higher a country\u2019s ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">Advertising makes us unhappy<\/span><\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier\u2014and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant\u2014there is a link. This suggests that <strong>when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;Their line is that <strong>advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being<\/strong>. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that <strong>exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations\u2014and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">This study supports the negative view, not the positive one<\/span><\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;Yes, some might see that watch ad and say, \u201cWhy are men buying $10,000 watches when they carry a mobile phone with the time on it?\u201d Or respond to a car ad by congratulating themselves for not buying a gas-guzzler that\u2019s expensive to service and destroys the environment. <strong>Our research shows that <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">the really big influences on human happiness are things like health, intimate relationships, being employed, social safety nets, not being in midlife (there really is a crisis for many)<\/span>, and so on<\/strong>. Buying that watch or car can help make us feel slightly happier, but deep down it has a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses status effect. And when everybody buys the same thing the effect is nullified. That\u2019s partly why advertising hurts group happiness; there\u2019s only so much status to go around.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;<strong>Our analysis shows that <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction<\/span>. That\u2019s about half the drop in life satisfaction you\u2019d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you\u2019d see in someone who\u2019d become unemployed<\/strong>. We have a lot of experience working out how people are affected by bad life events, and advertising has sizable consequences even when compared with them. I try to be an evenhanded statistical researcher, but I can see how you might look at our study and think, \u201cMaybe it\u2019s sensible for me to opt out of some of these ads.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Engineering demand is one of the main goals of marketing, and as such it is an indispensable&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1036,33,1040,1041,1039,336,1038,1037],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-advertising","tag-cause","tag-confusion","tag-dissatisfaction","tag-marketing","tag-mental-illness","tag-misery","tag-unhappy","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haidut.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}