by imiric | 2025-04-04 19:09:02+00:00
I would typically apologize for my admittedly rude tone, but I have zero sympathy for anyone in the advertising industry. It is arguably humanity's most evil invention, that has prioritized benefiting the rich and powerful by manipulating and actively harming an unquantifiable amount of people, all the while being normalized and celebrated. I'm unable to accurately put into words how despicable it all is.

Though I will congratulate you for getting out of it, so perhaps your soul can be cleansed over time after all, if you believe in that sort of thing.

> One of the things that makes me sad for our species is that we find it so easy to judge other people on small pieces of information, and create narratives that allow us to justify our own small evils while feeling morally superior.

I'm not trying to justify any of my "small evils". Talk about creating narratives...

I do, however, feel morally superior to anyone involved in advertising, because their behavior is morally rephrensible. I'm fine with this small sense of superiority, because my work doesn't involve deception, and I seek to put out truth into the world. I don't always succeed at this, but I don't go out of my way to do the opposite either.

> I am perfectly aware of how the industry works, and can tell you that it mostly doesn't.

Your perspective goes against the mountain of research around the effectiveness of propaganda, which advertising is a branch of. It goes against the existence and very real effects of information warfare and psyops. If you need convincing, here[1] is a summary of an analysis of 82 studies that researched influence operations. tldr; propaganda _works_. Not 100% of the time, but it's a messy subject that can't be easily studied.

I'm also aware of counter claims and studies showing the opposite[2]. I'm not particularly interested in the possibility that companies overspend on advertising and don't get a good ROI. That has nothing to do with the effectiveness of propaganda.

The reason for this discrepancy is because getting conclusive evidence either way is very difficult precisely _because_ of how psyops works. Does the person think a certain way because they were influenced by a specific campaign, by their social circle, because they always thought like that, or because they woke up one day and decided to think like that? I.e. tracing the thought or action to the original source is nigh impossible. This is what's so insidious about this, and why it's such a good weapon. The victim will be in a state of confusion, and won't be able to trace the attack back to the attacker, or even be aware that they were under attack.

To this day we're debating whether there was foreign election interference in the US, and if so, how effective it actually was. This is exactly the intended effect. Hell, we still don't know the origins of COVID-19, partly due to the coverup by the Chinese government, but the disinformation campaigns have been very effective at muddying this discussion even if we had shreds of truth to work with.

[1]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/mass-media-propagand...

[2]: https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/propaganda-is-dangerous-b...