Unfortunately ads work even if the person is very disinclined to the purchase when viewed. When faced with a decision in store many months later, even years, whichever brand you recognize more will be more likely to be purchased. Ads are a very effective form of brainwashing. One might recall the adage that "there is no such thing as bad PR".

I know this is often repeated and believed, and to be honest I sort of believe it can work, but my belief is unsupported.

Are there serious and conclusive studies showing that ads affect purchasing decisions "subliminally" like this? Even when you are not interested in the ad, or even irritated by the fact you're not allowed to skip or hide it?

If you want a N=1 "study" https://blog.imraniqbal.org/advertising-works/

This is a common argument that some people are using. Maybe it works for many people but for me ans my circle we usually would ignore the products that spam you with ads everywhere. So for example if I am looking for a VPN service I will never even consider Nord VPN in my search quest. Their claims in the ads are unbelievable. I apply this at all products in different areas. So my mind ia trained to, oh this was thr product I saw these ads over and over encouraging me to buy it, so it must be bad let's look into something else.

Your actively thinking of the brand you want to avoid; so at least the ads were successful in registering the brand. Even if your avoiding said brand it's probably counted as success in terms of brand awareness.

Interesting point but this raises the question. Does negative awareness about product counts today as marketing success?

I have automatically started to discount companies that need to ram ads in my face.

If you are that desperate for me to buy your product instead of your competitors’, and I don’t see them aggressively advertising, I assume it is because their product is superior and you need to make up the difference with ad dollars.

Even if that wasn’t true, a small part of me won’t want to buy your product out of sheer spite.

Then explain why I refuse to go to Burger King in reaction to their commercials this football season with that god-awful song.

A bunch of people who didn't watch their commercials and don't have that feeling about Burger King just got a reminder that they still exist.

In spite of your hatred for them, you just provided better advertising than they did for free.

Are we sure this is true? The last few years we have seen huge amounts of psychology research be discredited and overturned. Is it possible that the foundational ideas of advertising wouldn’t replicate, but everybody is too scared to look?

> These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything.

How do you figure? No one likes ads and everyone thinks they are personally immune to them. But they are still effective, somehow. I seriously doubt whether someone has an ad blocker installed is indicative of some characteristic about them that makes them not worth advertising to.

In fact we can gauge from advertiser actions that probably the most relevant fact about them is simply the ad blocker, which is why they want to get rid of the blockers and advertise to them. They know ads work on us, even when we believe otherwise.

You think so? What if the ad industry is stuck in a bubble and has no idea what works and what doesn't? All they need to do is keep their customers (not us) convinced that ads do something for them, and push to maintain the status quo (anti ad blocker solutions).

There was this article on HN in the past few days [1] about a company that gave up on the use of cookies on their site. Go look how full of jargon and dubious inferences it is. Even if they're trying to do a good thing, they still seem isolated in their own marketer's bubble.

There was also an article about some new Google anti email spam protections (lol, Google protecting us from marketing). I'm not going to try and link to that one. Edit: surprising but i found it [2]. If you look at the comments here on HN you'll see some people either honestly believing or pretending to believe that their email newsletters are something that people want. Again, bubble.

[1] https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935048

Honestly I do waffle between these two views of it. That they do work and so we should avoid them or they don't work and the entire internet is a bubble built on top of a fake idea and so we should avoid them.

I don't see how both can be true and I find both equally compelling, with comparable explanatory power of different things I see. But for the specific purpose of deciphering the actions and motivations of ad companies I think assuming they work is a more useful view. Presumably ad companies are acting as if ads work, and are assuming they work equally well on people running ad blockers, if they can get them past the ad blockers.

I find them corrosive to my soul and culture either way, and ad companies are acting towards me as if they work. So in this context I think it makes sense to also act as if they do.

> Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no?

This is a good point that marketers will never accept because their livelihood depends on the proposition that what they push down the trough will seem so delicious that the hogs will slurp it up.

I’m an ad blocking zealot and feel a big FU towards ads that slip through. Much less likely to trust the brands or their products, especially the scummy junk that pops up on yt. (“I bet you think doing cardio is the best way to lose weight…”)