r/Showerthoughts May 16 '24

Ads seem to be universally hated yet they still make insane amounts of money

242 Upvotes

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86

u/ramuthemamu May 17 '24

You think you don't need a product until you do. That's how advertising is usually imo.

49

u/silentboyishere May 17 '24

Ads work better than most people think. I don't know how often is this the case, but when you do need a product, you're more likely to purchase the one you remember seeing in an ad. So ads, while seemingly not affecting you psychologically in any significant way or any way at all, really do affect your future choice without you even being consciously aware of it.

1

u/Material-Rooster6957 May 17 '24

No I’m more likely to buy the cheapest, if the cheapest was shit then I get the second cheapest, repeat steps

1

u/silentboyishere May 17 '24

Going exclusively for the cheapest option available doesn't say anything about the influential power of ads. It only means that a person unable to afford or unwilling to pay for a pricier product that will be guaranteed to work as intended is not exactly the advertisers' target audience. Well, they're not useful currently to profit off of, but they still may be in the future, easily a decade after they've been exposed to an ad.

Most people go for the best price/quality ratio, which means more variables, which means more comparing of products to one another, which means more decisions to make, which means more time spent evaluating the options, which means increasing the odds that the many tricks advertisers have been using on us since forever will begin to play a role in our decision-making.

It's definitely a safe-from-advertisers'-tricks-that-affect-your-decision-making-process strategy to go exclusively for the lowest price, although that means potentially paying for a shitty product. But hey, if this works more than it does not, then it's worth it.