Why people think Ads are bad:
— The cached thought¹ that ads are bad.
1.Two things:
(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meanings e.g 'impregnating' a girl.
(ii) Deliberate framing: death tax vs inheritance tax, pro choice vs pro life, undocumented immigrants vs illegal aliens.
— They may hinder ideal UI/UX.
— Often bear a weak relevance.
What Ads are:
— Ads are tools that aid problem-solving by matching people to tools that solve their problems. People are notoriously bad at solving their own problems, or even realizing they have solvable problems.
Ads should be a net positive for consumers since they (consumers):
(i) are getting a product for free.
(ii) have an opportunity to passively discover solutions to some of their problems.
The only way they might not be is if ads are either poorly designed, or bear a weak relevance to a user. The solution to which isn't castigating ads as being bad; the solution is making better ads by:
— Destroying the cached thought that ads are bad.
— Designing ads that do not disrupt UI or UX, but instead align with the default context within which they exist. Cc: Reddit and Quora's native ads.
— Better data collection to improve relevance.
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Notes -
There are two purposes of ads:
Create common knowledge that deals are available
Hoodwink gullible people into taking bad deals.
#1 is strongly positive-sum because it reduces deadweight loss. #2 is strongly negative-sum; the equilibrium is that everyone gets taught about how not to fall for ads, and also that businesses spend large resources on marketing, both of which are losses to society. Back in the 1930s when marketing psychology and communications technology were far less advanced, #1 was the bigger effect. Nowadays it is fairly obvious that #2 is the bigger effect.
You can't uninvent modern marketing techniques, and you can't ban ads without extreme collateral damage, but reducing their effectiveness is almost certainly a net win. Ads masquerading as non-ads are more effective and therefore bad. Ads that are better targetted to people's psychological weaknesses are more effective and therefore bad.
There's also the factor that ads could be trying to do 1, but failing. If the audience is wrong, either due to the individual not caring about the thing in question, or due to the individual already knowing that the deal is available, the ad is not helpful to either party, and is an obstruction to whatever the audience actually wanted to do.
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