Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.
I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.
The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.
The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.
My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.
Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.
Might be useful for a B that wants to penetrate some C, but is it really useful from a penetrated C perspective?
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.
Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.
The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.
The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s
> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.
Are you sure that's all I said.
At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.
Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.
Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)
Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?
What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?
What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.
You opt in to looking at these, often for something specific. It doesn't lower your general quality of life like ads do.
> Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery?
Yea: we should stop building our society around encouraging people to buy crap they never asked for
They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.
If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?
The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.
Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.
Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.
The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.
Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.