How to Battle Advertisements

Ads make you want things.  When you see a lot of them, you may feel like getting those things will make your life better.  Consumer Reports says that the average American is exposed to 247 commercial messages a day.


See fewer ads, buy less useless crap.  Below is a brief list of strategies to defend yourself against the dark arts of advertising and marketing.


Ads on the internet:

• Use an adblocking plugin for your browser, such as Adblock for Firefox.  Sure, some ads sneak by the filter, but many are blocked.  Ad space will just show up as empty space.

Ads on the radio:

• Difficult to avoid.  Turn down the volume for a random period of time.
  

Ads on TV:

• Do not own a television, and definitely don't turn it on to "see what's on."  Commercials are on.
• Download torrents of your frequently watched TV shows instead of streaming them.  Vuze is a pretty user-friendly bittorrent client.
• If you do watch shows on TV or on hulu or something, mute the commercials.

Ads in magazines:

• You read magazines? On purpose?  Come on, people.  Internet.

Ads on apparel:

• If you don't buy clothing/bags/shoes/umbrellas with logos on them, you will spare yourself and the people around you from staring at ads.  Potential quandary: a free t shirt with a big logo on it.  Your options: forgo the t shirt (you seriously don't have enough t shirts?); spray paint something else over the logo; wear it to sleep.  We're not talking Run for Fun '97 t shirts, which are a great way to show other people your track record of fun, we're talking gratuitous corporate logoage.
• Express your distaste when other people flagrantly display logos.  Be rude about it; attack their self esteem.

Ads on billboards/bus stops/in the metro/on the bus:

• Yeah, these are tough.  Bring a book?  But not if you're driving.  Audiobook?  Distract the mind?  
• If an ad on the metro is made of paper, you can easily remove it and turn it over to the blank side.
• For billboards, I suggest utilizing paint cannons, brought to you by hipster science.  Or this quirky government-funded anti-billboard mere miles from where I live.

Ads on those fly-by-the-beach airplanes:

• Shoot 'em down.  Shoot 'em right on down.

Ads that are sneaky (product placement in tv shows, movies, that new Gap logo "hoopla"):

• For example, Vin Diesel drinking a Sobe in xXx.  Or hark - perhaps he is on the DIESEL industry payroll?  
• Check out this heartwarming article from, um, productplacement.biz, about the number of product placements on American Idol (4,349 placements during Season 6).
• How to defend against these when, by nature, they sneak up on you?  Avoid mainstream movies and tv shows that attract big advertisers, I guess.  I wanted to say, make sure you notice when there IS a product placement and not just let it slip subconsciously by, but then I'm telling you to pay special attention to an ad?  Web of lies.

These are some basic tactics.  Arm yourselves!

I Just Read This Book: "Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value"

I just read Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value by William Poundstone.

This book is mostly useful as a lesson in how to be aware of sneaky marketing and advertising, or as I like to call it, Defense Against the Dark Arts. Like a Malcolm Gladwell book, you get the point in the first few chapters but keep reading because it's entertaining and a week after finishing it you can't remember anything about it.

The basic idea is that people are terrible at absolute value pricing and much more sensitive to relative pricing. Not shocking. For example, if I showed you a pristine-looking windshield and asked you what it was worth, you might throw out a guess like $500. If I showed you a windshield full of dents and scratches and told you it was worth $500 and asked you to re-price the nice windshield, you might say $1000, judging it to be worth twice as much as the nasty windshield.

Poundstone looks at examples of this phenomenon in jury awards, theater seats, phone bills, real estate, car sales, sitcom star salaries, restaurant menus, super bowl tickets, etc etc. And of course he surveys dozens of studies performed with hapless undergrads. One recurring scenario is called the ultimatum game. "You are given $10 to split with a stranger, and you get to propose how the money is divided-for example, $6 for me and $4 for the other guy. The twist is that the other person gets to decide whether to accept your split or reject it. Provided she accepts, the money is split exactly as you specified. Should she reject the split, neither of you gets a penny." Many studies performed versions of this game, and nearly every time the responders felt the offer to be unfair (ie $8 for proposer and $2 for responder), they rejected it because of the perceived unfairness, forgoing a free $2 for the sake of punishing the proposer.

The point is, money-related decisions and ideas of value are often based more on emotions and context than righteous objectivity, no matter how savvy you think you are. If you nerd out on game theory, you'll like this book. Poundstone spends a bit too much time chronicling and adoring the founders of behavioral economics, but I enjoyed it otherwise and would say that it's worth reading and/or skimming.

Poke through the book with this sweet google books embed: