Former Googler here. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Googlers understand they work for an advertising company with a gigantic and generally well-run software "engineering" department. I don't mean that in any derogatory sense. Well-regulated advertising is important in helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions.
That's just something advertisers tell themselves to sleep better at night. And failing that, they just rub some dollar bills on their faces and then sleep like babies.
Advertising (regulated or not) is important in manipulating people into buying more stuff. There's no benefit in having your movies, music listening, games or your reading interrupted by ads. There's no benefit in a pair of breasts distracting you on the road from a billboard. There's no benefit in having to throw away all the crap you get per mail.
If someone needs something, they will look for it and buy it, but this pull model doesn't result in as many sales as the push model and CxOs have to eat.
If advertising were about "helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions" there would never be an attractive model, a wild animal, singing, dancing or any other trope in an ad ever again.
They would be a list of superior features of, and only of, the product read in clear, plain terms.
I never said that was their intent, just that it's an important function (often despite the intent of the advertiser).
I did a few searches for embedded development boards, and now I got lots of ads for alternative boards. I don't pretend that this information is in my face altruistically or entirely truthfully, but it does give me some useful information, probably paid out of the pockets of some people who take the advertisements at face value.
It's not the most efficient mechanism I could imagine for disseminating truthful information, but if you're not naive, it's a useful channel.
>They would be a list of superior features of, and only of, the product read in clear, plain terms.
And also the inferior features. And those of its competitors.
It's amazingly deluded to even consider that advertising is about informing consumers. It's clearly about disinforming them - clouding their judgement in order to make them buy something they otherwise wouldn't have.
I think most consumer electronics are advertised reasonably, and it's fairly easy for consumers to evaluate advertising claims there.
On the other hand, health products / dietary supplements seem woefully under-regulated, especially since the layperson seems to have great difficulty in evaluating health claims. It seems crazy that dietary supplement and drug advertising are treated so very differently.
So, I think in some areas we need better advertising regulation, but not across the board.
More importantly, my point is that I'm not holding my nose up at my former colleagues. Without the second half of my post, the first half could be read as having a very judgemental tone.
> Well-regulated advertising is important in helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions.
Citation needed.
This statement is just the pablum that people in the industry repeat to help assuage their guilt at what they are doing. I say this as someone who worked on ads for a company that had more than half of all US internet ad spend at the time.
