Advertising creates a presence. They don't think any one ad is going to convince you to buy it, and they know that after watching the ad enough times, it's not going to get any more convincing, but when you are in need of their services, you'll be looking at their brand and a competitor, and odds are, if price and everything else are the same, you'll buy the brand you recognize.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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And a new ad for the thing you've already bought can reassure you that you've made the right choice. Going forward, you're more likely to stick to that brand and for adjacent products.
IIRC that's the whole point of luxury car commercials during half-time breaks. 99% of watchers can't afford one, but the ad is there to remind the owners of that very fact.
Both your question and the answers are a sign of a healthy (oblivious) detachment from advertised society, IMO. Advertising works. Not to you, because you have the mental infrastructure to not want it to work. The right kind of advertising would work on you too, it's probably just not profitable.
Advertising works. Not to you,
everyone thinks they are unique. but advertising really works on anyone. it is not like you are seeing an ad for nike and you are just "oh my god, i just realized i need some nike shoes RIGHT now". but when you are in need for shoes in some future and you have to choose between nike and unknown_brand_27, it is more likely you will choose nike.
Assuming price is the same, would you pick a brand known for using child labor, or a company you know nothing about? I'd avoid the Nikes unless they're the cheapest option.
This. It’s amazing to watch normal people operate. It’s like they think the universe must be showing them the ads for some profound reason
Oh people know they're being sold and watched, it is just that many can't resist in a very literal sense, because they have stressors that outweigh lost (seemingly theoretical) freedom by manyfold.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you're in a bubble.
Go outside, talk to people, friends, family, especially of different generations. Even people I know that I consider much more "tech savvy" than average have no clue about ad blockers or how to begin using them.
If you think the number of people that use ad blockers is not a fraction of a percent of internet users, you’re in a bubble.
Nowhere near the majority, but also not a "fraction of a percent."
Google cooks the books on ad sales and after being found out it makes a lot more sense on the actions they are doing now with their other products that ads we're propping up.
AFAIK Google owns the vast majority of advertising online and is the one making all the money.
I generally post variations on this when similar questions come up:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2025+marketing+technology+landscape&iar=images
The companies on the edges are all about marketing adtech firms to companies with money to convince them to spend it on digital marketing.
My friend's partner works in online advertising from matching, ugh, "influencers" to brands to more "traditional" targeted online advertising.
I asked her something along these lines and she told me about a campaign she'd just worked on which dropped my jaw and changed my perspective.
Essentially, she was working with some product being sold with or inside some luxury brand of cars. Her firm was able to target people who seemed to work in dealerships for that brand in Canada. The product being expensive as hell meant that even a handful of sales would justify the campaign.
The campaign cost her firm almost no time, the data were available fairly easily and once established could essentially be run automatically.
Hers is an extreme example but combine relatively low costs with unnervingly accurate micro targetting like that... It's a stupidly efficient means of communicating to prospective clients compared to every other type of advertising.
Reddit is an interesting example. They're milking the advertising for all they can but I'd be surprised if the bulk of their revenue/stock valuation was from ads versus holding all sorts of AI trainable data.
It doesn't matter because they don't work on me since I can't see them anymore.
There are uhhh, many people who are not you.
Yeah, it's untenable. It's a bubble
Ads are actually pretty incredible. If no one knows your brand, all it takes is money to tell em. It's like a short cut compared to having a good product and word of mouth.
Its essentially like a cold call, but you know the audience is at least generally interested in your topic because of targeting. All that data that is being taken and sold from you, is being sold to avertizers.
Pay Google for getting on search on Google and youtube.
Pay meta to get ads on Insta and Facebook.
If you spend $500 to sell a $3000 product, it's a no brainer. Ita basically printing money when it works. So yeah, companies are paying when the results match. But also when they are testing the waters to see if its worth it to them.
I think what’s happening is that each individual company has a positive ROI on ads in the sense that they would lose more than a dollar in sales if they spent a dollar less on ads, but collectively the ROI is probably smaller than one: if all companies would cut their advertising budgets in half they would all be better off, as they would keep their sales roughly the same.
So adverting is less about sales volume (people don’t necessarily buy more things when they see more ads) but about market share (you get a bigger piece of the cake). Classic prisoner’s dilemma.