*EDIT* – Hello Reddit! It’s awesome to see all of you guys coming here to read my stuff! The way I write is that I just dump a stream-of-thought onto the page and post it. The benefit of having this post come up is that I managed to expand and make my point a bit more coherent. I will leave the original for posterities sake, and below I will copy in the comment I made on Reddit as I feel it expresses my feelings a little bit more

Before I start, I want to preface everything by saying that what I am writing here is purely my own thoughts and opinions, and they do not in any way represent the thoughts/feelings/mindsets of my employer or any of my co-workers.

Recently, I just passed the one-year mark working as a Web Developer at an advertising agency. I’ve learned a lot in that kind of environment, I feel I’ve become slightly more aware of making sure that good code is complimented by good design and more importantly, I’ve learned that a lot of the time, you cannot save a customer from themselves when it comes to what they want vs what is advisable.

One thing that I haven’t so much learned, as reinforced, is my feeling that advertising is not as effective as everyone would have us believe.

I’ve watched first hand as marketing campaigns that cost clients huge sums of money have resulted in incredibly poor conversions, or in most cases when it comes to print and physical mediums, have no real way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign ROI at all!

And what about digital? Banner ads are so bothersome that people go out of their way to build software to get rid of them, and some companies will even fraudulently increase click-through rates to give the illusion that their advertising is working when in fact it is an army of outsourced workers being paid fractions of a cent per click.

Daily, we are bombarded with billboards, signs, video clips and soundbites all designed to convince us that we want, nay need to buy their product, but have you ever actually felt truly compelled to go out and buy something simply because an ad convinced you to buy it?

And it isn’t that agencies are not aware of the growing discontent of advertising either. They’ve moved from beating us over the head with their product to trying to trick us with things like sponsored content. Quite frankly, I find the idea of sponsored content to be immoral, disgusting and disingenuous. The author will try and convince you that they were being above board by including a disclaimer *somewhere* on the page noting that the article is sponsored content, but a lot of times, you won’t know until you get to the bottom of the page. If you think it is ethical to hide a sales pitch for your insurance company in an indistinguishable article on a reputable news site then you are more than likely a horrible human being.

More and more, people are turning to services like Netflix, Spotify or even pirating, for the simple fact that they allow us to consume our media both conveniently and advertisement free. And that is the thing that baffles me, the consumers are not so much speaking to the market as screaming at it that we are happy to pay for content if you provide it conveniently and ad-free. Unfortunately, until the crusted-into-the-boardroom executives who haven’t understood a technological advance since the radio let go of their stranglehold on our content we will be forever the people who paid to have the honor of being sold as a product.

I must apologize for the irony of banner ads, I use free wordpress.com hosting which comes with banner ads, I strongly encourage everyone to not click on the ads.

I will admit, that part of what I wrote may have a slight bias towards anti-advertising as that is my stance on the issue, the mindset I had when I wrote this probably wasn’t conveyed as I write in a very stream-of-conscious way, but my feeling is that we’re so convinced that the old ways still work that we’ve been using the same methods for decades now. We throw tracking onto web ad’s and look at the ROI and convince ourselves “oh well, this is the best we can do” without even considering that if we tried to innovate in the field we might see better ROI. Not only that, but print and physical advertising is still a huge market which has more or less no measurable ROI metrics. Clients are essentially beholden to an agency saying “trust us, you’ll see more revenue from this campaign.”

The reason I say advertising doesn’t work is that even with targeted advertising, the products that are being targeted to us are of either a poor selection or are items we don’t need.

Do I have the answers? Of course not, I’m just a lowly developer with a bit of an axe to grind. But I can recognize a broken and outdated industry when I see one.