Ilikemilkshake said:
So really what I'm asking is when was the last time an advert convinced you to part with your cash and do you feel that advertising actually works for you?
Convinced me, personally...I'm not entirely sure. I do go for the cheapest thing in stores or otherwise things I personally know of (have seen/used at some other time). Also, I don't even have a TV or a radio, so I don't get most commercials at all. I have, however, bought Coca Cola but not by my choice (I don't really like it as much as other drinks) but because a friend said to pick a bottle up and come by and similar. So in a way, yeah, that's me being affected by ads.
However, I wanted to do a case study about how exactly ads do work directly. And let's pick up an extreme example of ads - spam. No, not the spambots that swing by the forums - they are actually not trying to sell you anything (directly anyway), so let's exclude them. Just normal boring spam you get for, say, viagra, rolexes, online pharmacies, etc.
Pretty much everybody and their dog knows about stuff. It's computers 101 - knowledge of spam comes just after "how to mouse" and "how to keyboard". Reaction to spam is overwhelmingly negative, too. All in all, it seems that spam...doesn't justify it's own existence here - people are aware of it and try to stay away.
So why is it that we get more spam? Yeah, the actual spam distribution costs very, very little - close enough to zero, in fact, but why send it still? Because it does make a profit. There are people who are opening those emails and clicking those links. There is a sucker born every moment and all of them use emails. Spammers can easily get from few hundred to few thousand dollars
per month from people falling for spam alone (there are other revenues to be made - as an example, a spammer can be paid by a company to try to sell their product). Sure, it's not as much money as taking even a part time job might yield, but it takes very little effort and you can still do that part time job, if you wish.
So, extremely unlikely and downright obnoxious ads, in the face of spam, can and do get people to fall from them. They work. Work well enough to justify their existence and well enough for some spammers to be able to live off them. Now imagine how well the other ads would do, given that people are not inherently opposing them and they actually get way more exposure.