Do Ads Really Work?

The older I get, the more I see that it’s all about marketing. I used to think ads were useless. When I first heard that companies were spending millions on them, I thought, “Really? Why?” I believed I wasn’t going to buy a product just because I saw an ad for it. But that wasn’t the case at all.

Do ads have any effect on you?

In written form, most ads are direct and to the point. That’s why they can feel a little silly. But over time I realized that what they’re really selling is the idea, the experience, the lifestyle. The people behind the ad want you to feel a connection to what you’re seeing. They want you to find something of yourself in it.

Take an ad about a computer. You already know which kind I mean. The people using it will look productive, happy, and effortlessly efficient. Other people will admire them. They’ll seem calm, capable, and cool in the coffee shop. Watch long enough and you start wanting to be that person too. You’re sold.

Or think about a car ad. The road curves around a mountain, the sun is out, the trees move in the wind, and a family sits inside the car enjoying a safe and comfortable trip. Wouldn’t you want that for your own family as well? Of course you would. You’re sold again, this time as a family.

Is marketing about tricking people?

I’ve thought about this a lot. Companies absolutely have the right to talk to their potential customers and explain what they offer. The real question is how they do it. If you’re the marketing person at a company, you can say that your product is better than all the others. But what if it isn’t? I wouldn’t want to be in that position. Maybe that’s one reason I never chose marketing as a profession. It reminds me of a question I used to ask myself as a kid:

How do lawyers represent someone who is clearly guilty?

In situations like this, I assume people look for whatever they can still highlight. Maybe the product is cheaper. Maybe it has one small advantage. Maybe there’s some comparison that sounds convincing enough if no one stops to examine it too closely.

In the end, the ad has to make buying your product feel smarter than buying the competition’s. So you need to persuade people. You need comparisons. Maybe there’s a study by a supposedly independent firm showing your product performed better in one narrow category. The study might be weak. You might not even trust it yourself. But in the ad, all you need is a fast disclaimer in tiny text at the bottom, and that’s enough.

Sarcasm aside, a lot of marketing works by using every available trick to make a product look like the best one, even when it isn’t. I think marketing should be about helping people understand a product’s real strengths, not artificial ones.

So, do ads work?

Definitely. If they didn’t, companies would have abandoned them a long time ago. Ads bring in millions of dollars every year, and they will probably keep doing that for a very long time.

The question for us isn’t whether they work. It’s what we do with that knowledge. As individuals, I think we should reduce our exposure to ads as much as we can. More importantly, we should stay aware of what an ad is trying to do. Its only purpose is to sell the product, whether that product is actually good for us or not.