I don’t believe I’m immune to advertising but I don’t think advertisers are willing to admit that it’s just as easy to create negative brand associations as positive brand associations. when the only exposure you have to a product is frustrating and irritating and offensive, these feelings can bleed over when you see them on a shelf later.

after many years of trying to ignore advertising and pretending I’m not influenced by it, I’ve admitted I am, just like everyone else. so instead of resisting the effects, I try to turn the feeling of brand familiarity into a warning sign: if I’m drawn by familiarity to a particular product, I question why before I buy. if the answer isn’t “a friend or i have used it and found it valuable/good”, then i remind myself that it’s not good enough on its own. they have to try and trick me into liking it, so it can’t be that good. if it were good, they wouldn’t have to drop dump trucks of cash into an ad agency to try and trick people into buying it. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit.

I feel like this same subtlety is also what makes it really hard to meaningfully track if an ad is actually effective or not. How do they know if you bought it cause ads or cause you would have anyway? Sometimes I wonder if ads arent way way less effective than companies think they are