Advertising Makes Us ... Unhappy?
The "Defend Your Research” column in this month’s HBR challenges Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick on his research that posits, in aggregate over time, advertising makes us unhappy.
Oswald's team compared survey data of life satisfaction from more than 900k citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011, with data on annual advertising expenditure in those nations over the same period.
The researchers found a inverse connection between the two. The higher the ad spend in a year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later.
The team's hypothesis is that an unintended effect of stirring desires to spend more on goods and services that ease dissatisfaction is ... more dissatisfaction.
This is an idea that goes back a long time, and Thorsten Veblen is invoked at some point in the discussion.
Oswald closes the interview with this - “I try to be an evenhanded statistical researcher, but I can see how you might look at our study and think, “Maybe it’s sensible for me to opt out of some of these ads.”
Limiting one’s exposure to fewer, better ads makes sense to me.
Broadly speaking, this is the direction the industry is taking too, as we develop new ways to give consumers more choice and control, make marketing experiences more relevant and useful, and comply with rules written to protect privacy.
