The point of marketing is to remove and subvert that agency, disconnect buying decisions from real value, and to limit the consequences of flaws and underperformance.
The point of marketing is to provide the signal - you can use your agency and decide whether that signal is valuable or not.
If I'm shown an advertisement for a watch from a well known company with some detailed specs I'm inclined to believe it based on the brand reputation. This signal (the specifications) is valuable to me but not necessarily completely accurate. I'm better off with the signal than without. The reason being there are more instances of truth than lies across all advertisements.. otherwise they wouldn't work.
Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.
Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.
I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.
The specs are not objective in the correct sense. They are just signals that you can later verify.. like all things. Everything has an accuracy number beside it - what makes you think the specs are to be believed?
True, agreed. But thats besides the point. For the purposes of this thread, if an ad contains text/information thats well defined enough to be verifiable/falsifiable in principle, thats better than 98% of the “ads” I see on Linkedin (or anywhere else for that matter). “We focus on building reliable, trustworthy AI” is not an example of that unless the CEO finds a way to, or makes an effort towards, providing a method for us to verify that.
