Modern marketing is largely extraordinarily efficient in fact, the opposite of absurd. It does a marvelous job of letting people know that things exist to be purchased. It's a compliment to free will. Buy, don't buy, the choice is yours.
What someone thinks of marketing & advertising will almost always tell you what they think of the intelligence of the typical person. Once you realize that, you realize it's merely a bias that someone is arguing from, that they think most everybody else is a moron and should be deprived of their individual liberty (for their own safety).
It makes the system very inefficient, don't twist my words, you're talking about something else. And this is not about intelligence, I'm not saying people make stupid choices. This is a question of perverse marketing incentives.
You haven't really said why it's inefficient, just saying it doesn't make it so. I can see the point of why it's efficient, that it shows people what is possible to buy in the market that they otherwise would not have known of, but I don't see it from your side.
it's already been explained in other comments: companies spend a shit ton of money to trick you (via storytelling, branding, slogans, influencers, psychological manipulation, etc) into buying shit. moreover, this is structurally necessary because a company without marketing is outperformed by one with it.
None of that is "inefficiency." In fact, since it's so successful at making people buy things, as you seem to state, given no proof, then you're just proving the parent's point, that it's very efficient. An inefficient process wouldn't be this good at making people buy stuff. I think you're confusing efficiency with value judgments of good and bad.
A slaughterhouse for example is very efficient at processing animals from living beings into mass produced meat, however you want to feel about the ethics of that.
we are talking about different things. you're confusing the efficiency of current marketing at making people buy stuff with the efficiency of the economic system. the economic system is here for us to satisfy our needs (although of course the current economic system has a different purpose). marketing has orthogonal goals.
Satisfying needs and wants, which marketing does very efficiently. You're just in the bubble of HN where no one clicks ads, everyone runs ad blockers, and people think ads are literally evil. The vast majority of people don't care and will even click on ads and buy products they want, otherwise ads would not work so well.
what bubble are you talking about? you don't know what webpages I frequent.
and you're still missing the point. I'm not saying that marketing has no effect on people (on the contrary, that's the problem, and it affects me too). my point is about the absurdity of basing our social organization on this. marketing only has perverse motivations, then you see the effects on people. tobacco is the classic example. this is an inefficiency of the system.
