My everyday purchasing decisions are mostly driven by opening my cupboard and checking if there is enough muesli left for the next three days. I haven't seen advertising inside my cupboard yet but any day now...
so you can't name one brand. If so then advertising is working. when you went to go make a purchasing decision if that brand was even considered advertising did it's job.
Is this a useful definition of advertising, especially in the context of everyday purchases brought up by eterm? The most prominent brand I interact with is a major grocery chain. This is because they have a huge store 5 minutes from my house. I'm not going to start going to another store even if it carpet-bombs my browser to get brand awareness. VC-funded adtech won't help anyone scale brick and mortar.
My purchasing decisions are based mainly on whatever is the cheapest. I do find brands useful, to the extent that if a product is brand-name, it's likely to be more expensive than the no-name variety one shelf below. Saves some mental effort of comparing prices more closely.
The muesli I purchase is store-brand. I have made the decision by comparing nutritional content of a number of varieties.
I have been advertised to to get me to look at the nutrition labels, I suppose.
The doubling of post systems as rural bankers in Europe has interested me for a while. Even today the basic bank services in Switzerland are done by the Swiss Post. It makes a fair amount of sense and there are some neat synergies. Even fairly small communities have a post office; postmen visit homes regularly and so can e.g. pay out cash pensions; sending out documents or valuable mail at a post office is intuitively similar to sending out money to pay bills; post has implicit identity systems to make sure mail gets to the right person.
It seems it wouldn't be very hard to adapt post systems to electronic age in most countries. It is basically accepted that electronic banking will verify identity by sending out mail (e.g. with login details) so the post is already involved to an extent.
I have the "anonymous" mode enabled on Linkedin. I do this for the same reason I am using a throwaway HN account, and - if I may presume - for the same reason you didn't put full name in your HN profile:
When I'm casually browsing around I don't want to think and worry about what the reaction might be to my name popping up everywhere.
4b. Northern Europeans stop visiting and spending money in Athens, Rome, Algarve, Canary Islands, and buying Mediterranean produce until the end of Northern-sponsored dolce vita.
This cuts both ways, and the ultimate end is economic war and possibly real war.
Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland (...and oh-la-la... your turn, France?) are in fact more or less in a post-war scenery. Why? Because much of the money either did never changed of hands or either ended in the wrong hands with the bleesings of all surveillance organs and agencies.
So whe have a curious crime here, millions of money vanishing and, big surprise, nobody wanted to see this and nobody wants to investigate now where the money goes.
Much better find a fool to pay for our disaster.
So they sell us some bright recipes poisoned from the start. All benefits that they predict crashed loudly and became chains and viper pits, but, hey!, those smart guys that were taking money from you germans, to "give the money" to you Greeks, are richer than ever... How could this happen?. And everybody feels cheated and angry now.
The Irish and the British are Northern Europeans? Because I'm not getting the feeling the majority in either of these countries would like to join the Germans (in any kind of game...).
I mostly bike around cities, and when I drive I have taken to cracking open a window because not being able to hear cars around me feels deeply disconcerting.
