The one example I was commenting about is the tyre example. They sold more tyres to women after dropping the sexy girl on the ad. How much of a stretch is it to assume that these women were not the sexy ad’s target audience because women used to be less (socially allowed to get) interested in cars?

Ok I realise that I did not put the previous comment in the friendliest form, sorry about that !

Your point is that the marketing choice of using beautiful women is dictated by the sellers’ preferences rather that the buyers’ one. In the apparent absence of evidence to support either hypothesis, you are willing to favor the former one.

What I haven’t said explicitly yet is that there is one argument that makes me find the latter one more likely in the absence of further evidence : the businesses that make their marketing choices based on customers’ preferences will tend to survive more. kn our capitalist society, it makes sense to me.

You gave one counter-example that is not strong enough to change my opinion as it can also be explained with the firm having poorly evaluated what their target audience was. They do say in the article that more women started buying tyres after the marketing change, which is indeed not the audience targeted with the sexy-girl ad.

It does however a good job at disproving the affirmation “because everyone regardless of gender and age are biologically conditioned to look at them.” to which you were originally replying, and I disagree with that affirmation as well. I just think your conclusion goes too far i the other direction, in the absence of further evidence.

It’s the salesmen who want the stall staffed with models, not the customers.

Could you link the evidence-base of this though?

What marketing departments dominated by men think works is not the same thing as what actually works

In this case, isn’t it because the market evolved faster than they could keep up with? Probably there was a time where most of their customers were “macho men”, so these adds would work in marketing.

This makes me think about the French “je m’en bats les couilles” (litt. “I beat my balls with it”). Some girls say it too, others say they beat their ovaries instead.

I agreed a priori, which, as you probably guessed, is exactly why I put that parenthesis 😀 But I think in practice the starting point already is too complex. For example, I opened inkscape and saved the empty image, the result is already more than 1KB. Similarly, Lemmy’s very simple logo is already 3KB.

I didn’t know there was an actual limit to the size of a QR code, but as we see a big problem with (raster) images is that the QR code rapidly becomes much more complex than the image itself

I find it a bit strong to basically equate a liberal defending their liberal opinions using mainstream media sources with impersonators poblicly spamming defecation pictures …