Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers’ jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. “Innovation” is no longer about creating new things, it’s about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.
On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.
Very Cyberpunk.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Advertising, marketing, and the stock market are the worst aspects of capitalism, and the system could be improved dramatically with heavy restrictions on all of those. Yeah it would shrink the economy, but the new steady state would be much better. Less waste, better stuff.
The economy doesn’t represent the people, doesn’t feed anyone and doesn’t reflect their well being.
You have my vote.
Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany’s mass media propaganda strategies.
I loved those old Chevrolet commercials from the 1930s that explained things like how a differential or transmission works in a car and I’m not even a car guy
I only remember the one, but yeah that was an absolute gem
If I had a magic internet/media button I know what it would be.
It would be a brand banish button. If I see an ad, I wanna just have a button to banish them from all my devices…forever. I already have a rule you poss me off with adverts …I defo won’t buy.
So much tech potential that just does not exist!
YouTube ads were only ever advertising to me on what not to entertain purchasing.
I agree. Everything being advertised on YouTube is sketch. Same with all the repeated podcast adverts honestly.
The fact that youtube hits me with an ad for a game that says everyone thinks its fake, with the most bullshit sounding voice over, tells me they are happy to take money for obvious scam products.
They’re building the internet for AI now, and were building it for advertisers for years before that, what with SEO choking up search results.
What should have been a wonderfully expressive, collaborative, and unifying medium is just being completely ravaged.
I, unfortunately, work in web development.
Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.
As a service meant to inform people of things they could benefit from, I see it. Like, we have public service announcements about food banks, giveaway days, and fun events. Honestly, if it was done for something other than profit, I’m not even sure the term “advertising” really applies - at least not how we usually use it.
Yes, but you misspelled “capitalism”.
Very Cyberpunk.
Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons
The advertisers are merely a tool for the investors, the people who own everything. The “haves” as it were. They are always at odds with and trying to squeeze money and labor from the rest of us, you know, the “have nots”.
Something something you basically just figured out communism on your own
Every single communist regime ended up operating in this exact same way…
I am not following if OP actually figured anything out beyond that this is a class war.
At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.
Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent “Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence” by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I’m going with this.
Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But… you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.
Anyway I won’t dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/
If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) “Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power” https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7
I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article “Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption” https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it’s systemic.
With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are “freedom”, perfume is “lust”), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a “solution” and so on.
It’s like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.
That’s how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn’t fight to keep that shit away.
Also, “problems” that are things capitalism created for itself, and then sells you a solution. Such as services that scrub old subscriptions that you don’t use, or companies that get you out of timeshares.
“It’s like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.”
It’s not LIKE that. It IS that. It’s literally exactly that.
Actually I think it’s worse: human salesmen cost money whilst this shit is mainly automated or uses distribution systems were one person presses a button and millions get exposed to it (for example TV), so the numbers involved and the relentlessness of the pestering is far, far larger in scale than if human salesmen were doing it.
I liken it to humanity devoting almost a third of our planetary output on perfecting the poison that will reduce everyone but the creator to useless, incompetent, stooges. This is obviously an incredible net good for the species as a whole. We should never stop this.
Advertising hasn’t been that psychological since cable TV. These days, almost no work is put into advertising creatives. The goal is simply to spam and inundate you with messaging so the product is in your mind at all times. People have incredibly short attention spans thanks to smart phones so advertisements need to be virtually instantaneous in delivering their message.
Its really all about statistics these days. Very little thought or effort is put into advertisements.
Have a look at Perfume adverts on TV: they are literally entirely made up of imagery meant to make one think about sex and being sexy, with not a single thing in any of them about the actual quality of the product.
Car adverts too are similar, but their imagery is about things like Freedom, Family, Friendship, Party, Joy and so on (depending on the car). Almost none of them talks about the qualities of the actual vehicle.
Adverts not relying in this kind of psychological manipulation are the ones which look a lot like 1950s adverts and talk about the actual qualities of the product.
Under-investment into training advertising creatieves doesn’t mean that the adverts aren’t using Psychology tricks anymore because that way of doing adverts is now so widespread and common in the industry (because it works!) that people just learn those things as tricks of the trade rather than needing any kind of special extra training in Psychology.
You’re talking Cable TV? I don’t have cable so I can’t see it but Cable is going the way of the dinosaur
Any live TV - were I live they all show the same ads.
Online ads can be easily circumvented, I am more annoyed with giant billboards polluting public spaces. Oh well, one more reason to spend more time in nature.
Recently I’ve become more aware of how intrusive traditional advertising methods are: billboards everywhere, radio commercials interrupting the music, etc. It’s incredible how immersed we are in that crap and how most of us don’t realize it.
There’s a French film called “BigBug” that makes an interesting parody about this.
One day ads will be unskippable, unless you get a 12 hr AdPass by watching 60 minutes of uninterrupted ads while eyeball tracking software monitors your attention. You will get mini games where you need to sing along or high five a friend. You can get an instant AdPass by purchasing the featured product.
Fine, I will stop consuming whatever it is they are putting the ads in front of then.
Books in the library don’t come with ads. But let’s be real I will just emulate old video games on my PC until I perish.
Left unchallenged, they’ll start inserting ads at your work, where you don’t control the devices. Mark my words. B2B ad and surveillance tech. The profiles will get dumped into the same data lakes, for thirsty ad ghouls to lap at. Just one big web of corporate iniquity, where they sell each other shit no one needs or wants.
Left unchallenged, anyway.
They’re working on defunding the library already.
Thanks to enshittification I’ve gone back to reading books, so, thank you advertisers?
NON ADVERTISER FRIENDLY MEDIA DETECTED WITHIN YOUR HOUSE
PLEASE GIVE IT UP WILLINGLY TO THE DANGEROUS MEDIA DISPOSAL SPECIALISTS DISPATCHED TO YOUR HOME
Some time ago I thought of something: one day they will invent some bullshit that maybe they will call “Proactive Advertising”, which is basically that instead of advertising a product, they will force you to buy it in order to continue enjoying a service. “Buy a Coke for 20 minutes without ads. Buy a Six pack for one hour” and so on.
You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.
🥇
