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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very Cyberpunk.
Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons
Yes, but you misspelled “capitalism”.
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.
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.
There’s a French film called “BigBug” that makes an interesting parody about this.
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.
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.
They’re working on defunding the library already.
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.
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
You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.
🥇
Datavampires.
I propose we make a massive product database. If you need to buy something, you can see your options there on a level playing field. Companies who spend more money don’t get any more visibility than any other. If you don’t feel like spending any money, the database isn’t trying to push you down a spending spiral.
And then for convenience, add a shopping cart so it’s not a separate research step - congrats, you’ve invented Amazon.
Congrats, you missed the whole point about Amazon.
As others already replied, the business model of Amazon (and any marketplace that sells its own products within it while being part of an oligopoly) is precisely to prevent unbiased comparison. Amazon gets data on all the products being sold on its website, its warehouses occupancy … then make Amazon Basics and replace them. They did that before also with diapers among many other examples e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-amazons-plan-to-crush-a-startup-rival-with-price-cuts/ but they also do the same with software products, e.g. AWS.
So no, clearly Amazon is not about having fair comparisons and a shopping cart. Amazon is about being the ONLY shopping cart one can have fill it with Amazon products.
PS: to clarify also something very obvious but just in case it’s not so, Amazon by the simple fact of controlling the order of search results control what customers can, or can not, see and thus compare and in fine buy. Even if it did not sell it’s own products (which again, it does) it would still be able to manipulate what customers buy. That is, again, the opposite of an unbiased product comparison service.
Amazon is everything but a level playing field and it is highly manipulated.
Yes but now do a search for the item in your cart and buy it somewhere else.
I absolutely agree with you. But where I live, Amazon is cheaper than any other sellers, online or stores. I hate it but I only have so much money to spend.
If you continue to support monopolies, soon you’ll have less to spend.
Average consumers are in a lose/lose situation. Choice is a privilege that not everyone can afford.
