Yeahhhhhh it’s not just for commercial purposes.
Stephen… Steve… Relax, my friend. There’s no reason to tell all these nice people about all that. Especially with Folger’s in your cup. Mmmmm Folger’s crystals lock in that flavor. The flavor that reminds us of that time in college when you decided to try eating ass after that house party that one night. You remember that, right Steve? That was fun. Folger’s is there for you.
If it ever comes to pass that I can’t learn or figure out a way to block ads, I’ll stop visiting sites that show ads. Obviously, that will severely limit my choices, but probably that’s a good thing.
They’ve basically dismantled society so Amazon can think I’m some kind of toilet seat and/or chainsaw collector. Clown shit.
Imagine if you and a friend entered a large, empty cafeteria, got your meal, sat down, and started eating. It would be so quiet your voices would echo. Then two more people come in and do the same thing. They start talking and it gets just a little bit more difficult to hear your conversation, so you and your friend start talking louder. Then more and more people come in start talking and the background noise gets louder than the foreground sound until you need to wear earplugs just to hear yourself chew.
That is the state of advertising. If only one player in a market advertised, they might derive some advantage but now people have to pay advertisers to scream the name of their product just because their competition does and no one can even hear the name of the product because everyone is screaming.
This, and coupled with the fact that businesses cross state and international lines. They’re not just competing with local businesses (which get drowned out in the noise created by the volume of money spent by big business) but they’re competing sometimes with national and international businesses. So 50 years ago you probably had to put up with mostly local stuff but maybe a national business like a car maker or airline, now it’s everyone that can do business where you live or might be.
sometimes it’s even buisnesses that can’t do buisness where you live
It’s wild isn’t it. They spend all their time profiling me and working out what I’m interested in and developing detailed groups. If I turn on a VPN, suddenly I’m Canadian they have no idea who I am, and the adverts are in French.
Oh and of course Microsoft cannot keep me signed in across all of their services because apparently keeping track of that, would be impossible.
Fortnine actually made a video explaining how Google’s ads are a scam.
In a nutshell, they don’t convince people to buy things. They predict that someone is about to buy something, shows ads for it and then take credit for the purchase.
For a second there I was wondering why Fortnite of all things was making a video on this
Right, when they can host concerts then why can’t they do courses on privacy or ads?
A coworker scrolling mentioned double stuffed Oreos, something she hadn’t had in a while. Boom, next ad: double stuffed Oreos. “They” really are listening.
I had a phone call with a friend of mine, who told me that a person we both knew had lupus. We talked about it for a minute or two, because I’d only heard about it on house and didn’t know what it involved. Starting that afternoon, I got ads for lupus for about two weeks. I know I hadn’t received those ads before because I play a word game for which “lupus” is a really useful word, and I had not seen its spelling before then.
This was about 15 years ago. It could be a coincidence (but I’m not the age or race most predisposed to lupus), but I’ve been a believer in phones listening to you since.
That isn’t how it works, listening to conversations would need too much bandwidth or processing power to be useful.
More likely that whatever prompted your coworker to think about those cookies also triggered the ad.
Or they have been getting those ads without thinking twice about them until they noticed when they were thinking about them.
Or it is just plain coincidence.
Nope. I worked as a marketing director before I remembered that I have a soul. A radio advertising rep tried to sell me passive listening ads.
According to that rep selling this service, it worked like this: All of these devices, including your phone, passively listen for keywords that get repeated frequently enough in a short enough window. They feed those words back to the mothership. An ad is then delivered across all ID associated devices targeted toward that keyword. This process is delivering an ad within 45 minutes.
For example, you talk about needing a new tent, you’re gonna say tent and camping a few times in that convo. Camping/tent get beamed up. Within 45 minutes, you’re seeing tent/camping ads in your apps and on websites across all of your devices because of your advertising ID.
It is not coincidence. They are literally selling this feature to their clients.
Yep. Guy I know cut off his finger using a table saw. They were able to sew it back on, and he was fine. But while he was recovering in the ER, his phone was served up ads for Sawstops (for those who aren’t into woodworking, these are table saws with advanced safety features that would have prevented this injury).
At that point he hadn’t even typed in on his phone yet what happened, but obviously people (himself, doctors, nurses, intake folks, etc) had been discussing the accident around him for hours at that point. It was pretty obvious that on some level his phone was listening to what was talked about. This was in 2012…
Wouldn’t that only count if the buyer actually bought the stuff through clicking on the ad?
No. Watch the video they explain it well
I will
My dad asked me the other day if I had seen some commercial for something and I was like “I block ads on the net and don’t watch regular TV. How would I have seen it?”
I’ve had similar exchanges with people where they’ll start with “have you seen the ad where…” and before I’ve even heard the details I say “I don’t watch ads,” but they’ll follow up with “No you’ve definitely seen this one, it’s unavoidable,” and then they proceed to describe something I’ve never seen because I don’t watch ads. Not only do I have ad blocking on every device that I use, I actively choose my entertainment based on what doesn’t have ads or can be adblocked. If the only way for me to use a given platform is to tolerate ads, I just don’t use it.
I’m happy to not be able to relate to someone wanting to talk about an ad. Especially if the focus of the conversation isn’t on how annoying ads are. I get that they can sometimes be funny or clever or whatever but that just isn’t a facet of humanity that I care to celebrate.
I had a teacher in middle school that told our class how he liked to watch the Super Bowl “for the ads.” I thought that was silly then, and I still think that’s silly now.
I know - companies throw money at the ads they’ll air at that time, and I suppose some people consider the results to be acceptable entertainment. But to me, ads are still ads. Fuck 'em all, even the fancy, expensive ones.
Watching the superbowl for the ads is so much more embarrassing than reading playboy for the articles lmao
It sucks to miss movie trailers. Its ironic, I subbed to a youtube channel to catch trailers, the only ads I wanted and it spammed shite edits of trailers and I gave up.
I don’t even see the ads I see. If an email or text message looks like an ad then I’m probably not reading it either. Nonstop
spamads caused me to be this way. I sure as sh*t am never clicking on an ad to buy anything. I don’t think I have ever clicked on an ad and bought something through the ad.
They wouldn’t waste money on ads if they didn’t work enough to at least break even on them. They work. People with adblockers or who do not click on ads are not the norm. Not that I like this, but here we are.
I’m no longer convinced by this line of reasoning. They wouldn’t waste money on meetings if they didn’t break even. They wouldn’t waste money on physical offices if they didn’t break even. They wouldn’t use chat bots if they didn’t break even.
What we have isn’t an efficient rational market. It’s just a bunch of superstitions from business school.
They just raise prices to compensate for the advertising budget. Sounds easy to justify when you make the assumption that reaching more people would generate more return. Perversely customers wind up paying more for the very thing that pays for the ads that get shoved in their faces.
Somewhere along the path from the boardroom to the consumer’s eyes, advertising still works. If they stop advertising, they sell less, that’s a metric they can measure and I’m sure they do, or at least have. Exactly how it works may be more art than science and not as well understood as they like to claim, but the numbers don’t lie.
There are three kinds of lies
Actually, data suggests that over 50% of internet users are using some kind of adblockers. Looking at ads is absolutely “not the norm.” Using adblock software just makes one part of the largest consumer boycott in history.
Which data from where suggests this?
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
The actual truth is the people paying for ads are rubes.
When it came out that Facebook’s “pivot to video” numbers were all fake nobody batted an eye. Marketing departments have failed to apply any statistical rigour for decades and all fall prey to the the idea that if you target ads well enough they work.
If you even have a marketing department they exist to spend money, so as long as they have charts and graphs they’ll ignore the users and keep asking for budget.
From what I remember, this pivot to video thing fucked a number of companies. Including cracked and college humor.
Read a great article by a guy who was questioned as to why the company’s advertising spend wasn’t resulting in sales. He had the IT chops to dig in, found 77% of “clicks” were bots. He laid out his testing and results very nicely.
I am amazed that companies keep throwing money at internet advertising.
I believe it. I’ve worked with this data for a long time, it’s mostly bots. If you think Google and Meta somehow have a magic wand to remove them you’re wrong
Yup. It’s human storage in pointless jobs doing feckless shit to justify those jobs. They’ll pump the numbers (and/or blame other teams on any flagging sales) in an endless cycle of bullshit. Marketing works strongest internally at most companies.
You have to remember that the people in charge of advertising spend are c-suite executives, and c-suite executives are the absolutely dumbest rung of society. Invasive advertising makes them feel important, and nothing else in the world matters more than their feelings.
When did advertising become so evil? It’s always been there, but today it’s ridiculous. Even the targeted ads are useless.
Imagine if all these companies spending billions on vast networks of advertising actually used that money and energy on something, anything, useful. This meme is on point.
Like tracking and imprisoning dissidents? Because that’s the usefulness we are going to get.
As you’ve said, it’s always been this way. It’s just the internet has supercharged their ability to serve them
He’s not fully responsible by any means, but the impact Edward Bernays had on modern advertising and public relations is rather profound. It’s gotten more evil in the past couple decades, but it’s always been a force for coercion and manipulation.
There’s to many people on the planet if this is what we come up with. Vile
Ever see Mad Men?
Personally I have not but given that I like the main actor in his current show where he steals shit from his rich neighbours, I think I’m gonna have to grab it
Clean, cheap energy? Imagine that world.
Advertising is a perk
Control is the goal
I agree that that is the goal, but also think that the control was much tighter before the internet. When all the information was centrally broadcast and curated. Now they may create a more personalized control feed, but I can still go outside of the feed. Until that is closed too.
I do those Google survey things for Google Play money.
Google, the biggest spyware company ever to exist.
99/100 of the things it sends are “Have you been to any of these places recently”, and none of them are even in my state.
I don’t understand. You have my location. Why are you asking me about shit in Texas?
In the end I get a dime for my time and sometimes I spend it on some game.
I used to do those until I realized the credits expire then I decided “fuck it, don’t care then.” I had racked up something like $35 in Google play credit, but I noticed my balance was like $12 one day because apparently I didn’t spend it fast enough. Get fucked Google. Just keep taking my data instead of asking me for it then.
I have never managed to accumulate more than like $5, and usually I just dump it into Coins in Pokemon Go.
They keep asking me the same shit too. No, I still don’t have a kid. No, I’m still not interested in football. No, I still don’t have a degree and I’m not trying to get one. No, I still don’t rent. You know which of your apps I use, better than I do I’d assume, why ask me?
Honestly, if there’s a good reason for why they want me to answer the same stuff over and over and give me 8 cents every time, please do tell.
Every time I log into instagram these days (not frequently) it tries to give me info on how to set up my teenager’s account safely. Also. I don’t have kids 😂
What also gets me, is occasionally it does give local places. But it’s still off.
Like, I go to Walmart and it sends a survey and it’s like, “Were you at the Dairy Queen or the car wash?” And basically every business next to the giant Walmart, but not the Walmart.
They want to catch you contradicting yourself, then they’ll know you are an unreliable survey subject (aka, a liar :) ). That’s why you build am alternative persona for this. I keep insisting I work in an industry I am not, I have kids I don’t, and make as much money I never.
Okay but these questions are basically all I’m getting. I don’t have any opportunities to be unreliable if I’m always just given the same five questions designed to be traps.
Pretend you make a lot of money, so that they want to sell you shit. Pretend you have kids. Pretend you work in an industry known to attract frivolous spenders, e.g. finance or tech.
Unless you actually do all of these. Then maybe they just hate you.
look there’s this HEB with a sushi bar, tortilla press, and a bakery twice the size of the largest house i’ve lived in.
have you been there? fresh tortillas = best tortillas.
Fresh corn tortillas are indeed very good
they even had good fresh flour tortillas. that was my go-to snack when i lived near there
LOL, I don’t even know what a HEB is.
why would i ask about not-texas? their haw has hardly any yee in it
I play this single player mobile football game that has pop up ads. I just turn off the wifi when play instead of paying 5 bucks to remove ads.
Just use a DNS adblock?
Sometimes this is ineffective. If you use the youtube app, it has googles ip address built in. So even if you.use a pihole, you will still see youtube ads
I agree, but for this use case (mobile games) DNS adblock is usually pretty effective.
When your generation isn’t advertised to anymore, it’s a strange feeling. My uncle who is in the boomer range, they stopped advertising to them and he and my aunt really took it hard. Like I said, it’s a weird thing to go through.
When they stopped advertising to my generation when I was early 20s, I watched them start trying again around the late 20s. I was kind of in the fuck you phase at that point.
My point is, if you’re in a booming type generation, you probably don’t know what it’s like to have no advertising towards you anywhere. Some generations, no one cares what you think.
Note: Not a bad thing to be not advertised to, but it’s a shock when it happens. You realize how much of it is out there.
