I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).
I don’t get it.
EDIT: just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a special snowflake immune to ads ffs. I’m talking about the ads in the enshittification spectrum, like the ones that blare inside the media center of your brand new car, the ones that makes sites unreadable, the ones shoved every minute in your 10 minute videos, things like that. But I understand that I may be inside my own ad hate bubble, I really dislike ads in general and I try to avoid them them best I can.
I will tell you, as someone who runs a business and doesn’t really advertise, you need ads to actually make money. I do not make enough to rely on my business as a sole source of income. I also do not have enough money to spend on effective advertising. So basically I’m stuck unless I want to take venture capital money (I don’t).
Your view of people’s feelings towards advertising is skewed. Likely by being around people who have the same feelings.
Most people don’t hate companies because they advertise.
If everyone is so concerned about smartphones and social media ruining our attention span than where is the moral panic around advertisements slicing up everything into smaller and smaller chunks seperated by unrelated maximally superficial content?
hmmmm
any brand that works with them by extension is hated and reviled by that.
That just isn’t true.
The advertising industry makes billions because ads make companies trillions. The advertising industry elects politicians and shapes public narratives and also rehabilitates public images.
I know this may shock you but people love ads. The Superbowl ads are almost as popular as the game. Some of the most successful comics troops working today are the troops that do insurance ads.
Hell there are company spokesmen who are international celebrities, The Most Interesting Man in the world, Lilly from AT&T.
I had friends in local media. They had Superbowl parties. No one watched the football, they all got quiet for the ads.
What don’t you get? They advertise a product, they get paid for that. Some ads are liked, some aren’t. Most companies of any decent size advertise, and they pay for that in order to garner more sales. I don’t think the general public revile them for it at all.
the stupid rhymes and jingles aren’t meant for anyone to like them, they’re specifically designed to get stuck in your head, regardless if the thing itself is relevant to you. WE ARE FARMERS ! BUMBADUMBABUMBUMBUM! you literally just sang that in your head. whether you meant to or not.
mind control and psychological manipulation are real and powerful things. they wouldn’t be spending the money on it if that weren’t the case. it’s about taking up as much space in your brain as possible, so that you have no space left for the competition’s jingle
This is not, in any meaningful way, mind control. It’s just making something memorable. You don’t become a mindless zombie because you listened to a jingle. Instead, it just means that when Jerry, who is really busy because of his kids and career and hobbies has State Farm hike his rates, he will think “those motherfuckers! Who else sells insurance?” And will then remember the jingle.
if you’ve deliberately changed someone’s behavior to align with what you want, then who cares what anyone calls it? the end result is the same- the ads worked
I mean, sure. But if that’s your standard for “mind control” then asking someone to pass the salt counts, too
ok. and?
If ads were truly that reviled, adblockers would be more popular. Most people either don’t care at all, or don’t care enough to change anything about how they use media. You can literally set up a way to consume their media without ads for them and most people will refuse to use it over the slightest inconvenience, such as “I don’t like Firefox”.
I don’t inherently hate advertising and have on occasion learned about products or brands through advertising that I then actually ended up buying. Without advertising, you too might not know a lot of the products you’ve bought in your life.
I do block most ads online, but still see plenty of advertising in public spaces, or on television or radio when I watch/listen to those.
The advertising you are seeing doesn’t work that well on you. I’m in the same boat. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. There’s a ton of advertising where I’m a net negative. That doesn’t mean the overall output is negative.
Most advertising is about building brand recognition. It doesn’t matter whether you buy their product or not - the fact that you can name the company whose product you’re not buying means the ad worked.
And it’s probably not even true that ads don’t work on OP. Everyone likes to think they’re built different.
That’s why I specified the ads OP was seeing. For me, there might be ads that are seemless with something else in doing that I don’t notice and might work. But in OPs example in his reasons to you, fuck any fucking company that puts an ad inside my goddamn car. Ads at the gas pump can get fucked as well.
Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.
Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.
This sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. Communicating with potential customers that your product exists and is good isn’t some concept that the advertising industry has somehow wrested from the hands of good hardworking people in return for their wages. It’s what marketing and advertising IS. It’s like saying the cheeseburger industry controls our access to cheeseburgers - like, kinda. But also, that’s kind of definitionally true. You can, of course, raise and slaughter your own cow to subvert the cheeseburger industry. And you can hand out fliers you made yourself advertising your business on the streetcorner. But it is a lot less work, and you’ll probably get a better product, if you outsource the work to a specialist
I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.
I’m just saying
They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control.
You can hear the creepy piano music when you read this
I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads. The large part of it is im just unwilling to pay for anything that is unnecessary now. Mostly out of necessity but the longer I have to be like this the more all of it seems silly and I feel that even if I had discretionary income I don’t see wanting to use it. Still would like to renovate where I live but that is mostly around disability and reducing energy use. eating out nope. movies nope. any other paid entertainment nope. internet and computer yep. smartphone nope. linux yep. windows nope. mac nope.
I feel like im a special snowflake virtually immune to ads.
For the most part, I don’t even see ads at all.
The only ones I might be exposed to at all are:
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Disguised Lemmy posts pretending to be normal users.
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Billboards and other signs on the side of the road.
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Product placement in a game, TV show, or movie.
Every other kind of ad has basically zero chance of ever even reaching my eyeballs.
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because people are morons and ads work.
You can take a small box of cat shit and in the right ad campaign, people will buy it. Catshit has electrolytes.
People would probably sponsor it or rent it these days. Buying was 5 years ago.
Subscribe to watch a cat shit in a box, also give me your ID to qualify for the chance.
Kylie Jenner won’t go anywhere without cat shit.
Ads work. People browse or walk by something, there’s a logo, video, or picture or some company or a product, it stays in their head, and they just keep buying shit they don’t need. That’s why. So the more people browse or happen upon ads, the more they sell (sometimes).
I don’t get it.
EDIT:
YOU can evade them, but most people can’t.
It’s some weird % math. Sending BS spam, like the good old nigerian prince, costs nearly nothing, but it only needs to work in like 1 in 10 million cases for it to be profitable. Returns on random spam advertisement is abysmal, and google gets like 10-100x that because it’s more targeted. That is why people use google ads. But also not because they’re good. They’re just less useless, while still having a very very minimal effect.
The rest is scale.
