100%. Ads are just corporate propaganda. What would the public do if they didn’t have their symbols shoved in their face every waking hour?

It’s about being in your mind-space, even days later in the shop. Which works 50/50 on some people and not at all on the others. But that’s good enough to bother all of humanity i guess.

Yeah like McD reminding you about their big Mac and fries. They know you know about it but they want to think about food because you might be slightly hungry and could eat. They are not ads but subliminal messages.

Not once, even when I was a little kid, have I been convinced to want a product more because of an ad like that. People know about McDonald’s, they know about Coca-Cola, they know about Hilton, they know about Disney+, the only real reason they have to advertise is to tell us about their new products that some of them have once in a while, or a deal of some kind. I can understand Dreamworks advertising a new movie for about a week, after that, the public probably knows. Same thing for Chick-Fil-A’s new sandwiches and whatnot. But they never stop. They go for a month and a half, two even. Other brands, like Marriott, nothing’s changed. We know that we can buy a hotel room and get free breakfast, we know, we’ll pay for it if/when we need it, but we’re not getting a room just for the “experience”. These ads must be working, they’ve been dumping money into them for over a century at this point, maybe I’m just too autistic to understand how.

Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who’d never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, “Fuck it, let’s just _____”

Amazon: I see you just bought one coat rack; would you like to start your coat rack collection with these other coat racks?

Facebook is the same : “Oh I see you’re married! Do you want to befriend other hot women? Let us introduce you!”

I have to use facebook for work every few months. All sandboxed and shit. They seem to think I’m in the market for conceal carry yoga pants. Which I fine with, because that means they have no clue about my gender, hobbies, or political alignment.

I used to have a chrome extension that basically poisoned my data by clicking on every ad in the background while hiding the ads from me. I forgot what it was called. I don’t use Chrome anymore.

It also benefitted the websites I visited by improving their click-thru while also hurting the advertisers by costing them money for ads that would never be effective.

Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.

Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.

Most people use apps or standard Chrome. And Google targeted the most popular adblocker there deprecating Manifest V2 and using only V3 by default (maybe V2 is already removed?)

I’m going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.

A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.

But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with “autootymization”, so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad “back in a day”. Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.

Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.

I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.

We are fucked.

I showed my sister ad block and she was like why would i want to block ads. She said she has her algo dialed in and the ads just show her products she probably wants to buy.

There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.

I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.

And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.

You think that’s an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That’s where the insane money is. That’s the long game. 🤢🥲

They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the first ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn’t realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I’ve been calling it Dropshipmas.

I was at Costco with my roommate this last weekend looking at coffee. They went straight for one saying they liked the design on the packaging. I asked if they were going to buy coffee based solely on how the packaging looks. They said “Yeah, that’s how advertising works.”

At one point, the advertising algorithm for Tinder decided what I needed in my life was a tractor. A massive, eleven tonne tractor intended for work on a large farm.

It probably wouldn’t fit up my driveway.

I have a similar account for everything that I expect to have some form of tracking. Yet all of these services that are supposed to spy on me to find out exactly what I’m interested in have not once succeeded in targeted me with advertising for something I have any interest in getting. I’ve only seen them work for people who have Facebook or something that actively listens for things to make ads about, which I don’t have.

It’s crazy how the algorithm isn’t even good, it’s just effective at generating watch time on average. It tries to push you towards addictive trash constantly, whether you watch it or not. I learned rust and got “why rust sucks” and “why rust is the best language” about 25 times now despite never watching videos like that, because maybe THIS time I’ll get ragebaited.

I think hotwords worked the best on me because I thought it was a link to something in the article. But then the law changed and they had to put “ad” on the links and it killed them. Laws work, some what.

Depends on the product, a lot of things exist to be ad bate, and don’t really serve a wider purpose. Tshirts is an example that comes to mind where people just buy dozens of designs they never wear.

The whole premise has become shopping is the fun activity, the product is just the waste from that activity that needs to be discarded.

So I guess sans ads we would see a lot less arbitrary products (and places like Amazon would take a hit [yay])

I would be curious to know how e-commerce would change though as without ads people would likely gravitate to the big box stores

Even when I saw ads, I never clicked on them (at least on purpose) and they basicslly just become noise my brain filters out. Like going noseblind to a smell that is constsntly there.