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I think it’s different if you consider ads as a way to maintain the status quo.
Like, there’s an ad I keep seeing on TV where 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago plays as parents struggle to keep up with the parenting responsibilities of their toddlers. It’s an ad for Amazon. And thank god for Amazon for being available to help these parents.
And like…everybody knows about Amazon. Nobody is going to suddenly sign up for a Prime account after seeing this ad. However, parents or expecting parents who already have Prime accounts are going to relate to the people in the ad and not even consider other options for their parenting needs.
Maybe a very specific example, and their are certainly ads just telling you to buy chicken nuggets, but I’m seeing it more and more.
Edit: Or hell, look at detergents. Do you really think Tide has innovated anything in the past 30 years?
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.
Which means ads follow the same rules as so-called “pick up artists.” No wonder they annoy me so much.
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.
It’s not about convincing people to buy the product. It’s about keeping the brand in the public consciousness. For example, they want Coca-Cola to be synonymous with carbonated soft drinks, so that when you want to buy a soda, the first option you think of is Coke, and not Pepsi or some other brand.
If I were a crackpot theorist, which I am not but I dabble, I would say I wouldn’t be surprised if ads serve as a medium of population control.
It’s very much this. They aren’t trying to introduce you to this thing that’s been an institution for longer then any of us have been alive. They’re advertising to take up the limited realestate in our conscious minds.
It works well enough to get returns on ad spend.
I mean I think that it does work on most people. I have a few people in my life who just don’t block ads. Some of them do not even change their radio frequency when ads play through it. They think that they can choose for it to not affect them, but that’s not really how propaganda works.
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 _____”
Before I installed blockers, I only remember one time ever clicking a targeted advertisement and making a purchase (it was for a ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ t-shirt). That was after browsing the web everyday with no blockers for like 15 years.
The Tumblr-clone I use for porn has been feeding me the same (rather gross) heterosexual ads for so long I finally added every available list to my PiHole so they’re finally gone. Good job morons. Couldn’t even figure out how to show a gay guy cock.
I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there’s like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?
They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the fist 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.
How did you find out? Did you talk about it?
They were pretty happy to volunteer the info. He still gave me the duplicate!
Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.
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 access ‘the web’ via phone apps. There’s no adblocker for those.
There’s plenty, with a bit of doing. Definitely not as easy as installing ublock through a browser extension store but very doable
On iPhone? And on android without rooting?
Firefox on android can just install extensions. No clue about the iphone. I remember some chromium browsers also having extensions on Android but I’m not 100% sure which ones.
There’s also DNS blocking of ads which can be set in your DNS settings or be part of your VPN connection. This will effectively block all ads too (even embedded ones in apps). On android ofc, yet again no clue about apple.
An unfortunate truth.
Some people justify it by stating that they keep ads because they want to support the websites, but don’t know that at the very least they should be blocking trackers and 3rd party cookies
they want to support the websites
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
Someone on here some weeks ago had a beef with me saying I skip passed promo content in YouTube videos. They said something about wanting to support the videomakers. K, but if I’m not in the market for a new mattress (as an example of an ad I sometimes hear), it doesn’t make sense for me to listen to the sponsored mattress read-through. If I don’t make a purchase with the YouTuber’s promo code, then what’s the difference if I skip a couple minutes ahead? Do I owe a video “respect” by listening anyway? And if for some reason the advertiser cares more about me listening to their spiel than about me actually making a purchase, well, that’s silly and sucks for them.
There are some things advertised that I’m never going to buy no matter how much they’re shown to me. Meal kits, gambling sites, men’s boxers, these are all things I’ve seen countless sponsored ad placements mid-video for, and they are all things I don’t use and can’t see myself using. Yet the ads persist.
So I will continue skipping.
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
For the most part, no, it doesn’t support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).
Even then the proper way to do that would be to Adblock and then whitelist sites you support and know don’t have turbo intrusive ads
Yeah that’s what I do, but if they don’t know about adblock, they’re not gonna know about that.
Same thing on every other creative platform. People don’t know that it’s much better off for the creators to receive support in buying merch or patreon than it is for them to get a small fraction of what YouTube makes in ad revenue
It’s not actually most. It’s just enough to cover the ad spend.
Someone needs to create malware that installs ad blockers. That will more than half their conversion rate.
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.
That hurts my brain to hear, oh my!
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. 🤢🥲
Middlemen make the most money of any profession.
Market Makers. Insurance. Everyone involved in the mortgage world. Research publications. Mid-level managers.
I’m a mid-level manager. I do make a good amount of money.
Was about to comment similarly 🤪
The data has more direct consequences when it comes to machine learning algorithms to keep you on the website and funnel you into a personalized echo chamber.
The epitome of this is TikTok, it’s algorithm was the only thing that set it apart from other short video apps. Youtube is a video host with an integrated recommendation algorithm, Tiktok is a recommendation algorithm with integrated video hosting.
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.
Oh, the algorithm is good, it’s good at generating watch time. That’s it’s purpose. It serves the company, not you.
What I’m saying is it’s not even good at that, and it has caused me to leave several times when every video it recommends is clickbait garbage. It just knows it works on most people who aren’t actively looking out for it. It’s basically purely designed for engagement baiting, regardless of if you take the bait or not it’ll keep doing it.
There was a small window around 2010 when Google’s targeted Ads is actually kinda good (which is to say, not annoying and somewhat relevant).
Then everything enshittified.
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.
Most people don’t use adblockers
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.
You still were subjected to the constant imaging exposure
You might not have noticed but your brain did
Even still, it was always either
A) Shit I’d absolutely never buy
B) Shit I was planning on buying anyway before the ad
C) The ad reminds me “oh yeah I do need new underwear” (idfk lol), but even then I just mentally log that and go buy underwear later, never “click the add and buy those underwear,” not even necessarily the same brand at another retailer, like instead of Hanes™ the ad could say “Underwear^TheConcept” and it’d be the same thing.
The targeting seems to not be worth piss to me imo.
Most advertising isn’t trying to convince you to buy product X that’s being advertised. It’s trying to get you to think about the brand itself. They’re saying “Buy this fridge from Brand A” but they’re not actually trying to sell you a fridge, what they really want is for you to think of Brand A the next time you’re looking for a new appliance or some other product they sell.
But I already know I want a Speed Queen, so when Samsung advertises whatever shit new Samsung AI Washer/Dryer with wifi and bluetooth horse shit, my brain goes “ahh yeah put more money towards that Speed Queen.” And then when I go to replace my phone I go “hmmm lets see what can use grapheneOS” and Samsung loses again, then I go to replace my TV and get a used Vizio from 2008 at the flea market, etc…
It just doesn’t work along “brand” lines at least for me.
Everybody thinks advertising doesn’t work on them.
At least some of them have to be right.
It’s not about the ads to buy things. That’s part of it for sure, but it’s more than that.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. want your data, your habits, routines, opinions, etc, so they can influence the way you think and behave and understand the world.
There’s a clip I saw recently of Peter Thiel saying they could never get people to vote for the things they want to do, so instead they are using technology to change things.
Even if you block ads, if you still use platforms owned by tech mega-corps, they have your data. Sure you might not see the targeted ads, and so you think you’re coming out ahead, but you don’t realize that every piece of content you see between the ads you’ve blocked is being filtered to influence the way you think about the world.
It’s all so stupid. I can’t remember the last time I got an ad for anything I was interested in buying. It’s all just whoever paid the most to shove their garbage in your face. Why even bother with all the spying at that point?
They realized they had to become profitable somehow or else people wouldn’t stand for the environmental impact of it, so they made AI.
Ads direct money.
They aren’t using ads anymore to direct your money.
Extrapolate that as you will.
It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance
that’s right, those lucky strike ads in 50s mags? Government surveilance.
Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since
I think “surveillance” doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. “Surveillance” sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
I still get ads on Youtube on my TV, and it’s mindboggling how bad they are. Google literally has years of my search history (before I switched to DDG), and it still doesn’t understand that I’m vegan and not interested in any products that are not vegan. Putting on my tinfoil hat, I think it’s just a massive data collection ruse masked as “personalized ads”.
