this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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I'm old, so many may not relate. I remember when the big selling point of this newfangled "cable TV" thing was zero ads. Can you imagine that?
Yeah, I have Prime for the savings on shipping. Got the Kodi addon for watching Prime, never used it except to watch The Expanse a few years ago. Would have been fucking enraged if I had seen ads cut into that. Fuck am I paying for?!
I think about this all the time. Kids today have no experience of the media without ads. Like we had commercials, but imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
This image has a totally different context today then when it was first created
Anyways, these kids will grow up and make even worse and more annoying ads. They'll be the next Gen of marketing executives in a decade or two. There's nothing we can do about it.
I prefer the obvious product placement in old movies, tv shows. How funny it is to see product placement all over the place on the kitchen shelves of Seinfeld, the sugar cookie of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
The list could go on.
Larry David said Seinfeld was just before studios did product placement deals and that they missed out on a lot of extra money from it. He said a lot of things they referenced were just plot devices. I'd say the one clear exception was George and his Rolled Gold pretzels that he was a commercial spokesman for at the time.
well i don’t know about no rolled gold, but i can tell you that these pretzels are makin me thirsty!
I don't know about Seinfeld, but I know in Friends, they used look-alike, but not real products.
It's not Sprite, it's Sprita. Same logo (for the time), but not the same.
It wasn't skittles, it was skitles.
You see where I'm going with this. They wanted the feel of a real apartment, without the legal trouble from using real products.
Honestly product placements in shows often made them feel more real. Yeah they’re drinking Coke…that’s what me and my friends do too. Products are already placed all over my house.
I'm really torn here. Like people complain when superman flies through an ihop or there are billboards. But they make it more grounded. My problem is that they frame it like a commercial. Or world war z where brad pit is drinking every pepsi(?) or Heineken(?) like it was a commercial. In one of these godaweful tranformers movies, they just show products in a way that is so disgusting not even an actual commercial would do it.
The worst was Tony Stark pulling up like the movie was a car commercial in Endgame. That was pathetic.
Actually for my kids at least it's different. They're so used to ad blocked YouTube and ad-free Netflix. That when the adblocker fails for whatever reason they get first delighted to see something new and very soon after annoyed at having to see that shit all the time and cry for someone to help them.
We watch regular TV so little. The other day we didn't have internet for several hours, maybe a few days. That's when we discovered that the TV is actually too far away to reach the cable of the satellite dish.
Or imagine the Flintstones advertising cigarettes to kids in the middle of the show.
Or comedy shows named after the sponsoring toothpaste company with sponsor breaks throughout.
Sure it’s gotten really bad lately, but mass media has always been rife with obnoxious advertising, both in-your-face and subliminal. The early days of Netflix streaming were really the anomaly as far as access to non-pirated ad-free media. The broadcast TV generation had their coping mechanisms with the mute button and eventually DVRs, but “media without ads” has basically never been a thing.
Fucking weird, isn't it? Another rant would be about where is all the advertising money coming from?! Imagining being a buyer, I'd have to wonder how well my spend would be profiting.
A couple of decades ago I played around with being a salesman. Top advice was to try this ad, try that ad, compare results. Surely these people are finding revenue from spending on these ads? It just seems impossible to me that there's profit for all of these cockroaches.
There are so many garbage ads out there now that either advertising is very cheap or businesses are pissing away lots of money.
I think a lot of it is a MAD scenario.
Some time ago i found a old VHS of karate kid that i recorded. That was on free open tv and the commercials were super short. And i think two for the whole movie. I downloaded some trash tv like 60 day fiancee, and it was accidentally an episode where they left the commercials in. That was the most insane shit i have ever seen. They streched a 45min show into a 1 1/2 hour show. With the same pharma commercials over and over all the goddamn time and then the recap after every commercial. This shit has to rot your brain in some capacity.
The worst are reality show “result” episodes. Seriously, you’re doing a two hour special with extra ads, all about recaps, when the only goal is to announce who won last week?
I've had the same thoughts about people who watch free to air TV. Between the same set of ads every ad break, and the frankly dubious quality of the programming, it has to be contributing to some type of cognitive decline.
My parents watch this tripe on DirecTV. I can confirm the cognitive decline theory with direct evidence.
I have Prime too for shopping mainly. I also can't use Prime Video because it refuses to go beyond 480p on Firefox for Linux (Atleast last time I tried).
Cable tv wasn’t invented to have zero ads . The original selling point of cable tv was to provide broadcast tv to those that couldn’t pick up OTA broadcasts.
I feel like you weren't there, in that time and place. Or maybe you were in some weird pocket where OTA wasn't available? Can't remember anyone bitching about lack of antennae service. Yeah, it could be sketchy, but I think most of us could drag in ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS.
I grew up in the 70's and had cable TV as soon as long as I could remember and it was the exact same broadcasts people that lived in DC or Baltimore got, we just got them from cable since the mountains we lived in prevented any OTA from getting through. And I am pretty sure I wasn't alone with my cable TV.
In 1968, 6.4% of Americans had cable television. The number increased to 7.5% in 1978. By 1988, 52.8% of all households were using cable. The number further increased to 62.4% in 1994. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television)
I think one could argue they invented cable TV so that more people could see ads, not to stop showing ads.
Well radio was originally mostly about advertising, and when TV came around it was just gonna be radio but with moving pictures! So yeah, it was about spreading more advertisements around to more people.
What. Cable has only been available in cities and you could get the OTA Chanel's.
What? Not everyone lives in or near a metro area. Some people live in valleys or mountains where an OTA signal doesn’t reach. I should know that is where I grew up.
Plus if you read up on the history of cable TV you will find that it was invented for just those reasons.
“At the outset, cable systems only served smaller communities without television stations of their own, and which could not easily receive signals from stations in cities because of distance or hilly terrain”
It isn’t that hard to read up on it and understand the history. Instead I guess just downvote because you don’t like the answer.