Ask Lemmy

Beyond feeling annoyed and manipulated, advertising is a constant reminder of our broken systems. Endless conspicuous consumption. Infinite growth. It's like a cancer.

I say it is more the adverts themselves disrespecting our senses (radio adverts being louder than the station music or presenter, TV ads flashing colour) or adverts masquerading as regular content ^even^ ^with^ ^sponsored^ ^tags^

*Edit* And for internet ads, the sheer amount of personal data that is collected to build an advertising profile on you.

I took some marketing classes in university, and from my perspective the biggest issue is that the entire concept of marketing is based on lies. At no point were we taught that you should be trying to reach people who would benefit the most from your product, nor should you be trying to inform people what your product is or does. The sole purpose of marketing is to ensure that people buy your thing for the highest profit possible, whether that means convincing them the product is more valuable to them than it actually is, or that they need it more than they actually do.

Your goal as a marketer is to exploit every dark psychological trick that the field of psychology has ever discovered, all of the horrible quirks in human nature that cause us to do things that don't make sense. All of the logical fallacies that constrain people's thinking are the tools in your toolbox. Xenophobia, outrage, escapism, false dichotomies, etc. are the bread and butter of the marketer. There is fundamentally no difference between marketers and con artists.

why we aren't attacking marketers and salespeople more often. I swear if we all focused on a week or a month by breaking the kneecaps of any salesperson or marketing agent while tormenting their families

That escalated quickly.

They're engineered to be as obnoxious and often deceptive as possible.

I don't mind adverts that show what a product is and what it costs, but those ones apparently underperform compared to the flashy/loud/clickbaity shit that's infested the internet and any other space that gives them a route to invade your field of view.

Ad blockers are a must now-a-days; any video that shoves that "and now a word from our sponsors!" shit in the middle of it gets a thumbs-down; and I'll actively avoid products I see on billboards / physical adverts.

The most simple answer.

Ads or commercials are typically an interruption to the content I was wishing to watch.

We also hate pushy sales people. Same shit different cringe

advertising itself isnt the problem.. its the abuse of advertising by MBAs who have been told if their numbers dont increase every quarter, they are failures and their compensation will reflect that. its the requirement that a business is always growing despite how blatantly impossible that is.

but its not just those sales folks.. its the entire executive structure up to the top that authorizes such behaviors.

you end up with an enshittified world.

I don't mind buying things, sometimes I even enjoy it. I hate being sold things.

I used to be okay with ads. Back then, they were on television often and gave you a chance to check on things, use the restroom, etc. Internet advertising in the 90s and early 2000s was annoying and pervasive. I was fine with banner ads and only one popup, because you could easily close it and crack on.

But then ads (and the Internet) became personalized with pervasive and predatory tracking. Coupled with the manipulation of algorithms, I’ve grown to despise most centralized systems. I hate advertising and now I make sure to take heavy measures to block as much as I can and reduce my footprint as much as possible within my control.

If companies turn off their telemetry and the personalization, stop selling my information with reckless abandon, and stop leaking my data where they claim “your privacy and security is important to us”, then and only then will I disable my ad blockers.

I'm out here trying to save enough money to get by, it's annoying to keep seeing all the things I can't afford paraded in front of me constantly. Some of them I wish I could afford, some of them I'd never buy if I had the chance.

It strikes me as companies with too much access and too much money looking to drain my accounts to add it like a drop of water to their swimming pool they already have.

I personally don't like ads because they're intrusive, and because they are an attempt to manipulate my mind in some way in order to extract resources out of me. I'd like to keep my mind as clean as possible and not be a tool towards someone else's ambition.

I don't mind ads on something like a TV, where you're already passively consuming content, and the ads are just "here's a product and how it can improve your life". But in something interactive, they are incredibly intrusive, and most ads are made not about a product and why you'll like it, but they're done in ways that are tested and optimized to bypass your rational mind and appeal to your emotions or your lizard brain. I loathe being manipulated and have great disdain for those that attempt it.

There's also the factor specifically online of tracking and data mining. You want to show me a product, fine, you need to know what color my butthole is to sell it to me, go fuck yourself.

They interrupt your current activity, they are often louder than the content you actually want to see, they are often repeated so often that they are grating and they often feature realy terrible acting.

An example I remember from s few years ago, when a chain of health clinics was expanding hard here in Sweden, the ad was constant for months, it started with an older woman who started her first sentence about how good the clinic was with a soft chuckle, that chuckle became increadibly grating.

I decided right then and there that that I will never do business with them.

Because so many of them are poorly done.

I had a shower thought the other day; what would the world be like if advertising didn't exist?

No billboards or giant signs everywhere blocking our views. Content would be better because it wouldn't be interrupted by commercials. But think of how much money is spent on advertising? Companies would have to invest that into other areas to be successful instead, such as cheaper and/or better quality products, or higher wages for their workers. Companies would have to work really hard to get a good reputation so their products could spread through word of mouth instead of using advertising to invade everyone's space.

I'm sure there's some downsides, but it sounds kind of amazing.

Money could be spent on SEO and useful visibility. Instead it is spam, and wastes my time and resources. It has no value to me. I have never and will never purchase anything advertised to me. I view any product with an advertising budget as massively inferior to any other in the same space. Any consumer product in the present market only has 20%-30% of the cost the end user pays going to the company making the thing. If that company is spending half of that money to advertise, the product manufacturing, packaging, and logistics costs them ~5%-7% of what I am paying. The other companies in the sane space can put ~15%-25% of what I'm paying into the product. So simply avoiding anyone that advertises results in a potential of three to five times more product for my money. Any company than needs to spam market to the world is doing so because they can't survive on their reputation or merits.

Plus, my data is a fundamental part of my person. Owning a part of me is the latest form of theft of autonomy. I prefer to call it digital slavery, and those collecting and selling personal data as digital stalkers. It is a means to manipulate and alter access to information. This isn't 1999; no one is using this for banner ads in a trillion dollar industry. Search engines and the internet are no longer deterministic, you have no way of checking and balancing the echo chamber you exist within.

They're simply distracting.

It makes me waste my time in a way. Even if it's a five second commercial, I feel like it's diverting my attention to something else, which could be dangerous in some (albeit extremely) edge cases.

A case that makes me especially angry involves this application I use to consult the arrival time of several train and bus stations I usually go to. If the mission statement is to be able to know which platform should I head to in order to reach my train on time, then adding advertisements is like kicking me right at the balls, because they sure as hell are going to show up at the worst moment possible.

I don’t hate them. I just don’t care about them and the only thing they really do for me is let me know that a product exists. After that, I research it if I am interested or move on and forget about it if not.

Why do we hate commercials and advertisements?

In marketing principles, there are about 20 methods used in advertising, heres a good list and explanation of each:

https://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/business-communication/advertising-appeals-overview/

Most of these are manipulative to the audience by creating a need where one didn't exist, then providing the product to fill that need. Of these only three can be used ethically without manipulation:

• Plain Appeal
• Rational Appeal
• Statistics Appeal

However even THESE can be misused and distorted in an effort to sell a product.

In short, nearly all modern advertising lacks honesty.

My answer is that we don’t like to be marketed to, especially from companies of which we don’t have a single ounce of interest of doing business with.

Those businesses would actually prefer not marketing to you either. There's a saying in marketing "I know I'm wasting have my money on advertising. I just don't know which half". If you're being marketed to for a product or service you're not a candidate to consume, thats wasted money for the advertiser. This is one of the reasons that Facebook and Google are so valuable as advertising platforms. They have access to VERY DETAILED information on what does interest you, and advertisers desperately want to reach you with their appeals to their product or service.

Makes me wonder a lot of the time, why we aren’t attacking marketers and salespeople more often. I swear if we all focused on a week or a month by breaking the kneecaps of any salesperson or marketing agent while tormenting their families through harassment because of all of the years they’ve harassed us and fucked with us by relentless advertising.

Are you actually suggesting bodily violence against people working in advertising or sales?! That is wildly inappropriate if nothing else just based upon basic human rights most nations recognize as "free speech", such as the USA Constitution's 1st amendment.

You do attack them if you install uBlock Origin. It’s easy.