I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.
Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?
And the advertisers seem to not care about context. I’ll be watching some awful disaster documentary then an ad for, say, detergent will pop up. Now I associate your product with a terrible event. The bombarding too. Do they think if I didn’t switch car insurance the first 100 times I saw the ad the 101st will do the trick? And I don’t buy the “some people may be seeing it for the first time” excuse. The ads were every few minutes.
That’s not why it’s repeated a 1000 times, it’s so when you actually do want to buy something in that category you’re more likely to buy theirs because it’s familiar.
See I’ve never understood how that worked because it has the complete opposite effect on me.
The more I see a certain product advertised the less likely I am to ever willingly purchase that product from that company.
I’m not convinced it does work. Freakonomics did a bit on marketing awhile back and the researchers they talked to said ad dollars were pretty inefficient and that companies would probably net a larger profit by reducing TV advertising.
Transcript of part 1
More anecdotally, they talk about two corporate tests in digital marketing (Ebay and P&G) that seem to indicate that digital marketing isn’t paying off for companies either.
Transcript of part 2
Personally this hurts my soul even more knowing the only people profiting are the middlemen who engineer their products to be objectively worse so that they can shove ineffective ads in my face.
That only applies to the ones you consciously think about. No one is immune to advertising.
Same. There’s a product I’ve used for years and I’m now getting ads for on youtube and it’s completely put me off of using it again. Like fuck off already.
Same. Being annoyed by excessive ads is a surefire way for me to blacklist a product or company. Particularly obnoxious ads can do it with just a single exposure.
I won’t ever buy a car from Frank Lita because of how obnoxious their ads are.
Not even just out of spite but also because I can‘t help but wonder how bad the product must be if it needs that amount of advertising to sell.
Oh hello fellow St. Louisan.
Oh hai