9 ms·

The whole advertisement industry and everything related to it is rotten. Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks, creepy things like t

The whole advertisement industry and everything related to it is rotten. Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks, creepy things like these coolers, always on mics, analytics about EVERYTHING, store smells and "branding, profiling and recommendation engines...I could go on and on about how advertisement is infuriating today. In old days, you might see ads in a magazine or a newspaper in the same way we see ads on Google, but they didn't have the kind of people coming up with insanely creepy ideas like today. I don't want to hang out with these folks. Who are these people? It is infuriating. Are there any sane alternatives to advertisement today? I don't want banners and flashing ads. Is there a model of advertisement which is "pull" instead of "push"? Kind of like trade shows but for the internet? I LOVE going to trade shows. There is so much value as an industrial consumer (I am an engineer) in attending trade shows - they provide real life demonstrations, new technology, latest methods and processes, face-to-face with people and I honestly don't mind people scanning my badges because there is consent.

hedora 8y ago
Display ads are the sane alternative you are asking for. Imagine the article had an ad for a privacy-respecting inventory prediction and optimization tool for grocers, and maybe a second ad for an ad blocker. That’d be totally cool from a privacy perspective (no tracking), and the ad purchasers would be paying a premium (prime real estate) to the site (actual content producers). However, it is harder to scale, I guess.
exodust 8y ago
Here in Australia they recently installed video advertising screens at many city tram stops in Melbourne. They are portrait-orientated 6 feet tall screens installed in the tram shelter wall where people stand and lean. The problem is on hot days these displays heat up. The fans inside start spinning fast and noisy. Hot air is blown out the bottom, right at people standing waiting for the tram, and the whole display is too hot and noisy to lean against or stand near. Consumers and the general public are always the last to benefit from "modern" advertising technology. It's always someone else who benefits, never the general public, who must cop noisy hot, overly bright video displays, or creepy surveillance so that someone makes more money selling those spaces. It's how the modern world is at the moment.
- dingaling 8y ago
  Horrid. And poorly designed by the sounds of it, placing the cooling vents where they could be obstructed. Would seem more logical to have the inlet at the base and the outlet on the roof to leverage natural convection.
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    They were probably installed upside-down.
m463 8y ago
What makes me sad is that the promise and joy of computers I've experienced most of my life has been coopted. It seems business models and revenue streams have prevented the pendulum from swinging the other way.
- tunap 8y ago
  14yo me could not fathom the how/why Dune's Butlerian Jihad could ever be conceived. Web 2.0 and modern spyware economics enlightened me, what these monsters could do w/ AI & Quantum Computing is terrifying, frankly. Thank Shai Hulud Fecebook deemed me unworthy(too old) and deleted my account 15 years ago.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks Because we didn't outlaw them, and mostly liberalised regulations around advertising. If they can, they will. It really does seem to be as simple as that.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Doing this would be explicitly illegal in the EU in light of GDPR. Essentially it is unauthorised personal data collection and you cannot sanitize it enough in the device. No, you cannot click through a drink.
- grkvlt 8y ago
  You say today's marketing but this has been going on for a while now...! It's been at least sixty years since Vance Packard's [0] 1957 book, 'The Hidden Persuaders' was published, which was probably the first time the public learned about these tricks. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    I was quoting parent, but the worst tricks have mostly been enabled by tech - the sixties through the millennium seem quite benign compared to today.
NoPicklez 8y ago
Well it's simple, because the better you can advertise and market to individuals, the more product you can sell and the more money you can generate. And if it's your business to market to people and generate profit, you are more inclined to find any method you can to market to people before your competitors beat you to the punch. The corporate world and particularly finance industries have been using data to make better informed decisions for decades. The creepiness of advertising I don't mind, because it's simply based on data to provide better recommendations and makes sense if you have the data. For me it's the frequency of advertisements being shown to me all the time. If I had to choose, I'd rather have more informed advertisements than a massive array on them. For example, when watching TV if I have to see commercials I'd rather see them about the latest graphics cards than about the new L'Oreal skin cream.
wwweston 8y ago
> Is there a model of advertisement which is "pull" instead of "push"? Search. And contextual ads. Really pretty much what Google executed its meteoric rise on. But so 2005, right? And the reason they're creepy today, along with the rest of the surveillance economy, is that wasn't enough.
- spectramax 8y ago
  Good point. I think today DuckDuckGo is using contextual ads like Google used to do in 2005. I grew up in the 90's so I don't remember much about Yellow Pages. Wouldn't it be great to have a Yellow Page full of, say for example, headphone manufacturers? As a company, they pay a monthly fee to be on the list just like old Yellow Pages. When I am thinking about purchasing Headphones, I go to this list (which btw would be devoid of any referral links to Amazon, etc. and would only have the subscription of the list membership as a revenue model) and see a list of various manufacturers. Clicking the link takes me to a page that describes their products in all its glory - like a full page ad. I am ready to be convinced and I wouldn't mind all kinds of ways to convince me why I should buy your headphones. If I don't like it, I hit back and I am now looking at other manufacturers. May be a startup idea? This would truly be a "pull" because I am actively seeking headphones and I don't want to go to some stupid article titled "Top 10 headphones of 2019!" full of bullshit opinions only to get me to click a referral link.
rchaud 8y ago
> Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks A few key factors: 1) Outside of maybe the controlled substances market, it's hard to separate people from their money. 2) B2C businesses can't survive on a simple buyer-seller relationship anymore, so they are branching into analytics-heavy BS like "customer experience" and "service design", which ironically involves a lot of covert crap like this 3) The biggest tech companies in the world harvest and sell data to B2B customers. You'll be hard pressed to find a successful software company not Apple) in this day and age that's actually selling something not based around optimizing your sales funnel and theoretically "making you more money".

hedora 8y ago

Display ads are the sane alternative you are asking for. Imagine the article had an ad for a privacy-respecting inventory prediction and optimization tool for grocers, and maybe a second ad for an ad blocker. That’d be totally cool from a privacy perspective (no tracking), and the ad purchasers would be paying a premium (prime real estate) to the site (actual content producers). However, it is harder to scale, I guess.

exodust 8y ago

Here in Australia they recently installed video advertising screens at many city tram stops in Melbourne. They are portrait-orientated 6 feet tall screens installed in the tram shelter wall where people stand and lean. The problem is on hot days these displays heat up. The fans inside start spinning fast and noisy. Hot air is blown out the bottom, right at people standing waiting for the tram, and the whole display is too hot and noisy to lean against or stand near. Consumers and the general public are always the last to benefit from "modern" advertising technology. It's always someone else who benefits, never the general public, who must cop noisy hot, overly bright video displays, or creepy surveillance so that someone makes more money selling those spaces. It's how the modern world is at the moment.

dingaling 8y ago
Horrid. And poorly designed by the sounds of it, placing the cooling vents where they could be obstructed. Would seem more logical to have the inlet at the base and the outlet on the roof to leverage natural convection.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  They were probably installed upside-down.

m463 8y ago

What makes me sad is that the promise and joy of computers I've experienced most of my life has been coopted. It seems business models and revenue streams have prevented the pendulum from swinging the other way.

tunap 8y ago
14yo me could not fathom the how/why Dune's Butlerian Jihad could ever be conceived. Web 2.0 and modern spyware economics enlightened me, what these monsters could do w/ AI & Quantum Computing is terrifying, frankly. Thank Shai Hulud Fecebook deemed me unworthy(too old) and deleted my account 15 years ago.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

> Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks Because we didn't outlaw them, and mostly liberalised regulations around advertising. If they can, they will. It really does seem to be as simple as that.

AstralStorm 8y ago
Doing this would be explicitly illegal in the EU in light of GDPR. Essentially it is unauthorised personal data collection and you cannot sanitize it enough in the device. No, you cannot click through a drink.
grkvlt 8y ago
You say today's marketing but this has been going on for a while now...! It's been at least sixty years since Vance Packard's [0] 1957 book, 'The Hidden Persuaders' was published, which was probably the first time the public learned about these tricks. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  I was quoting parent, but the worst tricks have mostly been enabled by tech - the sixties through the millennium seem quite benign compared to today.

NoPicklez 8y ago

Well it's simple, because the better you can advertise and market to individuals, the more product you can sell and the more money you can generate. And if it's your business to market to people and generate profit, you are more inclined to find any method you can to market to people before your competitors beat you to the punch. The corporate world and particularly finance industries have been using data to make better informed decisions for decades. The creepiness of advertising I don't mind, because it's simply based on data to provide better recommendations and makes sense if you have the data. For me it's the frequency of advertisements being shown to me all the time. If I had to choose, I'd rather have more informed advertisements than a massive array on them. For example, when watching TV if I have to see commercials I'd rather see them about the latest graphics cards than about the new L'Oreal skin cream.

wwweston 8y ago

> Is there a model of advertisement which is "pull" instead of "push"? Search. And contextual ads. Really pretty much what Google executed its meteoric rise on. But so 2005, right? And the reason they're creepy today, along with the rest of the surveillance economy, is that wasn't enough.

spectramax 8y ago
Good point. I think today DuckDuckGo is using contextual ads like Google used to do in 2005. I grew up in the 90's so I don't remember much about Yellow Pages. Wouldn't it be great to have a Yellow Page full of, say for example, headphone manufacturers? As a company, they pay a monthly fee to be on the list just like old Yellow Pages. When I am thinking about purchasing Headphones, I go to this list (which btw would be devoid of any referral links to Amazon, etc. and would only have the subscription of the list membership as a revenue model) and see a list of various manufacturers. Clicking the link takes me to a page that describes their products in all its glory - like a full page ad. I am ready to be convinced and I wouldn't mind all kinds of ways to convince me why I should buy your headphones. If I don't like it, I hit back and I am now looking at other manufacturers. May be a startup idea? This would truly be a "pull" because I am actively seeking headphones and I don't want to go to some stupid article titled "Top 10 headphones of 2019!" full of bullshit opinions only to get me to click a referral link.

rchaud 8y ago

> Why is today's marketing so filled with vile psychological tricks A few key factors: 1) Outside of maybe the controlled substances market, it's hard to separate people from their money. 2) B2C businesses can't survive on a simple buyer-seller relationship anymore, so they are branching into analytics-heavy BS like "customer experience" and "service design", which ironically involves a lot of covert crap like this 3) The biggest tech companies in the world harvest and sell data to B2B customers. You'll be hard pressed to find a successful software company not Apple) in this day and age that's actually selling something not based around optimizing your sales funnel and theoretically "making you more money".