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I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us. There w

I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us. There were times when checking my mailbox (I mean physical one) was either important - taxes, administration, bills or fun - postcards from family and friends. Now it’s 99% spam. It’s not worth checking. Email - the same. Mostly spam and shitty newsletters that will 'Teach you to Be Rich...'. Professional press - instead of interesting and novel ideas and research we get sponsored junk just to sell services. Instead of honest reviews we get paid test winners. All mixed with just plain old full page commercials. TV shows - instead of good story we get some unbelievable plots that are built only to excuse showing a sponsor car, cooking pots or some other junk. Phone - few years ago a call from unknown number meant your kid was sick or you have missed something in your taxes. Now it's always spam, many times per day. I've already disabled all notifications from numbers out of my contact list. Blogs - they used to be interesting or personal, now it's either commercial spam, worthless review/comparisons or a personal brand spam. Mostly written by cheap contractors with no experience in the field. I hope it get's replaced by GPT-3 soon. The list is pretty long: - city full of ugly banners - loading screens in cash machines so you can see a commercial - commercials in movie theaters before and after the film - worthless books just to build personal brand or promote products - sidewalks full of flyers - free games for kids on mobile - web pages with popups - addictive social media practices - spam comments underneath articles and in forums - reddit communities full of spam The list goes on. If we give them more time they will find a way to destroy everything that's worth while for us. Well paid psychologists, instead of helping people will find a way to get to your brain with next junk you don't need while data scientists prepare more reports from our personal data. After that engineers will work hard to circumvent your ad blocker instead of adding new features, fixing performance or improving user experience. Sorry, for the long rant, but sometimes I simply think their mission in life is to make our lives worse. In the end I'm just happy that clickthroughs are shitty. And that they stay this way.

lukebutton 5y ago
I agree, but the answer isn't less technology the only way to solve this is with better tech
short12 5y ago
Click on random shit to cost the advertisers money lowering their roi and ruin the analytics at the same time The profile on you in various advertising scumbags databases will eventually be so inaccurate it will be worth the cost to store in a rust platter Over indulge the scummy advertisers. Cost them as much money as possible for worthless clicks. They crossed so many lines over the last couple of decades people should be embarrassed to work in that industry. Honestly if i did I would lie and say I do animal experimentation. It's basically the same thing after all
- dazc 5y ago
  By clicking random ads you may be actually encouraging publishers to keep deploying them?
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    Short-term, certainly. Long-term - negative ROI's would drive away the real customers, who are paying for those ads. Or at least that's the "Optimism set to 11" plan.
    - chhickman 5y ago
      Evil plan: Create a network distributed system (kind of like Seti@Home) specifically for doing this. If there was enough participation to make a difference the advertisers would have to invest in countermeasures which could lead to an arms-race that ultimately erodes all profit from it.
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
I completely agree with you, but this is a straight up ancient problem, and if you don't believe me, you can ask Scaurus, maker of the best gaurum in Pompeii. The "get crowd's attention and monetize it" strategy has been around since the invention of begging. It's a fundamental strategy in any large group of people. The bigger the crowd, the better it is as a strategy. Sure, social psychologists and marketers are out there making better an better spam, but that's just tuning. As long as there are large groups of people and a way to communicate with them that's even slightly cheaper than the return, it'll never stop. I suspect there is no solution, but it's interesting to consider some. What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?
- libertine 5y ago
  >What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact? You just need to look back into history and see. We've basically been increasing the reach of contact, being the end game: globalization. So you'd have: - several monopolies spread across many countries instead of Google for example; - less massive companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple; - less access to services and goods; - less emigration and brain power leakage; - less economic growth; - and the list goes on Like this board wouldn't exist if you forced that limit. Is this bad? I don't think it has to be bad necessarily, it's a choice that wasn't made in the past and some countries/organizations have benefited from it more then others.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  The first killer app of AR glasses will be blanking out adverts. I imagine putting on a pair and then all the ads just show my next calendar event or task list, or pictures of my kids. Cuts out billboards, ads on the screen you're looking at, Nike swooshes on people's shoes.
  - reportgunner 5y ago
    Do you really believe that ? The first killer app of AR glasses will be ads in places where we couldn't have ads before. Your neighbor's lawn ? Ad space. The sky ? Ad space. Whirlpool in a toilet ? Ad space.
jackjeff 5y ago
To take the counter argument. Modern technology has enabled me to avoid advertising bullshit. I live in a world devoid of ads. In the 1990s, I used to watch TV and there were lots of ads. Now I have Netflix and the ad blocker takes care of YouTube. There were magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads. Now it’s free and the adblocker takes care of the ads. Radio ads. Now podcast where you can fastforward, sometimes before you even hear the name of the company.
- Guffton 5y ago
  I don't think you have avoided it completely. Advertising is everywhere you look. Even in Netflix you still see brands in TV shows.
- scollet 5y ago
  There are still ads on Netflix and YouTube despite that, but yes I agree it is much more convenient.
- cobertos 5y ago
  And hopefully the blockers will continue to work, as long as your browser vendor, mobile phone vendor, etc, don't change the APIs to prevent or make it infeasible to do it.
- musicale 5y ago
  > magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads Computer magazines (and computer/video game magazines) had pretty good ads. They're still fun to read today. I still miss the Fry's Electronics ad sections in newspapers. A few years ago at least, print magazines still seemed to be alive in the UK, perhaps in part because they were often sold by newsagents.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  A better measure than anecdata is looking at actual advertising impressions per capita for the population at large. There's also the question of qualitative change, such as personally targeted advertising and the infrastructure and methods (massive pervasive surveillance) required to support that. Given global ad spending trends and the consequences of targeted manipulation and mass surveillance, I'd strongly suggest your life is not nearly so free of advertising's influence as you testify, and perhaps even believe.
libertine 5y ago
>I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us. Oh boy... It's that time of the week again...
OneTimePetes 5y ago
What if.. what if we made a spaceship, with cold-sleep capsules, and put them in there, sending them off, to another planet, like Golgafrincham
dazc 5y ago
I've had the same email address for over 15 years and each day I get maybe one spam email at best. I agree that nearly everything has become a marketing channel but it is possible to avoid most of it.
pembrook 5y ago
This seems to be a pervasive attitude here. Pessimistic, cynical, backwards-looking to a golden age that never existed, anti-marketing and sales, etc. If this is such a huge problem, and you seem to have a lot of passion for it, why not try to create tools to solve it for people? And if you think business is evil, it doesn’t even have to be a product or service! You could simply create a political organization to try to lobby government to right these wrongs you see in the world. Your comment is the most upvoted one on this thread so a lot of people must feel the same way. There’s only one problem. People are irrationally resistant to change and new things. Even changes that might make their lives better. To affect this change, you’ll need to get a lot of people’s attention and buy-in via this process… …called marketing. Awww crap. This means becoming the thing you hate. Maybe this is just how the world has always worked and will always work? And maybe it’s not so bad?
- omnicognate 5y ago
  No, it's bad. And while the problem is old the scale of it is new. It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you? Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society. It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lukebutton 5y ago

I agree, but the answer isn't less technology the only way to solve this is with better tech

short12 5y ago

Click on random shit to cost the advertisers money lowering their roi and ruin the analytics at the same time The profile on you in various advertising scumbags databases will eventually be so inaccurate it will be worth the cost to store in a rust platter Over indulge the scummy advertisers. Cost them as much money as possible for worthless clicks. They crossed so many lines over the last couple of decades people should be embarrassed to work in that industry. Honestly if i did I would lie and say I do animal experimentation. It's basically the same thing after all

dazc 5y ago
By clicking random ads you may be actually encouraging publishers to keep deploying them?
- bell-cot 5y ago
  Short-term, certainly. Long-term - negative ROI's would drive away the real customers, who are paying for those ads. Or at least that's the "Optimism set to 11" plan.
  - chhickman 5y ago
    Evil plan: Create a network distributed system (kind of like Seti@Home) specifically for doing this. If there was enough participation to make a difference the advertisers would have to invest in countermeasures which could lead to an arms-race that ultimately erodes all profit from it.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

I completely agree with you, but this is a straight up ancient problem, and if you don't believe me, you can ask Scaurus, maker of the best gaurum in Pompeii. The "get crowd's attention and monetize it" strategy has been around since the invention of begging. It's a fundamental strategy in any large group of people. The bigger the crowd, the better it is as a strategy. Sure, social psychologists and marketers are out there making better an better spam, but that's just tuning. As long as there are large groups of people and a way to communicate with them that's even slightly cheaper than the return, it'll never stop. I suspect there is no solution, but it's interesting to consider some. What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?

libertine 5y ago
>What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact? You just need to look back into history and see. We've basically been increasing the reach of contact, being the end game: globalization. So you'd have: - several monopolies spread across many countries instead of Google for example; - less massive companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple; - less access to services and goods; - less emigration and brain power leakage; - less economic growth; - and the list goes on Like this board wouldn't exist if you forced that limit. Is this bad? I don't think it has to be bad necessarily, it's a choice that wasn't made in the past and some countries/organizations have benefited from it more then others.
lordnacho 5y ago
The first killer app of AR glasses will be blanking out adverts. I imagine putting on a pair and then all the ads just show my next calendar event or task list, or pictures of my kids. Cuts out billboards, ads on the screen you're looking at, Nike swooshes on people's shoes.
- reportgunner 5y ago
  Do you really believe that ? The first killer app of AR glasses will be ads in places where we couldn't have ads before. Your neighbor's lawn ? Ad space. The sky ? Ad space. Whirlpool in a toilet ? Ad space.

jackjeff 5y ago

To take the counter argument. Modern technology has enabled me to avoid advertising bullshit. I live in a world devoid of ads. In the 1990s, I used to watch TV and there were lots of ads. Now I have Netflix and the ad blocker takes care of YouTube. There were magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads. Now it’s free and the adblocker takes care of the ads. Radio ads. Now podcast where you can fastforward, sometimes before you even hear the name of the company.

Guffton 5y ago
I don't think you have avoided it completely. Advertising is everywhere you look. Even in Netflix you still see brands in TV shows.
scollet 5y ago
There are still ads on Netflix and YouTube despite that, but yes I agree it is much more convenient.
cobertos 5y ago
And hopefully the blockers will continue to work, as long as your browser vendor, mobile phone vendor, etc, don't change the APIs to prevent or make it infeasible to do it.
musicale 5y ago
> magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads Computer magazines (and computer/video game magazines) had pretty good ads. They're still fun to read today. I still miss the Fry's Electronics ad sections in newspapers. A few years ago at least, print magazines still seemed to be alive in the UK, perhaps in part because they were often sold by newsagents.
dredmorbius 5y ago
A better measure than anecdata is looking at actual advertising impressions per capita for the population at large. There's also the question of qualitative change, such as personally targeted advertising and the infrastructure and methods (massive pervasive surveillance) required to support that. Given global ad spending trends and the consequences of targeted manipulation and mass surveillance, I'd strongly suggest your life is not nearly so free of advertising's influence as you testify, and perhaps even believe.

libertine 5y ago

>I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us. Oh boy... It's that time of the week again...

OneTimePetes 5y ago

What if.. what if we made a spaceship, with cold-sleep capsules, and put them in there, sending them off, to another planet, like Golgafrincham

dazc 5y ago

I've had the same email address for over 15 years and each day I get maybe one spam email at best. I agree that nearly everything has become a marketing channel but it is possible to avoid most of it.

pembrook 5y ago

This seems to be a pervasive attitude here. Pessimistic, cynical, backwards-looking to a golden age that never existed, anti-marketing and sales, etc. If this is such a huge problem, and you seem to have a lot of passion for it, why not try to create tools to solve it for people? And if you think business is evil, it doesn’t even have to be a product or service! You could simply create a political organization to try to lobby government to right these wrongs you see in the world. Your comment is the most upvoted one on this thread so a lot of people must feel the same way. There’s only one problem. People are irrationally resistant to change and new things. Even changes that might make their lives better. To affect this change, you’ll need to get a lot of people’s attention and buy-in via this process… …called marketing. Awww crap. This means becoming the thing you hate. Maybe this is just how the world has always worked and will always work? And maybe it’s not so bad?

omnicognate 5y ago
No, it's bad. And while the problem is old the scale of it is new. It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you? Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society. It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]