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Sorry, Mad Men. The Ad Revolution Is Here
- techdmn 2y agoI like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, similar to the way advertising certain products (alcohol, tobacco, medication) is banned in some countries. Sure you can put a sign above the front door of your business, and sure you can buy a slot in the yellow pages, but that's all folks. We'd need different funding models for radio, television and much of the internet, but we're smart, we can figure it out.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThe best concert I ever went to was one I'd never have known about if not for a TV commercial. I don't follow music news and don't drive by the venue to look at the marquee. I hate commercials, they're annoying, I mute/skip them all but that one got through and it's made me consider that you can be too extremist about this like anything else. To an extent, our interests are aligned with advertisers. Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. If there's a new pizza place open on a street I don't drive down, I'd like to know. Another example. I realized I haven't seen anything but already-familiar movies in recent years because I've closed off all avenues to seeing trailers for movies I'm not already sold on.
- janice1999 2y ago> Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. You may be intelligent as an individual but your adversary has teams of PhDs, decades of psychological research and tons of personal information on you, now parsed and analysed by AI to target you. Thinking you can see "raw information" is very naive.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThe things you're saying are real on the scale of the entire audience, advertising does work in the aggregate. But I'm stubborn and frugal and skeptical so I'm not buying some new product unless the stars align. I trust myself to be able to hear that it exists from a biased source. Even if you don't believe the claim that X is the best product, it's good to know it exists as a starting point for if/when you ever start research on the options.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoIf you do any groceries in bigger markets, the shelf positioning and location of the aisle is also a part of advertising. Companies pay premiums for some spots.
- Fluorescence 2y agoAs a fellow frugal sceptic, that won't impact us much. We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value. I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary. What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!
- cobertos 2y agoIt'd just be nice if it was consensual. It is resource intensive to try to opt out of/avoid the ad-based society. And you never truly can as some data sharing and ad watching is almost compulsory (video/sound ads at gas pumps). To be fair, I've gotten some great ads for things I never would have found myself, on places like Instagram. And yet I didn't get to choose when or how the ads were delivered.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoCable TV commercials have been more or less consensual since DVRs came out in 1999. Start watching a show late and fast forward the commercials. The internet taking the anonymity and freedom to skip ads away from us is the main problem.
- tharkun__ 2y agoIsn't that the same thing? (Cable) TV ads are not more consensual just because you were using the ad blocker of the time: DVR
- tensor 2y agoAdvertising should be opt-in, and user tuneable. I avoid advertising in my life as much as possible, but yet, I still find out about all the cool local things going on. How? I use instagram, where I follow things that interest me. The key difference here is that I'm in control. I use it only when I feel like it, I've disabled all its notifications. That said, instagram still has a bunch of obnoxious ads I don't want. It's really not as user tunable as the "opt-in bazar" model should be. But that is the solution, ads should be 100% opt-in. You should be in control of when you want to go browsing vendor wares, and when you do that then sure they can hawk their stuff to you, but otherwise not.
- M95D 2y agoThat's called news, not ads.
- Fluorescence 2y agoThere are perverse incentives at work. Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free. Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.
- emchammer 2y agoIn your hypothetical universe, is it legal to have a vending machine in public that says "Drink Slurm: it's highly addictive"?
- euroderf 2y agoDepends. Does it have electrolytes ?
- selimthegrim 2y agoIt cools the HPC clusters.
- usefulcat 2y agoIt's what plants crave.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- morsch 2y agoI think we should just tax it at 100%. Easier than banning it outright.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago>I like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, Don't just imagine. Think. There must be some argument that advertisement isn't the same thing as the "speech" in free speech. I haven't figured it out, but I keep hoping someone else will.
- xigoi 2y agoFreedom of speech is about being able to state your opinion, not about being able to say anything, so it should not cover advertising.
- fallingknife 2y agoMy opinion is that Brawndo is the best drink out there and always for a reasonable price! Brawndo, it's got what plants crave!
- graemep 2y agoThere are many different funding models for media: hypothecated taxes, subscriptions, donations, merch... Why does it have to be an alternate universe? I have been thinking the same and there it would not be easy, but it could be done, and even if we had people finding lots of loopholes it would greatly restrict advertising.
- tomjen3 2y agoYour are missing: interest by individuals, information corporations wants out (no grocery store chain would ever think of putting a paygate on its opening hours), and think tanks. Besides, even in the extreme where no new media is ever created, would that be so bad? Anna's archive has 38 million books. You would be challenged to even read the index in a lifetime.
- tomjen3 2y agoI dream of a world where all advertising is in one place, and where I can go and look up things, when I want to. Where I can type a problem that I have into a bot and then it can show me suggested solutions for that problem: this could be as simple as "my car is too dirty" to "how do I communicate with by grandfather, who is both nearly deaf and not technical enough to send sms?" I don't want ads to show up everywhere, and I don't want them to tell me that they have a solution to my problem _without knowing what my problem is_. I have complained about it before (partly in the wain hope the some facebook engineers will see it), that Facebook does not use the data I freely give it to base its ads on[0], but only what its AI can match me with. In short, I think there is a time and place for me to enter transaction mode - but not with ads that assume their are smarter or know me better than I do, and not when I get interrupted. [0]: I am pretty good at blocking third party tracking, but I did tell them what school I went to, that I studied computer science, and when I did. Any basic human would be able to infer that I might like nerdy things and that I have a relatively high income. FB continually feed me slop ads.
- smcnally 2y ago“Banned” means someone else decides what’s considered advertising. Does it include Monday Night Football brought to you by MSFT Surface? The MLB World Series powered by GOOG? Or Pepsi’s American Idol? Stop buying things from advertisers and it will die on its own.
- Fargren 2y ago"Vote with your wallet" works for voting for things, but it has an abysmal track record when it comes to voting against things. It only works in the case organized boycotts, and only for a vanishing minority of those.
- pembrook 2y agoIt’s amusing to me how I just read a thread on HN where the top comment was about the unintended consequences of regulation resulting in far worse outcomes than the problem they set out to solve. Meanwhile, at the top of this thread, we have someone advocating seizing control of all public speech and media to forcibly eliminate any perceived advertising messaging. With very little thought in the replies paid toward the potential unintended consequences. What could possibly go wrong creating a centralized body to police all speech for perceived commercial intent. I’m sure it would be all roses and sunshine!
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"We'd need different funding models for radio, television and much of the internet." I thought the internet was funded by internet subscriber fees. What are we paying ISPs for. Advertisers do not pay our internet access fees. Any internet subscriber can publish on the internet. No advertisers needed. Owning a radio station or TV channel is expensive and may require funding from advertisers. But an internet subscription is affordable in the same way as a TV set or a radio receiver. If an internet subscriber has a reachable IP address then she can publish.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoThere would be minimal content without payment. There would be minimal payment without advertising. People are overwhelmingly unwilling to pay for online content.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoInternet subbscribers routinely produce and publish content to be consumed by other subscribers without payment. (Middlemen calling themselves "tech" companies have created websites to exploit this phenomenon.) For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment. Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.
- jklinger410 2y agoThis is a PR puff piece.
- fhubdull 2y ago> During an hour-long call this past week to sell investors on the virtues of a $30 billion merger of two advertising giants, data and technology came up a dozen times each. AI, eight times. “Creativity” was uttered once. Dark portents indeed. When these koolaid drinkers realise what they have done, make sure you demand triple your old rate to bail them out.
- cobertos 2y agoWill they need a bail out? The lifetime of ad content is so short and is always being replaced such that the quality need not be high. ML can more than achieve it. The code and creative I've seen and worked with on advert sites fits what I've seen ML do already.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoThe problem is, Meta et al. has shown their ad targeting ML models are best in class, and drive sales. So, these investors want a piece of that pie.
- seydor 2y agoI wonder how this works in a world where production costs rise due to lack of workers and the elderly are the richest consumers
- carlosjobim 2y agoThe whole industrialized world is living this already, so you just have to look around.
- anonfordays 2y agoAI ad blockers are the future. Trained AI models that can sniff ads out with incredible accuracy. I'd pay for such a service.
- smcnally 2y agoAI anti-ad blockers are part of that same future. Brought to you by the same company who brought you the ad blockers!
- Beijinger 2y agoI don't mind advertising. In seasonal amounts and targeted. In fact, I sometimes buy B2B magazines just to check out the ads. This being said, most online ads as scum, fraud and clickbait. Outbrain anyone?
- debacle 2y agoThe ad revolution is here, but not in the way people think. How many more ads can Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook add? Twitch plays 8 minute ad reels, my Facebook feed is a cesspool, and YouTube would probably be bad if I didn't block all ads on the platform. Amazon searches are close to 50% ads for the first ~30 results. Even DuckDuckGo is getting into the dark patterns - it's almost impossible to differentiate what is an ad vs a genuine search result. Is ARPU up? Or is it much flatter than these companies would like?
- jahnu 2y agoWhat is DDG doing?
- imiric 2y agoI can't figure out what the point of this article is, but let's talk about advertising and AI, since that seems to be a primary focus. Advertisers using generative AI to create ad campaigns is a diversion at best. The only use of AI advertisers are interested in is how they can embed ads directly in the personal AI assistants the world is starting to use. If a conversational AI model can be manipulated to casually mention a specific brand in its output at precisely the right moment, then that's the most accurate form of targeting, with the highest chance of engagement. AI assistants are trusted much more than any search engine, or any media we consume, so it's only a matter of time until we start seeing these integrations with mainstream models. No AI service provider will be able to resist cashing in on the advertising dollar, regardless of what their "benefit of all humankind" marketing agenda claims. They're sitting on a data gold mine much larger than the one adtech currently controls, with user demand that will eventually surpass social media and entertainment sites. The opportunity to monetize AI is enormous, and that's the next advertising frontier. Advertising is a scourge on humanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
- Timber-6539 2y agoI doubt that is where the most advertising value on AI platforms will be created. Text as a medium has never been less relevant in a multi media digital world. I can think of something like people generating a short video and some of the frames innocently containing brand placements. If people can share AI generations and these creations receive some semblance of popularity, that's where you will find advertisers. Most of the digital ad dollar value is created around social platforms. This recipe for success is already proven.
- imiric 2y agoI wasn't referring to just LLMs, but AI assistants in general, regardless if the medium is text, audio or video. Ad placement will certainly also be part of utilitarian generators as we know them today, but the real value of assistants is that they will be personal, and a major part of our lives. This means that the trust will be much higher, and advertisers will certainly want to exploit this.
- worik 2y agoI almost never see ads I live in a (mostly) ad free bubble, yay! "Persuading people to buy things they don't want, with money they don't have, to impress friends who don't care" The worst of the worst.
- smcnally 2y ago> the former chief creative officer of Leo Burnett US, recalls one agency trying to lure her in the ’90s with a stunning oceanfront house in Rye, N.Y. That’s quite creative or a great troll: Rye, NY has no oceanfront. It does have a Playland on the Long Island Sound.
- jareklupinski 2y agoit was a package deal comes with a former Swiss Navy vessel
- sharpshadow 2y agoSome comment on the original article pointed out that the merger is about firing people which makes sense.
- stuartjohnson12 2y agohttps://archive.is/oBu22 https://archive.is/oBu22
- maivjj 2y agoBoth the creatives in media (all forms - ads, news, sports, movies, radio, tv, games etc) and the ad tech crowd don't talk about barely growing global disposable income. Meanwhile they are furiously producing more and more content (ie real estate for ads). What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand? Naturally hiring will slow, mergers and consolidation, cost cutting via relying on tech and more automation. We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked. In both time and cash. They just don't like talking about it.
- germinalphrase 2y agoThere’s a reason Meta is pouring so much into VR/AR…
- theGnuMe 2y agoIt’s the future for sure.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoIt's certainly another frontier of exploitation, but we have yet to see any signals of significant demand. Well, maybe Roblox is sort of that signal. But meta's vision seems pretty disconnected from any signal that people want to interact this way. Besides, haven't we already been through this with second life?
- usrusr 2y agoAdvertisement has rarely not been a zero sum game. Disposable income will be disposed of and ads exist to influence the direction the money moves.
- xnx 2y agoAttention is the real estate for ads. The hope is always to steal more attention (time) from your audience that they are giving to things that don't contain ads (sleeping, walking in nature, talking to friends) or your competitors content.