6 ms·

Advertising Shits in Your Head

77 points by auxym 12y ago

l33tbro 12y ago
How is "brandalism" anything but "culture jamming" rebranded? The rhetoric here reads like the same undergraduate and naive ideas my friends and I used to espouse before we scaled billboards and defaced their images 15 years ago dressed as workers. I'm not knocking their idealism for a minute (frankly, our culture need less cynicism these days), but let's not kid ourselves about these ideas being even remotely progressive.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Brandalism seems to be a specific project of culture jamming, not a new word for the existing concept.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    We've had a much better neologism for jamming advertising logos and symbols for a while already - "subvertising".
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Brandalism seems to include subvertising, but not just.
boot13 12y ago
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
- thomasahle 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik
kaiku 12y ago
> "Public space is an arena in which no single authority should reign and multiple voices should be heard, so we started from a profoundly democratic conviction that the public sphere is a place for communication, a place where people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights." As we spend more time buried in mobile phones and other screens, our eyes and hands in intimate connection with these devices, I wonder how the artists would examine "private" spaces like those. Could advertisements – which demand attention and energy, even without active mental application – more damaging in this smaller sphere than in the public one? I like the idea of and motivation behind reclaiming of public space. The artists nod toward property ownership and the "rights" of advertisers, following it with, "no, thank you."
cies 12y ago
Let me take this opportunity to say: Thanks YC for keeping HN ad-free! So even when I occasionally read it from a browser w/o an ad-blocker installed, I still enjoy the content in peace.
- samsolomon 12y ago
  I don't think this is entirely true. Y-Combinator uses Hacker News as a vehicle to attract the best technology talent in the world and display job openings to that talent. I love HN and have no issues with YC doing that, but let's not pretend that it is entirely altruistic.
  - mikecsh 12y ago
    Ad-free != altruistic
    - icebraining 12y ago
      But it's not ad-free, the ads[1] just blend in better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
      - cies 12y ago
        Good point :)
- _delirium 12y ago
  HN does have ads, just not a lot of them. Once or twice a day there's a recruiting ad for a YC firm inserted among the submitted stories. Doesn't have comments or upvote/flag buttons, and is just inserted between the regular stories according to some algorithm. Similar format to the way Twitter displays ads inserted among tweets that look like a tweet, except YC only makes the space available to companies in its incubator, rather than selling it.
- MrMan 12y ago
  hN is an advertisement / product-placement.
emsy 12y ago
Relevant: http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-explicit/ http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-expli...
tomjen3 12y ago
Not unlike that hideos website design.
- nodejsisbest 12y ago
  I came, Ctrl + F, and found this. Thanks for saying what had to be said. That yellow background hurt me. No node.js developer would do that.
DanAndersen 12y ago
This is why I have no moral qualms about using adblockers or anything like that. I'm thankful that I grew up in a family where the tradition was to always mute commercials on the TV. I can't help but think that if we didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have them. "You can't choose not to listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like stealing!" My main issue with ads is the power disparity that can result. Those in charge of advertising and marketing have powerful tools at their disposal -- a wealth of data about how people respond, real-time analytics and A/B testing down to the pixel level to optimize that last percentage point of audience capture, and training in the nature of cognitive biases and how to exploit them. It's a hacking war in people's minds, and against such attackers, what defenses does the average person have? To what degree are untrained people able to resist these influences but by adblocking?
- Sven7 12y ago
  Fully agree. It is all about hacking people's minds. Taking advantage of people's weaknesses and ignorance has never happened at the speed and scale they happen today. It's also why I see inequality just getting worse.
- a3n 12y ago
  > I can't help but think that if we didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have them. "You can't choose not to listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like stealing!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism Jamie Kellner, former chairman and chief executive officer of Turner Broadcasting System, said: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming." And there was a lawsuit over at least one PVR's commercial skipping feature: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.html http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.ht...
  - DanAndersen 12y ago
tqi 12y ago
What does the "right for us to choose our own identities, without coercion or persuasion" look like? Isn't this fundamentally also an attempt to curate what influences people experience, just via guerrilla tactics instead of money?
- throwaway2048 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
oldmanjay 12y ago
I'm not on board with the tone do this article. evangelism is too strident by nature. this is essentially just as much marketing as someone trying to sell me something, but these people are trying to tell me how to think, which I find even worse.
- RodericDay 12y ago
  http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977 http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977 > What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
fragsworth 12y ago
Not all advertising is bad. For small companies and lesser-known products, advertising serves a purpose by exposing us to things we wouldn't otherwise be aware of. It allows valuable products to gain customers faster than through word-of-mouth, which is usually very inefficient and slow unless your "viral factor" is extremely high. Some advertising (e.g. Coke, McDonald's) is an attempt to remind us and make us feel good about a product that we already know about, and that's the kind of advertising that "shits in your head" and doesn't seem to provide any value to the world. But there's other stuff that gets advertised, and we shouldn't vilify all advertising just because some of it is bad.
calinet6 12y ago
A new thought has become clear to me recently: Advertising is a society virus. It's designed to infect and spread, enabling the growth of the infection at the expense of the human hosts. It piggybacks off receptors we use for rational thought and perception and uses them against us. Never is this more clear than on the myriad of clickbait viral media sites where the virus is so clear and obvious and doesn't even try to hide itself. It's clear that the purpose of the site is to force itself upon your mental pathways in an attempt to spread by sheer statistics. Such a strange symbiosis: our collectives simultaneously nourishing us in our search for sustainable life and meaningful work, and at the same time discovering any and all pathways to sap value from us in any way it can be done; some genuine, others malignant. This is the new evolution. Society is the organism.

77 points by auxym 12y ago

How is "brandalism" anything but "culture jamming" rebranded? The rhetoric here reads like the same undergraduate and naive ideas my friends and I used to espouse before we scaled billboards and defaced their images 15 years ago dressed as workers. I'm not knocking their idealism for a minute (frankly, our culture need less cynicism these days), but let's not kid ourselves about these ideas being even remotely progressive.

icebraining 12y ago
Brandalism seems to be a specific project of culture jamming, not a new word for the existing concept.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  We've had a much better neologism for jamming advertising logos and symbols for a while already - "subvertising".
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Brandalism seems to include subvertising, but not just.

boot13 12y ago

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

thomasahle 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik

kaiku 12y ago

> "Public space is an arena in which no single authority should reign and multiple voices should be heard, so we started from a profoundly democratic conviction that the public sphere is a place for communication, a place where people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights." As we spend more time buried in mobile phones and other screens, our eyes and hands in intimate connection with these devices, I wonder how the artists would examine "private" spaces like those. Could advertisements – which demand attention and energy, even without active mental application – more damaging in this smaller sphere than in the public one? I like the idea of and motivation behind reclaiming of public space. The artists nod toward property ownership and the "rights" of advertisers, following it with, "no, thank you."

cies 12y ago

Let me take this opportunity to say: Thanks YC for keeping HN ad-free! So even when I occasionally read it from a browser w/o an ad-blocker installed, I still enjoy the content in peace.

samsolomon 12y ago
I don't think this is entirely true. Y-Combinator uses Hacker News as a vehicle to attract the best technology talent in the world and display job openings to that talent. I love HN and have no issues with YC doing that, but let's not pretend that it is entirely altruistic.
- mikecsh 12y ago
  Ad-free != altruistic
  - icebraining 12y ago
    But it's not ad-free, the ads[1] just blend in better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
    - cies 12y ago
      Good point :)
_delirium 12y ago
HN does have ads, just not a lot of them. Once or twice a day there's a recruiting ad for a YC firm inserted among the submitted stories. Doesn't have comments or upvote/flag buttons, and is just inserted between the regular stories according to some algorithm. Similar format to the way Twitter displays ads inserted among tweets that look like a tweet, except YC only makes the space available to companies in its incubator, rather than selling it.
MrMan 12y ago
hN is an advertisement / product-placement.

emsy 12y ago

Relevant: http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-explicit/ http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-expli...

tomjen3 12y ago

Not unlike that hideos website design.

nodejsisbest 12y ago
I came, Ctrl + F, and found this. Thanks for saying what had to be said. That yellow background hurt me. No node.js developer would do that.

DanAndersen 12y ago

This is why I have no moral qualms about using adblockers or anything like that. I'm thankful that I grew up in a family where the tradition was to always mute commercials on the TV. I can't help but think that if we didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have them. "You can't choose not to listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like stealing!" My main issue with ads is the power disparity that can result. Those in charge of advertising and marketing have powerful tools at their disposal -- a wealth of data about how people respond, real-time analytics and A/B testing down to the pixel level to optimize that last percentage point of audience capture, and training in the nature of cognitive biases and how to exploit them. It's a hacking war in people's minds, and against such attackers, what defenses does the average person have? To what degree are untrained people able to resist these influences but by adblocking?

Sven7 12y ago
Fully agree. It is all about hacking people's minds. Taking advantage of people's weaknesses and ignorance has never happened at the speed and scale they happen today. It's also why I see inequality just getting worse.
a3n 12y ago
> I can't help but think that if we didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have them. "You can't choose not to listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like stealing!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism Jamie Kellner, former chairman and chief executive officer of Turner Broadcasting System, said: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming." And there was a lawsuit over at least one PVR's commercial skipping feature: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.html http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.ht...
- DanAndersen 12y ago

tqi 12y ago

What does the "right for us to choose our own identities, without coercion or persuasion" look like? Isn't this fundamentally also an attempt to curate what influences people experience, just via guerrilla tactics instead of money?

throwaway2048 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

oldmanjay 12y ago

I'm not on board with the tone do this article. evangelism is too strident by nature. this is essentially just as much marketing as someone trying to sell me something, but these people are trying to tell me how to think, which I find even worse.

RodericDay 12y ago
http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977 http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977 > What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

fragsworth 12y ago

Not all advertising is bad. For small companies and lesser-known products, advertising serves a purpose by exposing us to things we wouldn't otherwise be aware of. It allows valuable products to gain customers faster than through word-of-mouth, which is usually very inefficient and slow unless your "viral factor" is extremely high. Some advertising (e.g. Coke, McDonald's) is an attempt to remind us and make us feel good about a product that we already know about, and that's the kind of advertising that "shits in your head" and doesn't seem to provide any value to the world. But there's other stuff that gets advertised, and we shouldn't vilify all advertising just because some of it is bad.

calinet6 12y ago

A new thought has become clear to me recently: Advertising is a society virus. It's designed to infect and spread, enabling the growth of the infection at the expense of the human hosts. It piggybacks off receptors we use for rational thought and perception and uses them against us. Never is this more clear than on the myriad of clickbait viral media sites where the virus is so clear and obvious and doesn't even try to hide itself. It's clear that the purpose of the site is to force itself upon your mental pathways in an attempt to spread by sheer statistics. Such a strange symbiosis: our collectives simultaneously nourishing us in our search for sustainable life and meaningful work, and at the same time discovering any and all pathways to sap value from us in any way it can be done; some genuine, others malignant. This is the new evolution. Society is the organism.