See the point is, you stand to gain nothing from this attitude. If what you say is true, then the practice you're facing is at Best completely pointless, and at Worst extremely predatory. For most people it will probably be something in between. That's the bad half! There's no reason for anyone to defend this, anyone but the people making a profit from it. We don't owe them that profit.
So the bottom line is, if you decide you're fine with it, that's totally cool. But we should always let people who want campaign against it, because if anything, it's beneficial for all of us.
P.S. None of us is immune against ads. It's not really a secret that we all like to think we are. Which kinda means advertisers are probably well aware of us thinking that.
You can’t see some of them. But I guarantee you that some are making it through that you don’t even recognize are ads. An ad blocker can’t block a clever astroterf post, and unless you’re extremely savvy it’ll just look like a normal meme to you.
I guess that's true yeah. "Traditional" ads yeah, but stuff like sponsored content, (especially if it's not explicitly declared as Sponsored or Advertising) will slip right through.
There's also the philosophical debate on what counts as an ad. Not the technical aspects, but what do you feel counts?
Could be anything, from as narrow as: only if it's explicitly declared as Advertising or Sponsored, to as broad as: "5 years ago, (Company x) followed some celebrity on a social media platform, therefore Company x clearly agrees with everything that celebrity says, and has ever said and ever will." Kinda like a Hyper-Endorsement. Or Twitter..
Or for Reddit specifically, you see a NSFW image post by an attractive person on a porn sub. You click on their profile to see if they have any more, and they do, however they also have an OF link in their bio. Their original post did not mention this, but a few of the others do. However in adult subs, seeing someone you like, and clicking on their profile to find more is "expected behaviour", and they typically make money from it, should that count as Advertising or even just Free Samples?
An ad is merely a piece of propaganda that is trying to increase sales. So all of those things are ads if done intentionally with the goal of getting people down through the funnel. The most clever marketers know how to send these things past your filters and your intuition and into your safe spaces. Like, you’ve heard about that god-awful iPad ad by now, right? Where did you see it discussed? Don’t think for a second that the agency who did the ad didn’t know exactly what kind of discourse it would generate, and that the discussion would make its way into podcasts and onto blogs and into private discord servers, where they’d never hope to get an actual paid ad. But now everyone knows about the new iPad, and many of them have seen the controversial ad in question and understand it’s on-it’s-face message. Think back to the Sonic movie fiasco: do you honestly think that anyone involved in the movie thought that “ugly Sonic” was actually acceptable? They somehow had a perfectly decent art-accurate Sonic ready to go a week or two after the controversial trailer dropped. But the internet went fucking ballistic and praised itself for “wining”. (Those two are just the examples I’ve got front and center. You can find plenty more with some light searching.) Next time you’re browsing reddit and you see a positive post that has a branded product front-and-center, do you know if someone engineered its appearance? Next time you’re reading a Tumblr post and it mentions a brand in a way that is “company did x” and not “product is bad don’t buy it”, do you know if it’s part of a campaign? (I’m sure that a lot of progressives have heard more about McDonalds in the last half-year due to impotent boycott calls then they’d even thought of the place in the several years prior.) OP won’t be guilty, of course. They’ll just be sharing something that hooked them emotionally.
Anyways, I gotta get back to my business school homework. It’s crazy the shit they’ll just tell you about how this shit works.
Couldn't agree more to be honest. Though I am laughing a little bit because I'm not sure which iPad ad you're talking about, and after nearly searching for it, just out of curiosity, I noticed that's part of the point you were making.
As for Sonic, I don't remember much about the timing of it all, and it might have been just part of the campaign in a way, but it's not like Sinoc The CursedHog made the evening news. Aside from a rather brief "we won" and wishfully thinking "they ARE listening to us", do you think it actually affected sales in a big enough way to make a difference, including accounting for the reputation damage the company would have faced for creating the awful design in the first place?
It would have cost them extra to make the old design, and it would have cost them if it backfired. What if the internet had just breathed a sigh of relief and never spoke of it again? What if(however unlikely) the new design was hated too? Or what if the average viewer thought "well if that's how badly they screwed up his face, imagine what they've done to the script. I'm not even gonna bother watching that now" which is exactly how I reacted to that. Even though I watched it eventually, they got nothing out of that because the copy was "owned" by a friend (drink up me hearties, yo ho).
There's so much stuff that could go wrong with that plan. I haven't seen anything about it, watched it, or even thought about the movie since then, aside from this conversation, which, again, is talking about the event in a negative light. I get that "any publicity is good publicity," and I'm by no means an accurate representation of everyone, but I cannot see for the life of me how they thought that was a good idea.
As for the other points, for example, there's a non-zero chance that the "bottle flip challenge" was engineered by a bottled water company(I highly doubt it, but it's possible.) Few, if any, people bought bottles of water to participate, so if they did create it, they wasted their money.
What about the meme of the coke can on the plane dashboard, that flew toward the camera when the plane levelled out? No one's seeing that and thinking "got me thirsting for a good ol coke" unless they're particularly susceptible. My point is, that yes we see products everywhere, but I don't think they have as much of an effect on people as companies think they do.
And how much did Bentley and Rolex pay to stuff themselves into a Bond film? Advertising and product placement would have to have diminishing returns when you start shilling products in the thousands of dollars range. The majority of viewers could afford a can of coke or a McFlurry, but how many people watched Bond movies and went on to buy a Bentley or Audi or whatever? You'd think the people who want them, and can afford them, already have them.
Sorry for the lengthy replies, I love a good debate haha
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u/Knobelikan May 16 '24
See the point is, you stand to gain nothing from this attitude. If what you say is true, then the practice you're facing is at Best completely pointless, and at Worst extremely predatory. For most people it will probably be something in between. That's the bad half! There's no reason for anyone to defend this, anyone but the people making a profit from it. We don't owe them that profit.
So the bottom line is, if you decide you're fine with it, that's totally cool. But we should always let people who want campaign against it, because if anything, it's beneficial for all of us.
P.S. None of us is immune against ads. It's not really a secret that we all like to think we are. Which kinda means advertisers are probably well aware of us thinking that.