Personally I don’t fundamentally despise the concept of advertising. I think it’s acceptable for people and companies to share information about a potentially great product or service that they’re offering, on reasonable terms.
The main problem for me is: advertising went too far and abandoned most safeguards. Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing. Most ads don’t give you any information about a product or service whatsoever. Just some celebrity saying it’s great. What is this supposed to accomplish if not manipulating people into mindlessly paying for a thing they know nothing about?
I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it’s all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.
Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to ‘connecting with consumers on an emotional level’ decades before the Internet.
While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.
Exactly. I’d be much more ok with a standardised block of text and maybe a picture. No music, no animation, basic machine voiceover if any audio.
My favourite advertisements (the ones I’m most ok with) are podcast ad reads, because they never gave music or sound effects or crass images, it’s just the voice making the podcast reading some text. And they’re personalised based on the context of the podcast, no personal information needed.
It’s never sharing information about a great new product unless it’s a scam. It’s always scams or large companies screaming how their 2026 version really is superior somehow to their 2025 product and how competitors somehow suck
Personally I don’t fundamentally despise the concept of advertising. I think it’s acceptable for people and companies to share information about a potentially great product or service that they’re offering, on reasonable terms.
The main problem for me is: advertising went too far and abandoned most safeguards. Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing. Most ads don’t give you any information about a product or service whatsoever. Just some celebrity saying it’s great. What is this supposed to accomplish if not manipulating people into mindlessly paying for a thing they know nothing about?
I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it’s all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.
Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to ‘connecting with consumers on an emotional level’ decades before the Internet.
While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.
Every malware infection and online scam I’ve dealt with in the last 15 years has used advertising as an attack vector. I block everything.
Exactly. I’d be much more ok with a standardised block of text and maybe a picture. No music, no animation, basic machine voiceover if any audio.
My favourite advertisements (the ones I’m most ok with) are podcast ad reads, because they never gave music or sound effects or crass images, it’s just the voice making the podcast reading some text. And they’re personalised based on the context of the podcast, no personal information needed.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
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Joke’s on you, I never saw a netflix ad
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It’s never sharing information about a great new product unless it’s a scam. It’s always scams or large companies screaming how their 2026 version really is superior somehow to their 2025 product and how competitors somehow suck