Why do you think some of the most advertised things are... predatory loans and gambling.

Honestly for me the worse of it is, basically on linkedin and similar, people pretending to be recruiters, opening with a fake job posting and asking for your resume, then to follow it up with "Hey you know I don't think this resume is going to get by, can I put you in contact with my resume company, they will sharpen up your resume for $300. Umm... so yeah, don't know if you guessed this, but I have no clue when my next paycheck is coming in, this isn't the time to ask me to drop a large amount of money on something that may not do anything.

It's not about buying, it's about staying in your head, even if you don't remember it explicitly.

This kinda boring, menial, repetitive propaganda doesn't try to make you buy something straight away, it's to make you numb to it, to know it, to receive it without thinking, so then it tries to affect you. It tries to turn nothing into anything resembling truth, it turns advertisement and news, into an endless cycle of boring things that get hammered by the "a lie told 1000 times turns into truth" line.

It doesn't affect you when you're watching it, it affects you when you see or do anything relating to it.

When you need to buy new tires, you know what to buy, you don't buy based on technical sheets, you buy it knowing it, even not explicitly.

(A take from Adorno and Horkheimers "Dialectic of Enlightenment", the part where they talk about the media, culture, art, etc)

That's the neat thing, they don't.

Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it's a well-known fact that this doesn't work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it's not worth the money.

So what are ads actually there for then?

First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone's too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.

Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.

People keep saying that ads are to get the brand into my head, but they dont realise thats a bad thing for the company. I specificly buy brands i DONT see ads for because i believe if they arent spending money on ads but are still being sold in storesz they must be spending that money on bettering the product instead.

If you don't have money for either product then you are not their target demographic, and thus, you being inconvenienced or delayed does not concern them in the slightest.

Their goal is to get money from the people who have money. How they affect people with no money is not a factor in their decisions, since no money will be acquired from them regardless.

I find it wild that people are still under the impression that advertising doesn't work. I get it, you block ads, you aggressively ignore them, you feel like they never influence you. Same here. But they do influence us. A little bit here and there. Then consider that most people are way more suggestible than we are. If ads didn't work, they would've never been a thing.

You might think you cannot afford to buy most things advertised, but the numbers don't lie. They'll get you eventually. Even if it's just $3. Not having money never really stopped people from spending it anyhow.

The fact that McDonald's exists is proof that advertising works.

On the other hand, you never see ads for beans and yet you can't stop thinking about them.

Because you saved that money so that you could buy their product!

Because you might have money someday

Idiots live in debt by throwing money on bullshit all the time

They aren't worried in the literal you, in one sense.

Advertising is a temporal numbers game. Any one random single individual (or household) at any given time is insignificant. You are a speck of dust in the wind.

On the flip side, advertising is (or can be) a long game. At the moment you may be too young, too poor, too healthy, too whatever for their ads to be relevant. However, if they advertise enough and you see enough of these ads, it can make an impression (even if subliminal). And down the line when you're old enough to need dick pills and making just enough to afford them, you're now aware that dick pills exist and suddenly now that you're in the market for dick pills your reptilian brain will remember that jingle "Like a rock" and how Dicken's dick pills are the key to feeling 18 again. Suddenly you're sucking down Dicken's pills like they're candy.

They don't care about you. They care about the people that do have the money.

I mean, I'm too stingy to pay for premium but I do buy detergent.

Ads these days are run like internet scams they are there to trick the most vulnerable.

A bit late to the party, but... well...

If a streaming service has an ad-free tier, the ads shown aren't really there to sell the things they advertise. Oh, sure, the buyer of the ad wants your money, but they didn't pay a bunch to show you that ad and the revenue from the ad buy just has be "slightly higher than spam" to be worthwhile.

"Ad-Supported' tiers exist to differentiate the higher cost points. Which is why the ads frequently aren't aligned with natural break points in the video. And why in some cases it's the same two or three ads shown for every artificial and clumsy break.

The ads you are seeing exist primarily as an advertisement for the ad-free tier.

Because you still have to be inconvenienced for not paying the premium.

It's not just about purchasing, but also reputation, familiarity, etc.

Especially when it's for vacation spots, booking sites, or luxury cars. Keep spending that money for no return, guys, because absolutely none of that is happening. (I want to say "not happening anytime soon," but who am I kidding? I'm already in my upper 30s and I can't fathom making that kind of money.)

Credit card debt.

Ads from giant corporations aren't just about selling something to you, but to keep the brand's name in your head and influence you into having a good psychological image of it. it's also used as a form of influencing the culture of a population. They do a lot of research into how to more efficiently affect your mind, even if you don't notice it.

That's why I recommend blocking ads and/or moving away from those services (the high seas welcome you)

I appreciate the sentiment because I also hate ads, but just because you're not spending your disposable income on premium doesn't mean you couldn't theoretically spend it on something else.

This is exactly how I feel when a monthly bill goes up as result of missed payment, I missed because I'm laid off and broke. What makes them think turning up the heat will result in me suddenly having money appear?

if anything, they should ADD ads to premium users because they have more money

There are plenty of idiots that get sucked into those ads. Well shit, the 2024 US election proves it too.

The advertisers are doing the same math as the spam calls and emails. Basically, if one in 10,000 bite, that's all they need to stay in business. Ads, and spam both target stupid desperate easily manipulated people. The fact that you also see it, and show distain, in no way affects their business model.

Do you buy anything, ever? Then you have money, and can be swayed by advertising in terms of what you spend it on.

I hate ads so much that I even blocked ads back in the day on NetZero to get free internet ad free. I have been blocking since Internet 1.0.

Because you are the demographic poor enough to be susceptible to the scams they advertise.