Fred Rogers wouldn't have wanted to appear in a Google ad
latimes.com
latimes.com
And it works. To an obscene degree, really.
And I'd much prefer to watch that than the harrowing "Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead" commercial.
telling them about the values of the Apple brand and company
Haha that commercial is so entertaining in its absurdism
And it's a bullshit excuse at that.
Advertising uses concepts developed in propaganda and psychological warfare to play on human insecurities in order to make them feel inadequate without your product.
Advertisement in a good sense increases the information a consumer has about a product, and would help a consumer make a more accurate choice. Advertisement that just plays to the lizard part of our brains accomplishes the opposite.
The entire advertisement industry is basically a hundreds of billions dollar experiment on how to reshape human attention. If a group of scientists or a government would run an experiment of that size on the human cognition, people would probably be very concerned.
Should they not?
What dry information can they give you about their product to better inform you with images and audio alone?
Nothing of the sort. I didn't say anybody should be banned from doing any sort of marketing. I merely said that I think people don't need perfume and that the sort of marketing in these industries is unethical.
Convincing people they need something they never knew they needed through psychological manipulation is unethical, period. It happens all over society and it's really too bad. But trying to ban it would create a dystopian society which is arguably worse.
There are more than 2 options for dealing with unethical behaviour, apart from "lock them up and throw away the key" and "let them run amok, doing whatever they want", there is the possibility of rational debate. The vast majority of the time, I choose the third option.
If my (hypothetical, future) daughter wanted to buy a bottle of perfume, I wouldn't forbid her from doing so, I'd talk to her about marketing and beauty standards and so on. I'd try to persuade her that she's a perfectly good person without needing a product like that to augment her.
Some (most?) of us wear perfume because we like to be enveloped by a pleasant scent - it's for ourselves as much as it's to "impress" others.
Besides of course the obvious issue with the target market of a "manly deodorant" line having almost no overlap with people who read fashion magazines.
It's absolutely a deodorant + perfume combo, and primarily the latter from my experience as a niño. Go smell some Axe next time you're in Walmart and see for yourself. Or smell a junior high boy's locker room.
If your deodorant has some new unique property, etc, then it makes sense to advertise that. And I remember deodorants that did advertise they were careful on the skin, or didn't stain your shirt, were "invisible", longer-lasting, etc.
But if deodorant development has reached a point of stagnation, where no new deodorant tech is being invented and all deodorants are essentially the same, then we're in an interesting economic arrangement.
Macro-economically speaking, is this a company or industry that should keep on growing? The point of capitalism was supposed to be that there was competition in R&D (which brought about progress) and margins (which brought about availability through affordability) and eventually things like the ballpoint pen came to be: ubiquitous products that are extremely cheap and effective at what they do.
You don't see advertisements for the ballpoint pen any more: it's period of R&D and cheapening are long past. The industry is mature, it's done developing and is now producing a steady supply of ballpoint pens for a steady number of employees making a living off of it.
It's just companies today seem addicted to unbound growth and have discovered that R&D and margins aside, they can use advertising to sell more of anything by meddling with emotions.
Google "Ballpoint pen" and you get a whole top row of sponsored links trying to sell ballpoint pens to me.
But sure, ballpoint pens aren't advertised on prime-time TV like products sold to 20-something trying to get an edge on the dating life (deodorant, hairspray etc.). That's an especially lucrative market, but not the target audience of most products.
> Macro-economically speaking, is this a company or industry that should keep on growing? The point of capitalism was supposed to be that there was competition in R&D[...]
One of the main points of capitalism is to decentralize the decision making about what's worthwhile economic activity to a bunch of uncoerced individual decisions.
Does that result in a bunch of money being spent on "pointless" products? Sure, but who's to say what's so important that everyone should do without it?
FWIW, a lot of things are fashion magazines, including GQ, which is mostly read by Gentlemen, as the title implies. There is plenty of space to advertise to Manly Men in magazines, both fashion oriented and not.
Separately, I've yet to see an ad for men's deodorant made in the last, say, 30 years, that emphasized as its primary selling point how it makes you not smell. I'm open to counterexamples, I just can't think of any.
e.g. https://www.luckyscent.com/product/21631/black-by-comme-des-...
>Notes: Cedarwood, vetiver, leather, liquorice, birch tar, pepperwood, black pepper, incense
This is the information people who are buying perfume (for reasons other than brand image) actually care about. Sure, there's a lot of other marketing text there, but literally none of that information is in perfume ads (without sniff strips).
The free market revolves around the idea that eventually bad players lose and good players selling what's best for the consumer win. Rational buyers buy what's best, so producers have to adapt to that.
But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing".
Which is actually largely what we are seeing is happening. Both in industry and in politics.
In industry some of the biggest companies in the world live off of ads. This is crazy if you think about it. So much of the internet, TV, radio-- these huge infrastructure and production projects employing thousands upon thousands, producing billions of dollars. Google, Facebook, other SV companies employing some of the brightest minds solving some of the biggest SW engineering challenges-- exist off of the value people put to ads.
In politics, it's all increasingly about advertising a feeling and less about the product (policy). Is it that strange that the guy who had the most air-time, shook people the most, and has most experience with being a screen personality won the last US presidential elections, when the population has, thought the years, learned to be susceptible to gut-advertising via constant, steady bombardment from the advertising industry?
I've concluded this is what a free market economy gets you, because as a company or producer optimizing for survival doesn't mean optimizing for being the best out there, just "seeming" the best.
Ding ding ding. Advertising is deception. Arguments otherwise are dancing around the issue. The whole point is to make you do or buy something that you otherwise wouldn't, and the ways they resort to to make you do this are getting ever more insidious.
When you see beer ads, they don't actually advertise beer. Their job is to implant the idea that beer will make you fun, attractive, that without it you're missing out on incredible life experiences. That if you just go out and get some you will leave your drab miserable life behind and dance with a smoking hot girl in a sunset. That all those beautiful, young, fun, attractive people are laughing and having fun and having beer. It's all about manipulating your weak mammal brain to make you buy stuff. It's manipulative and immoral.
This is a solid argument, but it's used mostly as motte-and-bailey, a bait-and-switch. Ads are important because they are the mechanism for product discovery. But in reality, most ads are not like that - they're no longer about discovery, but about shifting where the spending goes. Personally, I'd be fine if all ads except purely discovery-related were to disappear.
So I personally do think it matters that his name and image would be used to sell smartphones.
I realize the production company has a good sized staff, a board and ambitions to carry on their mission.
But paying for it this way looks cheap and like they aren’t really trying.
Given the weight and voice of this brand I suspect they could have earned just as much through some kind of crowdfund.
I think it is a bad sign of things to come w regard to the use of me Rogers content, unfortunately.
This taps into a bigger question about the use of a dead persons name and image to make money.
This came up when Kurt Cobain was made to sing any song on Rock Band a few years ago: https://www.alistdaily.com/media/bon-jovi-weighs-in-on-cobai...
While I carry no celebrity, it would matter to me if my name and image were exploited in a way that was against my values.
One of the things that supposedly sets us apart from “animals” is that we have respect for and bury our dead. I’d say that foundations, organizations or “estates” that need to exploit the persons image for financial reasons fail to meet this test.
It's not new, I think. Just perhaps a little more blatant, and for more companies, than previously.
It’s definitely been around for a long time for some companies (I think auto manufacturers have been trying to sell cars = personal freedom and status as long as the car has existed) and you could argue that governments and religions have been doing it all of history, but I do agree that a lot more companies have been doing it the past several decades. Every damn podcast ad has to be about how a razor, mattress, or pair of underwear is a defining, empowering lifestyle choice.
As for the style: conspicuous consumption may have been the first consumption, after basic subsistence.
In chess games, often there is no endgame - the game ends in the middlegame, or sometimes even in the opening. If there is an endgame, not uncommonly most of the whole game is the endgame, 60% or 70% or more.
In movies, almost every time you see people playing, someone moves and says "Checkmate", which is also, I guess, around the time meant by 'end game' - right at the end of the game. That's just not much like what the word means in chess. except, sure, it's the last of 3 phases (opening, middlegame, endgame).
As for being okay with it the whole thing falls into tautology logic - it works because it works until it doesn't. If people actually cared enough about relevance than the problem would take care of itself by being absolutely useless.
Coca-cola sells 5 cents of sugar water for $1.75 via advertising, except the advertising for some reason is about poorly-animated polar bears or some demographically-balanced group of people having a good time. Maybe they know more than we do.
companies who pay for them are ok with them because they work.
#1 rule of sales is that people don't buy products, they buy transformation. The product is the tool to get that transformation, so it's often more effective and more relevant to pitch the end result (which can be something immeasurable like a feeling) instead of the actual product. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The issue here is different entirely. It's making a person a brand rep without their consent, because they're conveniently deceased.
It is so, and yet here I believe is the point where ads/sales become dishonest. I'd gladly seen all of them banned past this point. Ethical ads should communicate existence of a product/service, the products it solves, and the special features it utilizes. They shouldn't abuse people's emotions.
And, equally personally, I wouldn't want anyone to do anything about this. I find it quite useful.
I realised some time ago (actually is was when Claudia Schiffer advertised a Citroen, but that's not important) that, if the ad agency wants you to be distracted from a product, that's valuable information about the product.
And then, it ended in the cheapest, most offensive, most un-Mister-Rogers way possible: just a Google ad. I refuse to even let myself recall what crappy product apparently demanded the outright abuse of a man’s lifetime of genuine contributions to society out of some sense of clever advertising.
This feels like a bunch of Google executives just took a can of spray paint to deface everything that Mr. Rogers ever did. And Google, you don’t understand anything about why Mr. Rogers was so great.
They've cancelled many of these after backlash, but not all of them.
I don’t believe for a minute that they won’t be renamed and developed by some people they’ve now identified as not giving a shit.
Yeah I can really see how that impacts Fred Rogers /s
How hard can it be to build a publishing website in a privacy-respecting manner? It's been a while since GDPR was introduced.
Why should they even bother?
The fact that they aren't doing it is a god signal that those users aren't worth the cost.
You can't pass regulation and then complain that companies don't want to do business with you.
So why should they?
I can understand why a newspaper whose subscriber base is in southern California would not want to spend the time and money necessary to comply with European privacy regulations. It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs.
The only thing gdpr really changed was the size of the fine...
Why should they even bother spending resources understanding those regulations?
The decision is pretty straightforward for them. Don't like it? Go complain with the regulators.
Nah, people whinning on hackernews is pretty much irrelevant.
On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.
The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?
If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems.
A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
As an addition to the GP's argument, consider that these days, news stories are meant to be linked to on social media. People have friends and audiences in many places in the world. If someone with parts of their audience in Europe wants to share a news story, will they choose an article on GDPR-blocking site, or on a GDPR-compliant one?
The most important factor is still if your newspaper is any good.
The EU cares.
To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?
You can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't pass regulations and then complain people don't want to do business with you.
Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit.
Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.
2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.
I just in Europe last week and it was infuriating how many US-based newspapers couldn't even be loaded. Americans travel abroad, and foreigners read domestic news sources. The LA Times isn't just local news; it's cited widely in, say, Wikipedia articles, and those are read globally. So to refuse to display any content in Europe is a huge middle finger.
Or do you think a cost-benefit is the wrong approach?
The cost to providing a minimal EU only view (using the inverse of the current "should I block" function) that complies with the GDPR should be near 0.
The benefit, both in terms of advertising revenue, and network affects driving more non-EU viewers, should be high.
It's not plausible to me that an accurate cost-benefit analysis says "don't publish to the EU".
Separately, as journalists I expect them to be willing to spend some amount of effort (and it shouldn't take much) to report as widely as possible, even if a strict cost-benefit analysis suggests they shouldn't.
The fact that they aren't willing to do this brings their motivation, and thus their integrity, into question.
A big newspaper has a target on its back for GDPR trouble, and they have enough trouble already. Blocking access is the pragmatic answer — most other organizations are just ignoring it.
> The fact that they aren't willing to do this brings their motivation, and thus their integrity, into question.
Newspapers are businesses. If they don't make enough money they will have to close down, and then nobody gets to read their journalism anymore. So cost-benefit analyses cannot be avoided.
I country switch quite a lot these days. Video won't load? pick the Canadian VPN. Website won't load from Europe? use the New York VPN. The crypto exchange doesn't accept US customers? Use the Iceland VPN. Netflix pretends not to have a show anymore? Use the Australia VPN.
There was a time when I thought this would be a ridiculous suggestion, but at this point the VPN software is very convenient and they have such a wide array of servers in different countries, and regulations make the net much more fragmented. It is second nature for me now.
I want to see a PO justify resources for that epic. lol
I'm all for a free & open internet but I'm not for the internet complying to regulations set by governing bodies that do not represent the entire globe.
I believe that if a government should choose to attempt to regulate and enforce what we can build online and how then they (and their constituents) should be dealt with in a hostile manner.
It almost always works. As does archive.is, if you want to see more of the page's original layout.
But you're right that it does validate the LA Times's decision to not spend resources on it, if there's an easy way to offload the legal worry to another company.
Another aspect: I've set up my browser to be pretty aggressive about blocking ads & trackers, to the extent that in practice any website is limited to tracking only what they can collect server-side, with first-party isolation; as such, GDPR doesn't give me that much extra protection when I'm interacting with sites that I'm not actively giving my personal details to.
I'd still appreciate the additional protections GDPR provides, in terms of control over that server-side tracking, and when interacting with sites that do know who I am; and I see the value in even the protections I don't personally benefit from, for the sake of people who aren't tech-savvy enough to lock down their browsers to the same extent (and to deal with it breaking sites, when that happens). So I'm still a fan of GDPR in general - it's just that, when it comes to me personally, just passively browsing a site, my own browser set-up is adequate for my liking.
Eh... maybe? I mean, you could achieve the same end result with a proxy/VPN and your browser's reader mode - to do it that way wouldn't be copyright infringement, would it? I feel like, in principle, Outline should be treated the same.
But on the other hand, the fact that they're transforming the page server-side, and caching it there, may push it over the line in the eyes of the law. IANAL, I don't really know.
To be honest, copyright law is such a tangled mess, I don't really give it much thought. Outline does the job, and if anyone's going to get into trouble it'll be them not me, so I'm happy enough.
They will probably be auto-DMCA'd soon.
Not hard to understand, but disappointing. Fred's high standards for how children should be treated were ... advanced.
Some things should remain inviolate.
In this case, not just for the memory, but for the new children who continue to engage with Rogers' program (it will run in repeats and streaming for years and years) and experience its commercial free attention and insight.
Further, Fred Rogers was genuine. This commercial is disingenuous.
You should take a hard look at yourself, Google. (Speaking to individual Googlers, where the corporate structure refuses to.)
However, I don't find it absolving what I observe in today's Google and all the "business" and "marketing" types who appear to have come to dominate it.
Or the giant American flags waving over every car lot? Or pictures of veterans learning to walk again on an add for Prudential insurance?
This is a very old marketing game, and I'm sure whatever qualms the team creating it had, if any, were overruled by the need to make it rain and get bonuses and keep all of us engineers employed.
"Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack."
I also do not think Apple would use historical figures in this way anymore.
Because of this. Because some line has to be drawn.
Also for some products, you literally can't advertise the features; the most precise mechanical watch in the world is completely dominated by a 30 cent happy meal Casio digital watch. That's why advertising for luxury watches is all centered around a "you made it [to graduation, to financial stability, to the upper class, to retirement]" theme.
Children can't consent to all the psycho-behavioral research and artfully composed subliminal content a modern advertisement delivers. It's creepy that we accept there are adults in offices with whiteboards and Adobe products thinking hard about how to influence and manipulate children.
If you have a problem with this, you have a problem with capitalism. Advertising is nothing. There are people out there, right now, designing, manufacturing, shipping and deploying all sorts of lethal devices that are maiming and killing children all over the world.
That people seem more interested in getting ahead and pleasing their egos, instead of trying to repair or escape, is a kind of syndrome—the syndrome of being trapped in an idealogy.
DGMW, I would love to berate parenting, childcare, and education in the US; I mean, I would just beat it about the brow for being so retarding, if I could
Like, how do you trade middling entertainment and financial reward for terrible, indoctrinating, media and education for your offspring? You must be some kind of real selfish idiotic shitbrain to send your children to grade C- public school, while you go off and sit at a desk for peanut pay so you can afford, what?, convenient foodstuffs and the trappings of dignified success in a system that yr suspicions suggest doesn't care about you? FOH!
But no, I can only suppose a syndrome, and blame no one. The majority are being used by capitalists, and if they grow in that mold, knowingly or not, successful or not, it's not their fault; there's no obvious, non-serious, way out of capitalist subjugation, except for the American Dream, which is ofc to become one of them.
So, I think it tactical to treat this kind of spectre—invasive media campaigns aimed at children—as an outside, enemy, force; (today, all parents of young people, were themselves targeted by these forces, so they have the right to be pissed about it); If nothing else, people can get behind anti-child-predation, even if they aren't ready to stop the military industrial complex, or capitalism.
what does this mean?