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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school and college, I had bad insomnia. I watched a lot of late night TV as a consequence. I understood demographics and targeted advertising, and I found it insulting how asinine late night TV ads were. This is who they think I am?

Took me a while to realize that very few of those ads were really targeted, it’s just when the cheap ad slots were. If you spend a lot on ads it’s valuable to spend a bit more to make sure they’re connecting. But if you’re going cheap the shotgun effect isn’t a terrible strategy.

I think X is quickly going to find that Billy Mays was a paragon of cheap ad placements and half of what they get will be worse.

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I very clearly recall going through the cleaning goods aisle with my then three-year-old sitting in the cart when he saw something familiar, perked up and yelled, "Dad, you have to get Oxy-Clean. It gets the tough stains out."

"Kid, we really need to cut back on your TV time."

i love these comments. i never have a problem with comments where people are drawing on something they experienced. i treasure those comments. its funny because every other comment makes me feel like shit. like the world has gone to shit. and i make a lot of them.

its funny that you would think that those ads were targeted to you. television was so insanely monolithic. it was a shared experience. everyone thought the same thing. the idea of targeting anyone in particular with television seems silly today…

It's already happening.

Lately, my X feed has been showing a lot of ads for cheap Aliexpress drop-shipped products that are way overpriced. (selling for $24 what you can find on Amazon for $8)

Maybe that's just because of the Christmas selling season, or maybe that's a hint of the new normal.

It's the norm in most entry level content pipelines. Instagram for example has been autogenerated computer voiced spam audio over stock footage for a literally physically impossible product for years. You basically cannot buy a legitimate product from an instagram ad.

For a decade or more, a reliable grift has been selling "buy something on ali-express and sell it on another site for 10x markup" as some sort of business secret to low information people and other scam-vulnerable populations, and nearly all of them nowadays amount to "the next step is to buy $10k worth of ads on instagram" for the same white label product that everyone else is dropshipping. They're just get-rich-quick schemes. That's why they are so clearly low effort and fraudulent, because that's just how get-rich-quick schemes always are, because the target audience believes that if they just scam a little harder, they can be rich too.

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