Sorry, Mad Men. The Ad Revolution Is Here
wsj.com
wsj.com
I hate commercials, they're annoying, I mute/skip them all but that one got through and it's made me consider that you can be too extremist about this like anything else. To an extent, our interests are aligned with advertisers. Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. If there's a new pizza place open on a street I don't drive down, I'd like to know.
Another example. I realized I haven't seen anything but already-familiar movies in recent years because I've closed off all avenues to seeing trailers for movies I'm not already sold on.
You may be intelligent as an individual but your adversary has teams of PhDs, decades of psychological research and tons of personal information on you, now parsed and analysed by AI to target you. Thinking you can see "raw information" is very naive.
Even if you don't believe the claim that X is the best product, it's good to know it exists as a starting point for if/when you ever start research on the options.
We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value.
I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary.
What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!
To be fair, I've gotten some great ads for things I never would have found myself, on places like Instagram. And yet I didn't get to choose when or how the ads were delivered.
(Cable) TV ads are not more consensual just because you were using the ad blocker of the time: DVR
That said, instagram still has a bunch of obnoxious ads I don't want. It's really not as user tunable as the "opt-in bazar" model should be. But that is the solution, ads should be 100% opt-in. You should be in control of when you want to go browsing vendor wares, and when you do that then sure they can hawk their stuff to you, but otherwise not.
Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free.
Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.
Don't just imagine. Think. There must be some argument that advertisement isn't the same thing as the "speech" in free speech. I haven't figured it out, but I keep hoping someone else will.
Why does it have to be an alternate universe? I have been thinking the same and there it would not be easy, but it could be done, and even if we had people finding lots of loopholes it would greatly restrict advertising.
Besides, even in the extreme where no new media is ever created, would that be so bad? Anna's archive has 38 million books. You would be challenged to even read the index in a lifetime.
I don't want ads to show up everywhere, and I don't want them to tell me that they have a solution to my problem _without knowing what my problem is_. I have complained about it before (partly in the wain hope the some facebook engineers will see it), that Facebook does not use the data I freely give it to base its ads on[0], but only what its AI can match me with.
In short, I think there is a time and place for me to enter transaction mode - but not with ads that assume their are smarter or know me better than I do, and not when I get interrupted.
[0]: I am pretty good at blocking third party tracking, but I did tell them what school I went to, that I studied computer science, and when I did. Any basic human would be able to infer that I might like nerdy things and that I have a relatively high income. FB continually feed me slop ads.
A search engine does not only search for products.
Stop buying things from advertisers and it will die on its own.
Meanwhile, at the top of this thread, we have someone advocating seizing control of all public speech and media to forcibly eliminate any perceived advertising messaging. With very little thought in the replies paid toward the potential unintended consequences.
What could possibly go wrong creating a centralized body to police all speech for perceived commercial intent. I’m sure it would be all roses and sunshine!
I thought the internet was funded by internet subscriber fees.
What are we paying ISPs for.
Advertisers do not pay our internet access fees.
Any internet subscriber can publish on the internet. No advertisers needed.
Owning a radio station or TV channel is expensive and may require funding from advertisers.
But an internet subscription is affordable in the same way as a TV set or a radio receiver. If an internet subscriber has a reachable IP address then she can publish.
For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment.
Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.
Advertisers using generative AI to create ad campaigns is a diversion at best. The only use of AI advertisers are interested in is how they can embed ads directly in the personal AI assistants the world is starting to use. If a conversational AI model can be manipulated to casually mention a specific brand in its output at precisely the right moment, then that's the most accurate form of targeting, with the highest chance of engagement. AI assistants are trusted much more than any search engine, or any media we consume, so it's only a matter of time until we start seeing these integrations with mainstream models. No AI service provider will be able to resist cashing in on the advertising dollar, regardless of what their "benefit of all humankind" marketing agenda claims. They're sitting on a data gold mine much larger than the one adtech currently controls, with user demand that will eventually surpass social media and entertainment sites. The opportunity to monetize AI is enormous, and that's the next advertising frontier.
Advertising is a scourge on humanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
I can think of something like people generating a short video and some of the frames innocently containing brand placements. If people can share AI generations and these creations receive some semblance of popularity, that's where you will find advertisers. Most of the digital ad dollar value is created around social platforms. This recipe for success is already proven.
Trust implies some sense of consistency in results and LLMs have proven to be the opposite. Your whole argument's premise seems to be built on some of the dazzle created by AI assistants directly translating to advertising value. The connection is very loose here and to me only propagates the hype that's all too common in discussions about AI.
That’s quite creative or a great troll: Rye, NY has no oceanfront.
It does have a Playland on the Long Island Sound.
comes with a former Swiss Navy vessel
How many more ads can Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook add? Twitch plays 8 minute ad reels, my Facebook feed is a cesspool, and YouTube would probably be bad if I didn't block all ads on the platform. Amazon searches are close to 50% ads for the first ~30 results. Even DuckDuckGo is getting into the dark patterns - it's almost impossible to differentiate what is an ad vs a genuine search result.
Is ARPU up? Or is it much flatter than these companies would like?
I live in a (mostly) ad free bubble, yay!
"Persuading people to buy things they don't want, with money they don't have, to impress friends who don't care"
The worst of the worst.
This being said, most online ads as scum, fraud and clickbait. Outbrain anyone?
What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand? Naturally hiring will slow, mergers and consolidation, cost cutting via relying on tech and more automation.
We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked. In both time and cash. They just don't like talking about it.
Besides, haven't we already been through this with second life?
This is why the conglomerates consolidation is mentioned, particularly in consumer targeting and data access. In order to ensure efficient targeting to avoid over-indexing on generic, world-wide/national attention, marketers are increasingly turning to consumer data brokers to fine-tune their messaging to niche groups so they can gain more traction with less dollars. By buying these aggregators up, they end up saving money in the long-term and lock out competitors from gaining any competitive advantage of using those data brokers or charging more heavily for the pleasure, thus getting paid on the way in and out.
Regardless of the feelings of those here on HN or those who use adblockers, the rest of the public seems to be largely accepting of marketing and its annoyances. By continued consolidation and aggregation of consumer data, marketing agencies are continuing to find ways to stay relevant and efficient--all until someone fixes the root issue: data collection, sharing, and coalescing of organizations collating these data used for targeting.
Isn't that already happening? No human in our lifetime would be able to consume it all. Or do you mean that the total production would be higher than the total consumption? I'd wager a guess that we're already beyond that as well as one human can easily create content longer than they spent creating it.
It feels like global disposable income isn’t growing but that’s not true because the list of necessities increase the more income increases, if you lived like a person in the 90’s did you could save a huge amount of money,
Perhaps in the developed world, but with china and now southeast asia, india, africa, etc developing, I don't see how global disposable income is barely growing. If anything, there will be hundreds of millions ( perhaps billions ) of people with substantially growing disposable income in the next few decades.
> What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand? Naturally hiring will slow, mergers and consolidation, cost cutting via relying on tech and more automation.
That's one possibility. The other is to grow consumption/demand to meet the supply.
> We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked.
Nowhere close to it.
Dark portents indeed.
When these koolaid drinkers realise what they have done, make sure you demand triple your old rate to bail them out.
The code and creative I've seen and worked with on advert sites fits what I've seen ML do already.