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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

I became a baseball fan when I was nine years old and that lasted for thirty years. About 4 years ago I stopped watching the games because I couldn't stand the announcers reading ads during the inning, sometimes between pitches.

I don't mind a 3-5 minute commercial break I can mute and ignore or skip with a DVR buffer. Traditional TV commercial breaks are the most benign. But I can't listen to 5-10 second micro-ads that can come at any time. The fandom has left my body.

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And literally everything has a sponsor.

"Vitello on his way to the mound for a Tavis Law Mound visit".

"Matt Chapman in the Golden Gate Carpet on-deck circle."

"Don't forget, it's Taco Bell Tuesday here at Oracle Park. Every Tuesday is Taco Bell Tuesday!"

Ugh.

You forgot the official truck of the MLB and the game stats powered by Google Cloud and the instant replay brought to you by Zoom and please sir, won’t you consume some more?

The ads are so stupid too because you know absolutely no one on earth is buying some product because it is on a dugout or they named a stadium after it. "Oh I'll bank with SoFi because they payed for naming rights," Only someone in marketing would think like that. It's like they've been drinking the kool aid so long they don't know how stupid it all looks to normal people. "Kia forum, great I'll go buy a Kia!" Sorry, that isn't how any of that works. But there is so much money pumped into this marketing game that has to work right? Or else no one would do it, right? They can't all be lemmings, right? Right?

Nah, the emperor has no clothes, and everyone in that industry's job is dependent on not acknowledging that fact. Don't worry, a bunch of commenters are about to chime in and try and tell me I'm wrong, and that I will in fact go and buy that Kia because the idea was incepted in my head by the stadium rights agreement.

I've heard it explained that they don't expect direct sales, but when you need a bank and your looking at options you'll realize you've heard of sofi so it must be better than the ones you've never heard of. I don't know how that train of thought applies to things like coke ads though

This makes sense. Most people would prefer to do business with a company they know about slnce before. You need to put "I recognize this, this is familiar" into prospective customers' brains. Then later marketing can convince you it is the right choice for your savings.

It bugs me even listing on the radio when the radio announcer or talk host suddenly transitions into an advertisement.

Feels like the scenes in the Matrix when ordinary people suddenly morph into agents.

They'd stop talking, there would be a pause, and in that brief moment I was bracing myself for the lame shift into advertiser voice. Anticipating it was putting me on edge and when I realized that I knew there was no enjoyment in it left for me.

> I can mute and ignore or skip

That's the point though. They want your attention, so not getting it is a failure signal. And they'll try anything they can think of to succeed.

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