Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

"Killing SF" is overly dramatic, and others have noted that the phenomenon observed here is not unique to AI, or SF.

But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.

It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.

Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.

But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.

That's...weird.

I think it's related to the K shaped economy. The country is no longer being built for the middle class, which is concerning.

I think you're on to something. It's really concerning that the people with the money to run these ad campaigns are so removed from the bulk of the populace that they don't even bother targeting them with all the billboards anymore, just each other.

Otoh maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and maybe billboard advertising has gotten so ineffective that it's cheapened to the point that you can tuck it into your campaign as an afterthought. If you get one solid enterprise lead from it, it pays for the whole year. And besides it has branding value.

Either way, definitely feels a bit dystopian to me. How alienating must it feel for the service worker commuting to his dead end job where even the billboards don't make sense anymore?

> And besides it has branding value

I wonder if it's so some brand manager can put "78% of XX managers have heard of our brand" on a slide after running a survey near the billboard

Same with Barcelona FC's stadium. Originally called "Estadi del Barcelona", a new nickname became popular enough that the members voted to rename it to "Camp Nou". That makes sense to me, the ones who are there and members, get to decide the name. Cue 2022: Spotify (Swedish/American company?) buys the rights to the name, so now it is supposedly "Spotify Camp Nou" which is used absolutely everywhere on marketing materials, buildings and clothing, yet no one actually calls it that nor does Spotify have much to do with Barcelona or the club.

Why bother referring to the stadium by some name that some unidentified person has deemed? Just keep calling it Three Rivers Stadium.

"But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you."

The vast majority of advertising isn't for any specific individual. I've no interest in perfumes, fashion, electric cars or jewellery that feature on boards nearby and I've no idea who the celebrity endorsers are, but why should I care?

But many modern people have a compulsion that they need to be involved in everything, all the time, and anything they don't understand is either mocked or protested. It's a form of entitled self-importance, but what's the cause?

Hmm, I think you're projecting something different onto me.

When I was typing my post I thought about billboards for divorce attorneys: I am happily married so those billboards aren't for me, but this fact alone wasn't enough to alter the idea behind my post. And I guess I should also note that I did not demand that all billboards cater exclusively to my interests, that is obviously unworkable nonsense.

So let me try to refine:

Public advertising is...public. "of or concerning the people as a whole"; "exposed to general view", to pick two dictionary definitions. Billboards and stadiums occupy public spaces, places you walk or drive by all the time, so one could reasonably intuit that they should be representative of the people who inhabit those spaces.

Analogies don't usually help, but let me try: If a city had 90% of its inhabitants speaking German, you would expect most of the signage and advertising to be in German. An Italian speaker would arrive in the city and just feel that the place was...different, not for them. (It would not be "entitled self-importance" to say so.)

If a city was 90% German speakers, 10% French speakers, and the signage and advertising was all in French - what would the visiting Italian speaker make of that? Would a group of Germans in town rightly be accused of "entitled self-importance" for asking that the world around them is accessible?

for me it's the opposite of alienating - it's like the ads have been banished to some niche sphere and I can live my regular life in the city unbothered by advertising.

I think it's alienating because people were told all their lives that their commercial impact is actual power, that they can "vote with their wallet". That has never been true, but now they're not even lying to us anymore.

Regular people have no relevant political power and no relevant economic power, and the people in power have stopped pretending that we do.

The world is not for us, we don't even matter enough to have billboards advertising to us anymore.

A small town vote can with their wallet on their local diner, at least. The sentiment certainly has significant limitations, though lots of votes with wallets should still matter, just as inversely one writein for Buckethead wouldn’t suddenly make him prime minister.

Heinz just sells diabetes & fatty liver disease and packages it as a staple of american cuisine.

What did the prepared mustard ever do to you?

You're far, far more likely to get fatty liver disease from products sold by companies like Diageo and Bacardi.

Just how much ketchup are you eating?

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