An experimental real world adblock
jonathandub.in
jonathandub.in
Some context about the project: We built this a few days ago at the PennApps hackathon during a period of 48 hours. We originally wanted to try to block out magazine advertisements and billboards, but didn't think we could quite get that working with the time constraints, so we chose to block out logos instead. We called the project Brand Killer.
Ah neat, that certainly is a lot more fitting of a description.
I've updated the reply.
Yes, if you want to buy a specific brand you'd need to modify the filter. I'd like it to say pick out the "cheapest lemonade that has lemon in it and no aspartame and scores at least 50% in taste tests" or "the lemonade I drank last time" and just show me that one at my behest!
Simple advertising like branding on the product itself isn't the problem, anyway. It's usually not intrusive nor irrelevant to what you're doing. If you're looking at the bottle, chances are that you want to do something with it. It's not like you're driving down the road and the bottle forces itself into view like a billboard. It would be better if this form of adblocking could somehow detect if the branding was actually attached to the product and let that through, since it does double duty as branding and identification.
The difference becomes apparent when considering soda pop bottle versus a high-end dress shirt. The soda-pop bottle is a trivial purchase, and is generally available among many other brands offering the same thing. However, the shirt may be purchased with more effort and care, and is generally available among other clothing from the same brand.
The brand on the bottle offers identification of the individual item during purchase and later during selection for drinking. No matter if it is found in a bin among bottles from other brands, or within a section containing only bottles from one brand. Bottles are also discarded after use, so they are not identified individually, but merely as one of many copies. I have several bottles of soda pop, some Coke some Pepsi. The brand is still very relevant.
A shirt on the other hand is probably accompanied by an entire section of clothing for the same brand, and does not need individual identification. Even more so during selection for use, shirts are generally owned by a single person and cared for individually. I only have one pink broadcloth shirt, and it happens to be from Banana Republic. The brand is not as relevant.
No?
If you didn't know the shape of the bottle or other characteristics you wouldn't know what the hell you're buying.
Sounds like a fun shopping trip.
Then you're back at artists advertising their work.
How you made it 28 minutes before someone suggested pr0n is a mystery to me.
Instead of blurring the label, translate Coca Cola -> Cola Soda Pop (355ml/300 cals)
The ban[2] specifically refers to trucks with 5 axles or more and proscribes them from entering the city centre between 7am and 7pm. Previously, there was a large amount of trucks driving through main thoroughfares to access Dublin Port but before introducing the ban, the local authorities finished constructing a tunnel and motorway to bypass the city so the truck drivers have viable alternative routes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard#Laws_limiting_billboa...
Well, for the owner's it's a sense of pride over all the hard work they've gone through to get to the point of being able to put their business name on the wall. Why do people buy flashy sports cars? To show off success.
I don't think having a name on a building like "SomeGuy's Sawmill" is really an advert, if anything, it's a brand.
Not to mention, say you're trying to find a location like the closest clothing store, or restaurant. How will you locate it (or the right one) if every building is just plain and looks exactly the same?
No-one is saying you can't have a nice sports car, nor that you can't be proud of it - here they're saying that you can't put spotlights on it and erect a hoarding saying "I'm awesome, look this is my car", just park it on the street like everyone else.
How will you locate a building. Numbers, street names - map or GPS : those are the usual way.
That would only work if you knew ahead of time you were specifically looking for that particular location. There's been plenty of times I've driven by some place and decided to go take a peek inside just based on their name alone.
If 'Al' wasn't able to put his business name on the building (or advertise in any form), then he'd probably not make very many sales.
It surprises me where the conversation has gone -- this being HN and all, we're mostly startup/biz/tech people round these parts.
I guess plain signs reading "bakery", "clothes", "cars", "hipster coffee", etc. could be allowed if you try this.
Yes.
> I mean, if I owned a nice building for my company, I'd take pride in having our name on the front.
I'm not sure why the fact that the advertiser would make it any less advertising.
It's beautiful.
This is an excerpt from Slavoj zizek's Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which in turn excerpts the cult sci-fi film They Live. Both are very much worth your time.
- the name of the brand in plain text
- the parent company of the brand
- the parent company's stock symbol, market cap, and percentage change in the last week
- political campaigns the parent company has contributed to recently
- consumer reports / better business bureau ratings for the brand / company
1. Advertisers will probably want to use AR devices to superimpose their product logos on the real world, thereby advertising more at a lower cost. No need to rent billboard space when you can beam your corporate logo right into the eye of the consumer.
2. Consumers will probably want to use AR devices to remove product logos from the real world, much in the spirit of AdBlock and this video (using machine vision to detect advertisements, and then to replace them with something less objectionable).
What effects will these opportunities have? Who will come out on top? Will it be like advertising on the internet, all over again?
if advertisers did this, they have to somehow pay out to the consumer something of worth - free stuff. otherwise, i m not gonna let an advertiser beam anything into my field of view!
Exactly. If the price is right, people will view advertisements. It's really as simple as that. So the question of whether advertisement will win or disappear depends on whether advertisers will be willing to pay what consumers demand in return for viewing the ad in question.
How the economics of this will change is very hard to predict, IMO.
It's a nifty project, but ultimately it's attacking the symptom, not the cause.
Really makes it obvious that the browser-ad-blocking-is-theft argument is bunk.
See, such ad-block device to be effective needs to be able to distinguish ads from legitimately important communication like traffic signs or warning labels. This in turn will make advertisers design their ads to be as indistinguishable from content as possible. In the end, we'll win nothing in terms of ad reduction, but we'll lose traffic signs and other important information.
I sometimes wonder if we shouldn't have stopped fighting ads a while ago just to keep them from improving. Fighting advertsers is like fighting a fast-mutating bacteria. Whatever partial solution we apply makes it only evolve to a more nasty and disgusting form to be fought next season. I worry that the end result will not be lack of ads - it will be lack of information you can trust.
It's a double cost to society too since not only are peoples buying decisions warped but the people creating adverts are doing negative work instead of producing more useful goods / services.
But to clarify:
- advertising isn't as harmful (yet) as infectious diseases
- if we want to get rid of it, the same rules apply as to fighting bacteria - you want to hit as hard as possible in as many places as possible, to not give any room for bacteria to mutate; proliferation of adblocks is like taking antibiotics and stopping treatment half-way - not effective enough to kill off everything, and forces bacteria to mutate into drug-resistant variety
Then there's also problem that ads mutate much faster than bacteria - because they're driven not by evolution, but by sentient adversaries.
For organic content, their algorithms (before considering paid reach) are organized around making sure you only see, approximately, what you've actively indicated you want to see (which isn't the same thing as "agree with" -- if you positively engage with things you disagree with, you'll see more of them.)
Of course, Facebook's revenue model is entirely based on people paying -- either via ads-in-the-overt-sense or paid reach for posts -- for more favorable treatment for their content than the relying on the normal algorithms and (in the case of ads-in-the-overt-sense) even the basic opt-in following mechanism would provide, so its not at all the case that it is good at making sure you only see what you agree (or have positively asserted an interest in seeing, even.)
Though they do let you opt out of ads from a particular advertiser or particular ads, so they are arguably fairly good at making sure you do not see what you have actively requested not to see, which is different than only seeing what you agree with (or even want to see.)
I soo wish for "NEVER EVER SHOW ME THINGS LIKE THIS AGAIN" YouTube button. Currently I open one wrong YT link and for the next week google keeps recommending me videos of shitting babies or some 'hot new singer you just need to listen'.
http://wearcam.org/diminished_reality.htm via http://cyborganthropology.com/Diminished_Reality
Don't get me wrong this sounds like a fun project though.
Other people find Muslims, Jews, Mormons, non-caucasians, breast-feeding mothers, alcohol-imbibers, blondes, Ugg boots, motorcycles, gold watches, crying children, airplanes passing overhead, and dogs to be offensive to their ability to live. Can't ban everything you don't like.
Also, there are already restrictions on advertisements (when was the last time you saw an cigarette ad on television?), and some places are much more restrictive than others.
I simply suggested that, when we're considering hacking our eyes as depicted in the OP to avoid ads, we might consider limiting the ads instead. And that has nothing to do with racism.
In that context, it's hard to see ads blocked by law,even though there's a high likelihood they are harmful to people, and especially to teens and kids.
It's a bit of an obsolete example these days, but think back and consider cigarette advertising, and someone trying to quit. If you just blocked them out, marketers would evolve new ways to reach you, right? But if their logos and ads were always surrounded by a picture-border of pulsing blackened lung-samples... Well, you're actually reprogramming your own mind to dislike their brand, which is very different.
A tamer example would be to enhance your recognition of "good" brands at the expense of the bad/less-good ones. Imagine walking through a supermarket and having your eye drawn to the "good" products at the expense of the "bad" ones. (Where Good/Bad is determined by some criteria that are resistant to subconscious advertising.)
so what are those criteria, and more importantly, how much bribery would advertisers/companies pay to make themselves on the good list?
Negative advertising is just as bad as positive advertising in the scenario you proposed.
The most important difference is it helps increase your ability to control your own unthinking behavior through other conscious choices. (This is generally agreed to be a worthwhile thing, and factors prominently in a lot of religious and psychological traditions.)
The fact that the service exists is evidence of the problem.
Canada's anti spam law just went into effect for email, companies can't (see arent supposed to) just email you out of the blue anymore, why can't this apply to snail mail as well?
I think the answer is because the postal service survives on the revenue they get from stuffing your mail box with garbage, but I assert that's not a good enough reason. If they can't keep themselves afloat without the spam. I question whether they need to exist at all in the age of free webmail accounts and the ability to run your own server.
I still find the amount of advertising annoyingly high, literally every plane that could be possibly filled with ads is filled with ads. This has to change on another level, not by simply ignoring the advertisement in one way or another.
Yet I don't think I would use it, since in daily life, I don't see many ads.
The only ads I have to block are online, because they impact negatively my UX with the content.
Clearly advertising works, so some people must be exposed and influenced by it. This product is useful for those people.
Do you have a reason to believe that you are less exposed or influenced than the average person?
(I can't find a way to phrase it in a non-jerkish way, but it's actually a genuine question)
The idea is a bit different though. "Nada discovers the sunglasses are special. After putting on a pair, he sees the world in black and white and discovers it is not what it seems. Media and advertising hide constant subliminal totalitarian commands to obey and conform." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live)
Here you can see how the "sunglasses" work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w
[Added additional information]
Also this tool could be terrifyingly hackable. Imagine someone hacking into your vision.
Sure, it might be a problem in the future for people wearing brand obfuscatory equipment, but it's an inexcusable flaw in your packing laws right now that's endangering anyone with Macular degeneration.
Maybe it's a secret, but is it custom hardware? Could a Raspberry Pi handle this kind of image processing?
*Back when MTV actually played music videos.
Could be fun, but might do nothing at all.
From wikipedia: "Research shows that the EURion constellation is used for color photocopiers and is likely not used for computer software."
You can see this with photoshop, where the presence of the constellation does not appear to affect currency detection.
EDIT: In a comment below, the team mentioned this was their inspiration. Life imitate art imitates life. Cool!