It's sad that such a thing needs regulation in the first place. In real life if a salesman is being inconsiderate, I'll go out of my way to avoid their sales and find someone else who is better mannered. But we don't seem to apply the same measure to ads. Ads can be brash, insulting and manipulative, and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them. Rather it appears such ads work better and now that's what everyone's pushing towards. Human psychology is such a weird thing.
We do apply the same measure, adblocking. Except since companies base their businesses on ads theres a cat and mouse game at play to ensure you pay them with your attention. I'm reminded of the scene in "Airplane" where the captain is fighting off sales people in the airport. I feel the same way about the Internet.
My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
I've noticed that I got Pavolved and whenever I hear things like "But first" or "This is where I'd like to tell you about" I immediately rush to the keyboard, expecting a sponsor segment I should skip.
During baseball games I've come to get annoyed when I hear the announcer stop talking and take a breath, about to change their tone of voice from conversational to formal so they can launch into one of the micro ad reads between pitches or at-bats.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).
Maybe its possible to feed everything in to a model that can identify the situation or context in audio or video and block a section out because its an ad. We would not be short of training material.
Latency would have to be low enough to be attractive to users.
Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
It doesn't have to auto-skip, it can e.g. just mark the different types of segments for you to make the call to skip or not. You can also still manually seek to any part of a video (even with auto-skipping enabled).
In the UK the TV would show moving black and white stripes in the corner of the screen before a commercial break. If you were recording the programme, you could pause the recording during the adverts.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
Viewers thought of them as that, and in popular culture that is what cue dots are remembered as today, especially by the Map Men, but technically that is not what cue dots were.
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
I doubt if the ads are working better. I suspect their measurement approaches related to ads effectiveness is wrong.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior. In the end, platforms like Netflix and Hulu don't need to prove that a higher volume works, but perhaps their customers think that it works, and that is enough.
> I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
Unfortunately that's not how human attention works. Being annoyed (or really having any strong emotional reaction) causes the ad to have a stronger impression on your memory. Now pair that with "autopilot mode" while shopping and you have a desirable (for the business) outcome.
My personal little doomsday theory is that the entirety of the advertising industry is built on faulty data. Approximately no one has the complete data set to determine how much an ad is worth. For direct ads ("enter promo code BLAH", "Click Here to check out the new...", there's hard data. But most of the perceived value of advertising is different: The company buying the ads has zero chance of knowing if someone seeing a car ad on YouTube 6 months ago factored into their decision to purchase a different car by the same manufacturer. Maybe the advertising platform has a chance of knowing (though Google AdSense has never asked me for my sales data), but they are strongly motivated to never reveal any results that would damage their industry. The platforms that serve the ads have no reason to thoroughly vet whether ad impressions are being accurately measured because error is almost always in their favor.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
I tend to believe this is some form of Goodhart's law running amok, but when I see obnoxious ads converting I have to wonder if the emotional response eventually boils off leaving behind that sweet sweet brand awareness.
I'd say the metric is simply "if it's suddenly louder than the content before, we have the users attention and eyeballs".
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
> In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
Yeah, one would think that it works the same for everyone, but in fact it helps to be attention-grabbing, regardless of how.
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
Personally I feel like keeping a list of annoying ad brands and avoiding them would take up too much of my mental space, and it would lead me occasionally to bad purchasing decisions. Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying, but basically all companies have to do it and they tend to do what works and behave similarly. As long as I have a choice, I’ll avoid advertising in general, regardless of whether it’s annoying.
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
I could agree that advertising is ‘always manipulative’ in the sense that, of course, it always seeks to sell you something and hope you’re swayed into buying. Most of it isn’t secretly or overtly manipulative, most of it is someone saying out loud “here’s my thing, buy it”.
> There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
That’s a step too far, IMO, and before saying that you should at least reflect on how some advertising somewhere likely benefits you. There are many kinds of advertising. Advertising is not necessarily dishonest. If you work for a for-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a non-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a government agency, your org probably advertises. Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
We are chatting on the website of a venture capital company. This very forum you’re using is a subtle advertisement, and a significant portion of the chatter here is about how to start a company, including marketing and advertising. The type of ad/marketing that HN is is neither annoying nor manipulative.
If you ever start your own company - and I recommend it - that’s when you learn the fact that advertising is both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult to do well. If you ever do anything in public, announcing it is advertising. The vast majority of companies advertise, as do many government and non-profit and public-interest organizations, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertising is a huge part of the business model that funds the arts in the US, and without it, we’d have a lot fewer plays, dancing, and music.
> Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
Sure, let's discuss.
I cannot agree. Even if it isn't necessarily wrong, that's not strictly correct either. I'll call it a generalization well past the point of not being useful.
Reading several dictionaries' definitions of "marketing" and "advertising", there is room between them, with advertising focusing on paid placement in every one. The American Marketing Association says: "Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting and meeting customer needs. Advertising is a business practice where a company pays to place its messaging or branding in a particular location." https://www.ama.org/marketing-vs-advertising/
Yet "paid" isn't enough, and not only because of the common phrase "paid advertisement". A more accurate distinction might be made with intent. Perhaps: an advertisement is intended to change a viewer's trajectory to the advertiser's desired outcome when the viewer is not already heading in that direction. This is not completely satisfactory.
I believe most people would find it a little off or burying the lede, though not necessarily wrong, to hear, "https://adobe.com/photoshop is advertising for Photoshop", in a way they wouldn't if "promotes" was used instead. I believe most would have a similar impression, "that's a rather weird way to phrase it", if you were to say a business is advertising in the phone book when they are only listed by name, address, and number -- the most basic listing.
It’s fine if you want to define advertising as paid announcements here in this thread, though words have multiple definitions and I’d be willing to bet every single dictionary you checked includes definitions that don’t involve payment (I just checked a few as well). Paid promotion might be the most common definition, I can accept that, but it’s also a fact that use of the word “advertising” in non-commercial and non-paid contexts is quite common and perfectly valid in English speech and writing. Most common does not equate to only, and it’s a mistake to imply otherwise.
Defining ads as requiring payment leaves out some obvious examples that aren’t “paid”, like companies next to freeways or streets that put commercial advertisement murals on their buildings. It’s routine for billboard companies, magazines, publishers, movie trailers, etc., to advertise the space they offer for paid ads. It’s common for Google to advertise Google services on google.com. Nobody is “paid” for the ads in those cases, not in the sense you’re talking about, and I’m sure those are still ads by your definition, whatever it is, right?
So, for the purposes of this discussion, assume I accept your definition of advertising as being paid promotion. Nothing in your comment addressed my point that paid advertising is the business model by which the arts largely gets funded, nor that you likely benefit financially from paid advertising by organizations you’re part of. I don’t know that for a fact, of course, I’m just betting based on the fact that the vast majority of people are part of, or make a living from, organizations that do paid advertising.
You haven’t established any reasons why paid advertising would be considered “dishonest”, or why advertisers should be considered “scum”. Does that apply to your employer? Does that apply to grant foundations or business donors that fund plays or concerts? Does that apply to the government? Kickstarter or gofundme campaigns? Startup companies? Paid PSAs?
There are some ads and companies that I would agree are dishonest and scummily manipulative, like cigarettes. But there are also plenty of ads that are innocuous and not irritating, and quite a few ads and advertisers who are good and kind people that support their communities and public works.
Do you believe I disagree with everything you said earlier? I don't. Take me at my word, that I wanted to discuss how advertising is not "any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist".
I have been making an effort the past couple years towards less advertising in my life, including less reliance on ad-supported services. That has required a significant investment of time, though less money than you'd expect, and is why I was interested in discussing what it is about advertising that causes people to say things like the person above did with "scum". However, you conceded that and appear disinterested in discussing it further; where you're going now doesn't look very interesting or useful.
> You haven’t established any reasons why paid advertising would be considered “dishonest”, or why advertisers should be considered “scum”.
One good reason to not like advertisers is because the job involves such a high degree of intentional manipulation of a viewer towards the advertiser's self-interest. Many do call that dishonest. I called this "paid placement" definition not completely satisfactory -- but this is so very prevalent and typical that you accepted it as true.
Have you heard "visual pollution" used for advertising? https://petapixel.com/2023/01/11/what-major-cities-would-loo...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa Those working towards pollution are quite scummy. How many snake oil salesman do you need to be ill-intentioned before the whole profession is tainted where you are no longer surprised to see people stereotype them? You're not adding much to the discussion if you're only arguing against a stereotype with the equivalent of, "there are some very bad advertisers, but you also have some that are very fine people".
> you likely benefit financially from paid advertising by organizations you’re part of.
My current employer does not advertise, and I've been with them a decade. I've never been in a position to control advertising by any of my past employers, most of whom did advertise. I recall declining advertising jobs, such as door-to-door sales of Cutco knives, back when I was a student. (I still remember that presentation, despite leaving in the middle; this captures much of what I felt: https://www.thetakeout.com/the-invasive-manipulative-art-of-....) There is no gotcha here: I am a working stiff, my employer is medium-size, though they also don't rely on customers off the street. I don't see how these things do or do not affect the current discussion.
Other than as an employee (or business-owner), I struggle to imagine what other types of organizations I could be a part of that would provide financial benefit to me. My church does provide financial benefits in the form of donations to families, but I am thankful to have not been in the position to need that. They also don't advertise, though is the line blurred by accepting advertisements to put in flyers distributed to members, or in that instance, is the church the community which benefits from the advertisers?
Most people have no control over advertising by their employer, and I see no cognitive dissonance with an employee cashing paychecks while disliking the advertisers employed by their employer. Nor is there dissonance with a business owner feeling scummy by their own need to hire advertisers. Distasteful things can be necessary in a given environment.
You recommend starting a business, and I have gone far enough down that path to realize one of my significant hurdles would be dealing with things such as advertising. Still, a business would probably be worthwhile, and if I ever do, I hope I feel scummy when I advertise instead of feeling entitled:
Oh, the very first thing I need to say is that I missed the fact that you’re not the same person who said there is no such thing as an honest advertiser and that all advertisers are scum. I did indeed assume you were defending that stance and disagreeing with everything I’d said. That’s my mistake, apologies.
If you agree that some ads and some advertisers are not dishonest, not scummy, and not doing harm, then I think we’re probably in full agreement. I agree that some ads are some advertisers are deceitful, I’m aware of visual pollution and I don’t want it. I also seek to minimize ads with my own online activity.
> “paid placement” definition […] is so very prevalent and typical that you accepted it as true.
No, I agreed to accept it for the purposes of this conversation, to avoid further useless semantic argument, because you were pushing that definition. I did in fact offer multiple examples of how that definition does not work in general, and outside of this conversation, my definition of ‘advertise’ is unchanged and does not equal ‘paid promotion’.
> I wanted to discuss how advertising is not “any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist”.
Google’s first definition of advertise is “describe or draw attention to (a product, service, or event) in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance.” Google’s 2nd definition is “seek to fill a vacancy by putting a notice in a newspaper or other medium”. Google’s 3rd definition is “make (a quality or fact) known”. Google’s 4th and last definition is to “notify someone of something”. I don’t know about you but in my mind, all four of those definitions are very close to what I said. To advertise is to “make known”, yeah that is a lot more concise than my quote. It doesn’t necessarily involve payment, and it doesn’t necessarily involve manipulation, and it doesn’t necessarily involve dishonesty or scummy people. Right?
I’m not pro ads, my singular contribution to this conversation is to counter the false claim that all advertisers are bad people and that all advertising is bad. I was trying to give examples of advertising - examples that you and GP would agree count as advertising - that are not dishonest, scummy, or manipulative.
Yes, ads in your church flyer absolutely count as paid promotion, and your church benefits financially from them. The other example that I gave of a non-business organization that does a lot of paid promotion is the government, and I mentioned it specifically because much of the paid promotion activity from the government is informational & PSA type of advertising. (Though I can readily admit our current administration is pushing some truly stunning advertising.)
> There is no gotcha here
I wasn’t aiming for a gotcha, I was aiming for a more serious reflection on the role of advertising in society. The stance by GP that I was reacting to that all paid ads are pure evil is an extreme stance that fails to recognize why advertising is here and why it’s so prevalent, fails to acknowledge the benefits of advertising, and fails to offer any thoughtful alternatives. If we want to talk about advertising being bad, we ought to steer toward what we can do instead. Without a viable alternative to the economic output of advertising, we can complain about the bad ads all we want, but we’re tilting at windmills and nothing will change, right?
Are you certain your employer does no advertising? To me that implies your employer does no marketing at all, and gains all new customers strictly via referrals from other customers. Is that true? That’s great if so, but doesn’t change the fact that most people work for companies that advertise, which is a good reason to reflect on the role of advertising in society.
I hope you feel neither scummy nor entitled when you start a business and have to advertise. Making known your goods or services is simply a necessary part of doing business, and when it’s done well it’s an honest living and supports the families you employ.
Sorry for the mini rant but... One of the things that annoy me about TV shows is that the pacing on shows that were designed for network TV with ads is so predictable you can know whenever a tense scene is going to have an interesting outcome or not.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
> all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene
reply
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
AFAIK even annoying people with ads still makes them more likely to buy your product. Even making people think "ugh, I'll never buy that" still makes them more likely to buy that. They do this stuff because it works. Even if you think it doesn't work, it still works.
Whether or not this actually turns into purchases, I would imagine that obnoxious == memorable, and therefore advertising companies believe more memorable ads will turn into more purchases.
I think the solution is to recreate and reenforce United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. for the modern age, forcibly separating the production and display of video media.
That means Netflix couldn't make any of it's own shows, you wouldn't have each media company with its own streaming service.
Add on top of that standard fees for streaming royalties which were how do I say contract free syndication. As in you don't need to make a deal with a studio, any company can have anything in their streaming library and everybody pays the same fee (maybe with something like a 1 year lockout, but anything made available on one would be required to be available on all).
Then you have a real market for streaming services and productions instead of all of these little monopolies. Consumers get to choose with their wallets instead of tying the art with the corporate policy.
> It's sad that such a thing needs regulation in the first place.
Profit motivated business (i.e. almost all of them) have a fiduciary duty towards the owners or shareholders. They are legally bound to maximize profits at all costs. If they don't do this, the leadership will be found guilty of dereliction of duty and be sanctioned.
Business aren't people, therefore human morality does not apply. Regulations are the only thing that keeps this behaviour in check. It's the nature of the beast unfortunately.
> and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them
It absolutely has a negative outcome for them, there is a post on the front-page of HN right now about how a California law is forcing Netflix and other streaming services to turn down the volume of their ad breaks.
