Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation.

Don’t worry they’ve solved that, it’s called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That’s much less ominous! They just influence!

It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.

Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.

He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.

He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.

It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.

Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”

Well said. It disgusts me a lot, and it also dismays me to see a lot of people don’t care at all about ads. I even rememeber people in my old job talking about ads on tv. Boggles my mind.

If I am forced to see or interact with an ad I will do absolutely everything in my power to excise that ad source from my life.

So when you’re in a store or a restaurant that is playing the radio and an ad comes on you’ll walk around the entire commercial break with your fingers in your ears going, “lalalalala?”

Sure. Sure you do, buddy.

Its crazy how much people put up with it every time I see someone elses browser I ask them why they dont use an ad blocker and I always gets some nothing reply.

Have you installed Bonzi Buddy yet?

I mean, it sounds like they’re not even running an ad blocker. That’s not even an effectively defensive relationship.

The Super Bowl commercial with the Backstreet Boys and MGK was nostalgic and funny. Generally I find most ads annoying and block them or avoid the sites/channels where they show up.

thnx for advertising those to us.

/jk

This 100%. I have so many brands in my black list to never consider after happening to get interrupted by their ad, not even neccessarily a dumb ad. Reoccurring ones do that quite effectively too: Seeing an ad once is maybe no biggie (unless it’s long/dumb), twice starts to annoy, three times and you’re out.

True. I remember two ads specifically in my country that pissed me off so much I vowed to never purchase anything from their company. Both were phone service providers.

One was an ad where the guy gets the message of the ad out in 5 seconds and then the rest of the ad is him sitting in silence for 25 additional seconds, eating some food. That ad pissed me off enough to contact the company and let them know what I thought.

The second was this stupid bint sitting in a pink room, smugly wringing her hands and going: Oooh, you really want to get to your video, don’t you? Here it comes! 🤪

I was like: I don’t give a fuck if your phone service provider is the best in the galaxy. I will never use it ever.

Technically I have a third ad that made me despise charity for life, but that was before the time where ads online were what they are today and this ad did not show up online. I’ll tell the story anyways because this is the type of ad that every charity should avoid if they want people to donate:

Rewind to 2012. My boyfriend and I were dirt poor. Literally had to borrow money from our parents to have enough for food. He was a full time student and I was sick with a mean depression at the time.

We get some birthday money. I forget who it was from and who it was for. Normally, we would spend birthday money to pay bills but this time there was a tiny bit left over and we decided to go to the cinema for once. Have a date night. We only had enough for tickets. No snacks. No drinks. Just the tickets, but we didn’t care because the fact that we got to go to the movies felt like a massive luxury.

Ads pop up on the big screen. One of them is this close up of an African child with flies on his face, looking real sad. Across his face a text appears: “How much was your movie ticket?”

That singlehandedly made me boycott that specific charity for life. Fuck them forever. Worst part is that i used to actually volunteer for that charity and help them collect money by going door to door once a year with a friend. We collected so much money for those assholes. Haven’t bothered with volunteering since. It wasn’t solely that ad that turned me off charity, but a series of gross experiences that just made me fucking hate charity and the vultures who use it to scrape money from normal everyday people who think they are helping little impoverished children in third world countries.

I have seen similar charity ads on social media after the terminally online realized that there is a neverending war in Gaza. So many ads with obvious scammers prematurely blaming you for skipping their ad and leaving them to suffer. My reaction? 🖕👁👅👁🖕

There for sure are good and honorable charities out there and I have no ill will towards them, but I see the vast majority of charities as guilt tripping scams where they try their best to make people feel ashamed for being born in a privileged country and wringing money out of them while exploiting children in poor countries who will never see a dime.

In short: I hate ads too and the more they annoy me, the more their company or charity ends on my permanent shit list.

It’s becoming best practice in IT to install uBlock Origin on browsers to help prevent scareware

“but youtube generates my music playlists because it knows what i like”