if anything, they should ADD ads to premium users because they have more money
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
That's the neat thing, they don't.
Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it's a well-known fact that this doesn't work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it's not worth the money.
So what are ads actually there for then?
First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone's too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.
Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.
They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse.
I hate that I’m going to defend marketing here, but if they do stop marketing then things will collapse (for many businesses). Do I like marketing, personally? No. That’s why I got out of marketing and am becoming an elementary school teacher to help others rather than spit propaganda but I digress…
Marketing isn’t always about generating a sale. Many times its reach and brand recall. We’re a global and digital economy now, so reach is massively important for survival. Stopping marketing limits who is exposed to your brand and the repetition makes your company synonymous with a product.
Why do we call tissues Kleenex? Why do we call cotton swabs a Qtip? Why do we call small sticky notepads Post-Its? Why do we call searching “Googling”? Why do we gravitate toward those brands even when cheaper and more generic options exist that are perfectly on par?
Making those brands the prime thing you think of when you use a specific thing so that no one thinks of using something else even when they have money. You want people to mention your product or think about it even if they aren’t buying it.
You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.
You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.
Tbh, I don't think it's that powerful. I've been happily googling on DuckDuckGo for years, same as I have been using Post-its from all sorts of companies and in fact never from Post-it. I don't think this brand is even available in my country.
I've been using "Tixo" for "sticky tape" even though the Tixo brand went out of business around the time I was born.
In fact, if a brand name becomes genericised, it loses its power. It stops being a brand and becomes a generic term for anything in that space.
Brand recognition also goes the other way. You know, like when you see a McDonalds and you instinctively go "Ugh, these asshats who keep wasting my time with always the same ad over and over again when I try to watch a youtube video."
Intrusive ads don't further positive brand recognition but instead cause brand fatigue.
This video by Northridgefix always stuck with me because most of why his business grew is because he spent so much Google ads that he made enough money to then move to a strip mall by a major road all while making YouTube videos and taking mailed in work.
He has another video looking for new employees because he had too much business.
Marketing is more than just advertising and promoting though. Marketing is an integral part of a business. If you research what your target audience likes, that's marketing. Researching where you should sell your products, marketing. Focus group testing, marketing. What price you should sell, marketing. Even if a business doesn't have a marketing department they still engage in marketing.
the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management
That’s quite an interesting insight.
Don't have money? Time to increase your debt!!
Because you still have to be inconvenienced for not paying the premium.
If you don't have money for either product then you are not their target demographic, and thus, you being inconvenienced or delayed does not concern them in the slightest.
Their goal is to get money from the people who have money. How they affect people with no money is not a factor in their decisions, since no money will be acquired from them regardless.
I get that for stuff like billboards and tv/radio commercials.. But why does google and friends keep telling me about how they need my data to give me targeted ads? If they wanted to give me targeted ads, shouldn't they first figure out how much I'm willing to pay, then get mad at me because I can't pay for anything and maybe offer ads for mental health services?
I mean obviously the answer is that they just want the data for control and whatnot. But they should just drop the whole pretending to do targeted advertising. I would probably appreciate their honesty if they just told me that they need my data to grow their business, instead of giving me the "we care about your data" and targeted ads bullshit lol
But anyway, doesn't really matter for me personally since I use ad blockers, if I can't use ad blockers, I'll stop using the service and go read a book.
if its on a browser, you can just block it with adblockers.
Ads these days are run like internet scams they are there to trick the most vulnerable.
While we're clearing out the air, if I buy your shitty product, why do I still need to see your fucking ads?
Or worse.
Theres a product I need, never seen an ad for it. Go online, buy it. Thats all my ads are for the next 3 months like I'm some sort of fucking collector now.
And, closely related, the recurring "auto ship" suggestion for items like electric razors or oven mitts.
Yep, you nailed it, Alexa, I absolutely need one of these shipped every fucking week. Saved me so much hassle!
I appreciate the sentiment because I also hate ads, but just because you're not spending your disposable income on premium doesn't mean you couldn't theoretically spend it on something else.
Why do you think some of the most advertised things are... predatory loans and gambling.
Honestly for me the worse of it is, basically on linkedin and similar, people pretending to be recruiters, opening with a fake job posting and asking for your resume, then to follow it up with "Hey you know I don't think this resume is going to get by, can I put you in contact with my resume company, they will sharpen up your resume for $300. Umm... so yeah, don't know if you guessed this, but I have no clue when my next paycheck is coming in, this isn't the time to ask me to drop a large amount of money on something that may not do anything.
ugh yeah. the gambling. I mean that one is straight out like. play our game and you will make millions guaranteed. I mean with that voice saying the bank account balance thing. this should be crazy illegal. Im a big victimless crimes person but I have to say I would like advertising for adult things to be limited to adult venues. I don't think they should allow gambling sites to even be listed in app stores or be indexed by search engines but like if your at a bar or strip club they could have a poster with a QR code.
And nowdays you just know their $300 "service" is going to be "run it through an LLM."
On the other hand, you never see ads for beans and yet you can't stop thinking about them.
Rubbish, I can stop thinking about beans any time I want.
...
...
Mmmmmmm, beans on toast with a bit of cheese. DAMNIT!
It's not just about purchasing, but also reputation, familiarity, etc.
People keep saying that ads are to get the brand into my head, but they dont realise thats a bad thing for the company. I specificly buy brands i DONT see ads for because i believe if they arent spending money on ads but are still being sold in storesz they must be spending that money on bettering the product instead.
Sadly, you're not the norm. Getting the brand into peoples' heads actually works in most cases, which is why they keep doing it.
It's insane to me how little thought people put into things in their daily lives, because you're right. So many people see a thing and they're like "Oh, I see the thing. I'll do the thing. Coke flavored mouthwash on my TV? Yeah, let's do coke flavored mouthwash." Literally just the first unfiltered, uncritical reaction they feel.
I had someone the other day tell me they didn't want to use Firefox because when they did it gave them a bunch of security issues. When I asked what they meant it turned out the security issues in question were the browser asking them if they wanted to let different websites know their location, have access to webcam, etc. "Well I just don't like that it does that"

I don't want to stray into XKCD territory, but it does seem like people in general tend to be less...conscientious about such things than I. However, I'm oblivious about plenty of things myself that others are more aware of, so I guess it's just how different priorities work.
seems strange to me that this (in the attached image) isn't the normal way people think

This is exactly how I feel when a monthly bill goes up as result of missed payment, I missed because I'm laid off and broke. What makes them think turning up the heat will result in me suddenly having money appear?
They aren't worried in the literal you, in one sense.
Advertising is a temporal numbers game. Any one random single individual (or household) at any given time is insignificant. You are a speck of dust in the wind.
On the flip side, advertising is (or can be) a long game. At the moment you may be too young, too poor, too healthy, too whatever for their ads to be relevant. However, if they advertise enough and you see enough of these ads, it can make an impression (even if subliminal). And down the line when you're old enough to need dick pills and making just enough to afford them, you're now aware that dick pills exist and suddenly now that you're in the market for dick pills your reptilian brain will remember that jingle "Like a rock" and how Dicken's dick pills are the key to feeling 18 again. Suddenly you're sucking down Dicken's pills like they're candy.
the advertisement doesnt suppose to be some out of reach thing. more than likely targeted. also if you cant block ads or use modded apps you might be on apple, which means you probably will buy it.
It's not about buying, it's about staying in your head, even if you don't remember it explicitly.
This kinda boring, menial, repetitive propaganda doesn't try to make you buy something straight away, it's to make you numb to it, to know it, to receive it without thinking, so then it tries to affect you. It tries to turn nothing into anything resembling truth, it turns advertisement and news, into an endless cycle of boring things that get hammered by the "a lie told 1000 times turns into truth" line.
It doesn't affect you when you're watching it, it affects you when you see or do anything relating to it.
When you need to buy new tires, you know what to buy, you don't buy based on technical sheets, you buy it knowing it, even not explicitly.
(A take from Adorno and Horkheimers "Dialectic of Enlightenment", the part where they talk about the media, culture, art, etc)
Exactly this, its the main reason people around this corner of the internet push ad-blocking software so much. Its a slow toxin that warps your subjective processing.
Everyone is vulnerable to it, those that claim otherwise are deluded, and the only way to be free of it is to cut advertisment from your life in as many places as possible.
May I introduce you to neurodiversity.
You say everyone is vulnerable to it, I'd like to change your view into: everyone is affected by it.
I am not saying I am deluded or immune but it affects me in quite opposite ways. You see, autists are known to be quite stubborn (in general or places). So there's this behavior that the more you push the more distance and negativity you'll receive.
That's how eg. Radio ads affect me. I can hardly endure listening to it (even passively) but the more I hear the repetition of one ad the more I will actively work against that product or company.
(there's also research into this counter forceyit just doesn't work and erode that way)
The fact that McDonald's exists is proof that advertising works.
Last time I went to cDonald's it tasted fine and was rather enjoyable. But I felt queasy the following day.
Especially when it's for vacation spots, booking sites, or luxury cars. Keep spending that money for no return, guys, because absolutely none of that is happening. (I want to say "not happening anytime soon," but who am I kidding? I'm already in my upper 30s and I can't fathom making that kind of money.)
They don't care, they get paid to show you the ads. And the people spending to get the ads delivered aren't given very good demographics or proof that the people seeing them are good candidates, all they know is that people are watching them and that some of those people click through.
I find it wild that people are still under the impression that advertising doesn't work. I get it, you block ads, you aggressively ignore them, you feel like they never influence you. Same here. But they do influence us. A little bit here and there. Then consider that most people are way more suggestible than we are. If ads didn't work, they would've never been a thing.
You might think you cannot afford to buy most things advertised, but the numbers don't lie. They'll get you eventually. Even if it's just $3. Not having money never really stopped people from spending it anyhow.
It is because it works that I spend so much time trying to block them. I don't need them trying to manipulate me, gaslight me, or try to convince me I need shit I don't want.
It's incredibly toxic.