Man Against Marketing
johnhellion.substack.com
johnhellion.substack.com
- Governments (state as well as municipality) like having some inescapable public ad space, because they use it too, for announcements and such. Solution: decouple commercial advertising and government announcements.
- "But how will people find out about new products?" - yes, I've heard people say this without any irony, maybe nowadays we can respond that people are on their phones all the time so they can still see ads there. Some opt-in advertising solution (like jokoon is describing) could be an alternative as well.
- "What about store signage and shop windows?" - I think these shouldn't be included in an outdoor advertising ban, however advertisers are sure to try and muddy the waters here to get small businesses on their side, so it would be wise to emphasize this from the start.
- "I like ads, some of them look nice" - replace billboards with trees, art, the sky...
- "What about the revenue the city gets from advertising space?" - The most hairy and perhaps most important point. I would like to make explicit all the implicit exchanges of value involved in advertising, but it might be too abstract for the average Joe. Someone pays the city to show me something. That means the ability to show it to me is worth more to them than what they pay the city. It also means that at the end of the day, the money is somehow coming from me, and this amount could be larger than what the city gets out of it, even. Therefore I would actually save money if the city abolished advertising and just raised taxes a little. Of course there is the false consciousness that many people have, "I don't get influenced by ads".
- Negative psychological effects of advertising, the basic human right to not have to look at something designed to manipulate you. I feel this on a deep level but you quickly start sounding like a crazy person if you explain it to someone who doesn't really get this. Maybe an alternative would be to refer to objective studies relating advertising and wellbeing.
Banning one form of advertising simply raises the value of the unbanned forms. The problem with advertising is that there is so much of it. That is because it is cheap for the value that the purchaser receives. If we tax all forms of advertising, it will become more expensive, and less advertising will be purchased.
It would be better to tax it by volume (i.e. per billboard, magazine page or banner ad) than by dollar since this would encourage better targeting. However, people would likely find a way to work around the easiest ways to define advertising volume, so it really would be best to start with a tax on advertising revenue just to raise the effective price.
Think of ads like ammunition. If a bullet is 10 cents, it pays to spray and pray. But if a bullet is 10 dollars, it pays to make sure you hit your target. We have too many advertisers spraying and praying. Their ammo is too cheap.
>Banning one form of advertising simply raises the value of the unbanned forms.
For me personally it is most important to ban the forms of advertising that are inescapable, i.e. in public spaces. Indeed it would raise the value of advertising on radio/tv/internet, but those are much easier to ignore. But the only way to ignore outdoor advertising is just don't go outside, which is a bit much.
A tax on advertising revenue is not a bad idea though, it might be a good incentive to find other revenue streams for many types of businesses.
It can tax. It can regulate. It can grant or deny rights. It can criminalise.
Taxation will reduce overall amounts of advertising. Taxes raise costs. Quantities of price-elastic goods or activities decrease if taxed. Ergo: an advertising tax results in less advertising.
Individually targeted advertising is regulable through both practice and rights. Government can require or restrict technology. Government can give rights (of privacy, of control over personal information), or remove them (the ability of third parties to exchange, sell, or otherwise utilise personal information other than at the express direction of the subject of that information, say).
Government can criminalise violations.
Government can make claims for redress in the case of business disputes over personal information or targeted advertising null and void. This would make any substantial business activity predicated on these activities far more risky: contracts would have no legal standing, the contract itself would be evidence of criminal activity, and any significant retention or exchange of personal information directly or by derivative would be both outside any legal protection and criminal.
In ancient civilizations as in Cuba, there's a state (church, pharaoh, etc) monopoly on marketing. All the power now dispersed to sneaker sellers, political lobbyists and SEOs was concentrated. "Everyone should believe, want or object to X" was an achievable goal. That may be what made pyramids possible.
Cornerstone of civilization.
Or if there are I've gotten extremely good at tuning them out.
Finally you can really envision that crowd you're speaking to as naked to ease your fear.
One would think "but you're talking about Instagram".
No, users would actually be able to choose the ads, and posters would always be required to pay a minimum amount per ad. The users could like or dislike the ads and never gain anything by watching ads, to avoid bot accounts.
Generally the goal would be to have an honest advertising system where users don't feel harassed by ads, since they would consent to not watch them and decide what to watch.
When I think hard I'm still describing Instagram. But it seems advertising will always have a bad reputation of harassing users. This might change, but it still seems like an impossible problem as long as it's immoral to gather user data.
That seems worse than the current situation (for me) - right now I’m ‘paid’ to watch ads by being able to access services (eg YouTube) which would otherwise come at a direct cost.
People do it all the time on Netflix, Steam, Amazon etc. Why do you believe people would stop doing that?
IKEA, La Redoute, and many other companies used this approach, and people literally had these in their living rooms so themselves, their family, or even guests would have something to fiddle with.
Catalogs are marketing tools, and usually come out of marketing budget.
There are uncomfortably blurry lines between marketing, recommendation engines and NN systems that will probably be core systems.
With the current FB, Youtube, Etc... it's hard to really define where marketing begins and ends. As content recommendation and ad serving engines collaborate and converge...
I don't expect perfection from Musk, but it's easy to imagine he does most everything with good intentions, or at least no malice.
I'm a fan of anyone willing to go broke for what they believe in though and I do recognize his social influence is so strong that it would be very difficult for any human to handle that without getting a god complex.
The reverse, more worryingly, is also sometimes true.
I'm in the "hero" camp, yet I still made that comment about neuralink. I would probably be more shrill in my concerns if Zuck was doing neuralink. But ultimately, I don't think the individual matters much. The creepiness of social media ads and recommendations systems is mostly because of what those platforms are, not the individual publicly leading them.
As such anything that can be done faraway will be. My shirt can be made in Taiwan or Arkansas and it’s imperceptible to me. When so need to get an MRI flying to Taiwan is out of the question and a day trip to Arkansas is impractical. I need a doctor down the street I can see with a half day off work.
this makes me glad for add blockers, VPNs, TOR, Canvas manipulators, piholes, and such. Sitting in front of a friends TV for a coffee and the amount of advertising from the moment she turns her TV on (the damn thing has adverts on its menu bar...) and then the sprawling chaos of attention grabbers from free to air tv and finally youtube itself. Thankfully I saw the recently uploaded and monetised video her sister put on line including its 5 seconds of advertising at the start and 15 seconds of unskippable advertising 25 seconds before the video finished.
I have no regrets for my ignorance
> Once you're through the ads jungle, you enter the content maze. Many things you read, watch or listen are designed to sell you something (subscribe, by the way, and leave a comment). The aim is to get more sales, a bigger audience, more clicks, more money, more attention.
Traditional religions promise us a blessing in our life (or cursing our enemies and wrongdoers) or a good afterlife.
Political ideologies promise us heaven on earth.
Marketing promises us a better life, more joy, better social status (as discussed in the blog post). Even more - temples used to be the most central and well-kept building for cities; now, there are shopping malls. For some, e.g. Apple store, the resemblance is intentional. Similarly, when it comes to the festival - it does not matter what you believe in for Xmas. It matters if you buy gifts.
Comparing push notifications to the human toll inflicted by guns and bombs is asinine beyond belief.
In the grand scheme of things, nobody gives a shit that someone had the audacity to try and distract you. It’s not super important.
Guns and bombs have been with us for centuries. The effect of them is known and it always same - it kills. We are already good at killing, invented the deadliest weapons and we don't really need to go "deadlier".
However, mental health issues, attention span, distractions, Dopamine feedback loop, etc. are also issues and they are something new for humanity. These things might kill slowly, and not exactly in a physical sense. The effect of them isn't visible yet but I believe we will see it in a few generations.
Cheers, John
I guess when we talk about destructive power, this topped out in the 1950s with fusion weapons. It’s unclear if that technology will represent the apex of deadliness forever, or whether we’ll discover and develop something more powerful in the future. As you say, even ordinary munitions are plenty deadly and are causing misery ever single day.
However, if we talk about evil weapons, they are very much in active development; there’s seemingly no limit to the cruel and unusual ways we’re willing to fuck other people up. Technological development on those has not ceased.
I’m actually in agreement that the economic incentives mixed with technology (and a lack of scruples) has led to a vastly degraded information landscape; where we differ is that I think the comparison–even as a literary device–weakens the argument and makes the concerns seem trivial.
Marketers must be really powerful if they can affect the way underground stations are designed, I thought design is done to be as cheap as possible, since digging all those tunnels is expensive anyway, so making it even more expensive by digging some more tunnels to make them longer sounds indeed horribly.
Next:
"Angel is the station with the longest escalator in London. The vertical rise is 27.5 meters and the total length is 61 meters, making it 3rd longest in Europe. Flashing pictures don't bring me joy but the long escalator reminds me of the time when I was living in St. Petersburg. The average underground escalator in there is deeper and longer than the average escalator in London, and probably anywhere else. "
Ok, so marketers were so powerful also in Soviet Union, as most of the Underground was built then. This gets really interesting. I would never say communists fell into ads tech stuff too.
There are obvious shortcomings of ads tech, like intrusive tracking, gathering information that can be used against people (to sell them products for a higher price, refuse job, renting flat, selling insurance, etc.). But article is not mentioning that, only the fact that "ads are selling a dream".
Well, they are, believe or not, on the markets of ancient Rome, Babylon or Cuzco sellers were also selling the dream of having the tastiest vegetables, the most durable pots, the best spears and daggers.
Don't you see it? What are the glorious murals depicting the advancements of the workers, if not ads for The Party?
It also doubled as a nice bomb shelter. You never know.
It's a topic that captivates me every couple of months, most recently I've been interested in the power of YouTube's recommendation system. If you show interest in a topic you're slowly guided into more videos on the topic, to the point where you're more likely to buy items surrounding the topic you have become interested in. Then eventually the recommendations change, your interest in that topic weans and you're on to your next interest. It's a cycle that's easy to fall into and easy to break if you notice, but how many people don't notice?
YouTube behaves the same way for me, and I am wondering if it's just a perception thing. If I watch an MTB video, it's mostly MTB recommendations, but they're all people I am subscribed to so it's not notable. But if I watch a video about metalworking, it probably shows the same kind of spread just for a topic and channels I'm not familiar with, making it feel like it's lost it's way.
I also wonder if they don't weight subscriptions that highly for the recommendations, and because I mostly watch subscriptions, if I watch a new topic it's heavily weighted because there's not much other data.
Host-based adblocking works if advertising delivery comes from servers distinct from content, and is delivered directly to the client (that is, the end-user's web browser) rather than "rendered" on the server side.
There are reasons the independent ad hosting solution's come about, not a few of which revolve around measurement and fraud --- a freestanding ad infrastructure gives metrics independent of the ads venue. In a world in which trustworthy data are hard to come by, this had been strongly embraced.
The rise and success of host-based adblocking creates an evolutionary arms race between advertisers and ads-averse publics. There are several possible countermeasures:
- Advertising can be intermixed with content, either with ads coming from content servers, or content coming from ads servers.
- Ad payload and content bait can be pre-rendered on the content delivery site. The user no longer has a separately-identifiable data stream to discriminate the advertising content.
There are other adblocking methods. Some rely on determining what parts of a web page (the "DOM", or document object model) correspond to advertising. Typically, dimensions (ads are sold in standard sizes), element names (usually HTML attributes including CSS class and ID values), or display attributes (fixed or floating elements especially) are used. The story's complicated. Browser-based adblocking typically includes several of these heuristics, in addition to host-based blocking.
And there are new technologies which will make even those methods less effective. (Look up direct canvas rendering as a leading option.)
Router-based blocking is virtually always to determining the source of a data stream, but not its content (thanks in part to the security and encryption now part of most Web traffic, thanks to HTTPS and SSL/TLS security protocols). PiHole and its equivalents have been largely effective to date, but still leak some ads, and may be less effective in future.
People feel pinned down in their life, so a common dream sold is to be free. Think of Mac and their proposition of enabling your creativity (a creative person is unconstrained). A lot of car and motorbike companies also show their products as liberating in different ways.
Beer ads often show popularity and unselfconscious social interaction, which is a big deal for young guys.
For course there's dreams of beauty, success, feeling accepted.
Car ads for example are a complete blur in my head. The only thing that I distinctly remember is when everyone had ads with their cars driving in shallow sea water, which I found absurd. Do they still do that?
I certainly do feel pinned down in life, but I also don't remember seeing ads that offer a concrete solution (and I'm not even convinced its solvable). I don't think I need to be sold the dream to be free, because that is already something I desire very much. I just see products. Ones that will not fulfill that dream.
And advertisers greatest trick is making you think that ads don’t work on you.
We like to think we are above it all (I know I do) but why do I drink one brand of vodka as opposed to another. Objectively they are all identical. Clearly at some point some piece of branding breached my defences, you know?
Yes, I might prefer pepsi to coca cola or vice versa and maybe that's a product of marketing, but both are just drinks to me. Just another product. Which I might buy once in a while, but it's really got nothing to do with my dreams.
And the noise...which generally is not mutable
They probably sold us the Revolution in the first place.
We are autononmous independent entities, living within a simulated Universe.