No one likes ads. So let’s do something about it

As for the content, it's another great example of "The old web is dead" trope.

There's tons of fantastic advertising designs - more in volume than ever before! [1]

But there's also 10000x more crappy ads than there were before. Previous years crappy ads were all just walls of text

I'd bet the ratio of good design to bad/no design in advertising is probably about the same as always.

[1]https://www.designrush.com/trends/magazine-ad-design

[2]https://www.thoughtmedia.com/print-advertising-in-2019/

Pages used to be: a header, sidebar, a block of text, and a few pictures.

Now, it's a bunch of ads.. usually blocked by an adblock.. and a cookie prompt. Ok/accept all (and delete when you close the browser)... then a "we need donations/subscription"... "conitniue free"... then you slide further, and a popupto subscribe to their newsletter... find the tiny x... and the whole article is ten sentances and 6 stock images.

Now everything on the internet is a generic slurry of Content shoved through a handful of corporate pipes that do their best to strip any ads off and substitute their own. And the bidding structure means you end up getting the same ads again and again, ad nauseum. You never get that one crazy local mattress salesman doing goofy, awkward skits at 3am, you just get another fucking Grammarly ad or whatever. Or you get some horrible micro-targeted thing aimed at whatever precise demographic you've been sliced into by the immense piles of data all the tracking companies have collected, sold by someone drop-shipping junk from China behind a brand identity they spun up two weeks ago when the previous one was getting too many bad reviews.

I make comics and put 'em online. When the webcomic ad network Project Wonderful died, I just quit running ads on my comics. Patreon had come along not too long before that and made me much more money than ads ever did. I do kind of miss being able to have some ad spaces that earnt enough money to have ads for my comics regularly popping up on other comics, attracting the attention of people who were interested in reading weird indy comics online. Now the space of "comics on the web" is mostly dominated by a couple of corporate Content Pipes that want everything to fit into the Procrustean bed of one panel at a time on a phone screen and might deign to give you a part of the ads they run against your work if you get enough views.

The idea of "stock photos with product placement" sure is not making me excited. Fuck ads, and fuck the modern Internet ad world even more.

I see the proposal offers a value proposition for Unsplash and creators using their images. However I don't see how the the article solves the problem of advertising.

Websites overloaded with advertising/popups will still exist unchanged because they are attempting to convert visitor traffic to a revenue stream by using advertising as their funding mechanism.

> Open Source Advertising: the act of promoting a brand by releasing media (especially images) featuring its product(s) to the public to use and distribute free of charge.

First of all, Open Source isn't the correct term when referring to non-software content, you should be using something like Creative Commons or just "permissive."

Open Source is about the... well, source, so you would only use that term if you were doing something like uploading the raw image files and data used to create the ad, and if you were letting people fork it and recompile it and swap out brands or something. Like, you might conceivably call a Blender movie "open source" if it shipped with the Blender files and assets used to build it.

That's not what's going on here, so it's just a misleading term.

Second of all:

> “But will my brand be safe if go this route?” Yes. Here’s why you shouldn’t worry: First, under intellectual property law, you have the ability to issue a takedown notice to remove content that negatively infringes on your brand.

Then it's not a permissive license at all, is it? If you're going to not only use open source, but capitalize it and call it Open Source, then one would think part of the license would be the ability to remix, redistribute, and modify the content regardless of whether or not it makes an advertiser happy.

But this doesn't even link to a license at all, and Unsplash's default license is not compatible with Creative Commons since it doesn't allow aggregation. So what on earth does "negatively infringes on your brand" mean?

It annoys me to no end when businesses try to have their cake and eat it too by using Open Source/Creative Commons terminology to describe their incompatible licenses.

Their solution is product placement in stock photos- I can see the appeal here, but to some extent, doesn't it just push the problem down a level? Unsplash are targeting "creators" with their branded content, who for the most part are only making their "content" to get views and by extension push regular shitty online advertising. So I dont see how this breaks the loop that has made online advertising a cesspool. Now we'll just have blogs using stock pictures with a Windows computer or whatever in them, that still have all the annoying popovers and other ad accessories.

If someone is interested they will click on it, if not then why manipulate their minds and play with emotions. (Coca-Cola is a primary example)

Probably the legions of garbage ads have simply been forgotten about, and we only remember the greats. In the same way that the average quality of golden-oldie radio stations is better than new-stuff stations.

I know there are lots of Googler's on this forum, and its just incredibly sad to see so much talent devoted to such a vile cause.

give people the option to turn off moving ads, turn off ads for alcohol, gambling.. opt in to 'cat ads' or opt in to getting amazon ads on pages - or something -

this way there are options and control and no longer have to say 'no one likes ads'.

I've written longer and more detail with similar in the past.

Sites can control this.

I find this a stretch. I can’t imagine writing a Medium post, then inserting an unsplash photo containing a Coke bottle placed discreetly in the corner…unless I’m writing about soda.

I'm sure there are plenty of flaws here but perhaps having Ads for good causes will at least make it more pleasant to the eyes than the current state...

#seedontbuy #WAYSDNBI

> Think of the classic campaigns from Apple, Volkswagen, Absolut, and Nike.

Is this not the definition of selection bias? If you only think about the classics, everything seems better than it was. It also rests on the point that those classic ads were 'good', and that's something I disagree with - I don't think there's any moral form of advertising, which is my second problem with this article.

> Ads aimed to be compelling.

Ads aimed to redirect your attention without your knowledge and artificially create an urge to consume. I interpret the author's use of the word "compelling" as an admission that ads are story-telling, and give a narrative that does not need to be beneficial. The classics of Absolut apparently (I don't know for sure - I'm just looking at the images on the website) are about Vodka, and encourage consumption of alcohol unilaterally, despite and because that's not a choice consumers would make unguided and without external influence. Alcohol kills people, and that's not something ads are going to mention.

Apple is of course into their slave labor and suicide net model of production, and VW lied about their car's energy efficiency. It's a cliche to say this, but there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Please, for the love of all that is good, let's stop acting like there is.

> It wanted people to feel something.

Yes, that's called emotional manipulation, and it's both bad and not gone.

> Sadly, we’ve lost those great, Ogilvy-esque, creative campaigns and replaced them with the digital equivalents of windshield flyers, direct mail campaigns, and door tags. What a snooze.

Why exactly do we want the fine-wine equivalent of emotional manipulation? This does not feel like an art form, much less an ethical art form.

> 96% of consumers don’t trust ads. (source)

Thank fuck? Why on earth do you want people to trust ads? What good to society does that do?

> I’m a creator and I need an image so I can make something I care about.

If this is what was encouraged by economic dynamics, I'd be all for it. But no matter who runs the ad, individual or multi-million dollar corporation, it'll still be pushed towards an image encouraging consumption to an excess. *That is how capitalism works*. This article is the advertisement equivalent of addressing climate change by consuming more products. It completely fails to address the root problems and favors a near straw-man argument to substantial change and effect. Honestly, this feels like a parody of neoliberal ideology meant to poke fun. I really hope I'm not missing a joke.