Only watch Blu-rays and when I do Youtube, I do it through yt-dlp. If there are ads, I'm out. I just can't physically handle this assault on my mind. It's too much.
Obviously this doesn't apply to classified ads or their electronic equivalents. But what we normally mean by advertising, where people are paid vast sums of money to think very, very hard about how to manipulate you to hand over money for shit you don't need, is vomit-inducing. Billboards are even worse because they deface and degrade the public landscape, and ugly landscapes can contribute to depression, anxiety, irrational anger, and other problems. They are as bad as littering.
What has made people think this is ok?
I have ad free household. We treat ads like a poison, like there's a fire. Over the top reaction to shut them down if they creep in. It has taught my own child to avoid ads like the plague (unlike their peers).
I have no idea how people use the Internet with all the ads, no blockers. It is just bonkers, and even at work it is an uphill battle to convince people ad-blockers should be enforced just to protect the business from malicious ads, let alone their own brains.
I want to lobby to have all adverts removed from public transport, but I am unsure how to do that in Australia, but I will work it out.
I don't know what I'm going to teach them about politics when the time comes, since (what most people mean by) politics is essentially a particularly malevolent and dangerous species of advertising, but at the same time I don't want to make them too cynical.
I don't know if the boiling frog thesis explains it, since it's gone from near-zero to 100 in non-western countries over the past couple of decades, unlike the west where it's built up slowly over the past century and a half.
These days it is ads of folks around my age doing a yoga type of a thing on a beach and stretching joyfully at sunrise.
The ads are about some meds that can cause suicidal thoughts and constipation (in small print and quick blah blah blah) but "may" help your arthritis.
Then, a $150K Ranger Rover ad, a thing I'd never want to be seen in even if I could afford it.
I've worked in digital ad tech for many years, I like ads, but I want good ads. Never bought anything from a 180 second long ad on Amazon Prime Video.
One would think that with all PII that's been gathered, a brand could scratch an itch, but nah, it's just useless carpet bombing.
I've been to France and I've seen the ads on public channels on a hotel TV. They were very innocuous compared to merde we are fed in the states.
It's the superior Youtube experience that, funnily enough, is not available on paid platforms like Apple TV.
https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
>iSponsorBlockTV is a self-hosted application that connects to your YouTube TV app and automatically skips segments in YouTube videos using the SponsorBlock API.
Thinking about it... product placements do introduce an interesting dynamic.
TV shows I watched in the past often went out of their way to change brand names, for example Somy instead of Sony, WacDonalds instead of MacDonalds etc.
This is done to avoid copyright infringement, I think.
But on the other side brands pay to be inserted.
Yes, I also couldn't watch a Blu-ray in a normal player. Too many ads.