Driver of overconsumption.
Keeping us hooked on social media feeds.
Targeting children, making them use addictive products.
Making everything more expensive (because we are paying for the ads eventually).
Collecting our data.
Sometimes allowing malware to be installed on our systems.
Frustrating the idea that the best product should win; instread the one with the biggest advertising budget wins.
...
Anything that stalks, snoops, tracks, profiles, personifies, “shares”, coerces, scams, scans, or sells any of the aforementioned should be illegal and considered with broad definitions. Minimally jail time for destroying generations of culture.
When was the last time you saw an ad for anything that matched your interests, let alone made you actually buy something?
It seems like such a shallow and dumb targeting mostly based on region and language: If I watch just a couple Russian videos on YouTube but never spoke Russian, I get Russians ads! If I fly to Indonesia but never watched any Indonesian videos ever, I get Indonesian ads!
70% of my YouTube views are games, but I only ever see an occasional ad for Eve..
That's why I go to a lot of effort to block as much of it as possible for myself and my family, and to some extent, extended family and friends.
Advertising is a gross perversion of 'service' and a symptom of Uber-capitalism. It is psychological manipulation.
Whenever I use other people's tech and get bombarded with ads it's a sensory overload. Not only the sound, colors, etc but just the dense amount of bullshit information. It's all lies. It's all a weird advertising version of what it is. It's all marketing wank.
Whenever I see a good number of advertisements I feel overstimulated and like someone just tried to sell me a car without telling me the truth.
I really don't understand how people stomach advertising. It's so over the top.