Well hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.
I don't long for the day when I can install an ad blocker in my car's windshield so I don't see billboards or the names of car dealerships on the backs of the other cars.
Then again, when I drive someplace where there's too many billboards I find it annoying.
The advertising industry in general is hitting just ludicrous saturation levels. I barely register ads anymore because there are just so fucking many now. My brain is attuned to shut them out, which makes them less effective, and the only solution the ad industry seems to have is MORE SODDING ADS.
What also strikes me is how many billboards in my commute route (not long, but still) are blank, or rather, just have the owner's spiel on them about outdoor advertising and how to get your ad on one. A lot of them have looked like that for a long time, maybe we're finally hitting saturation?
I'm from and in Europe sick and tired of ads being everywhere, public transport, giant posters, and so on. That it's even worse elsewhere doesn't make the shit I'm wading through daily any more palatable.
I wholeheartedly agree. Furthermore, we now have ads that are giant flashy LED screens at the busiest intersections.
The most distracting thing you could think of (flashy ads) at.the.busiest.intersection... really gets on my nerve
Also, I think this is also a matter of accessibility: these ad vendors are endangering drivers with various health or mental conditions/disorders (e.g., ADD, ADHD, AS).
Posts like these feed my belief that advertising should be criminalized. In physical form it litters the world in more and more ways in order to grab our attention. I don't think there's many deaths associated with billboards along roads - but these billboards have been getting new "features", such as animations, in their battle for drivers' attention.
In digital form ads get even more malicious - trying to reverse-engineer people's thoughts in order to place the most "actionable" ad in front of right person at the right time.
I don't really expect any government to begin to take action against ads at large - but I wish more people would take a good look at all the bad things advertising does to us all.
Last time I took a cab in NYC there was non-stop video advertising that I couldn't turn off. At what point will we as a society start to realize it's a miserable existence being advertised at around every turn, and start to set limits? In many states, even public schools run ads in the hallways.
This is not going to work anyway. After some time advertisiers will find other ways to push crap into our brains, be it imitation of warning signs or some deceptive product placement.
That's just stupid. It's like asking the casinos in Vegas to stop with flashing lights and sounds. I'll agree that we're a population that is over marketed and flooded with advertising but part of the excitement of times square is all about the signs and advertisements. Take all that away and it would be a pretty boring spot.
Forgot about advertisements? They are literally everywhere. On clothes, on cars, at the bottom of your shopping cart, at the gas station, on the plane, even in the baggage screening bins.
Here in Bangkok when I wait for the sky train I find myself trying to avoid advertisement. I end up looking at people or at the sky (I stopped the data plan to avoid being dragger to my phone). There is basically advertisement everywhere, plus sound for the biggest screens.
So unless I do a conscious effort to avoid, I'm 100% of the time looking at some kind of ads.
Ads are fine, but yes, this is too much.
I can't wait until the windows in our homes plaster ads over everything every time we look outside.
It'll sure be distracting when it's the windshields of our cars, but I do look forward to the legal drama when companies get sued for painting their "holographic" ads on top of the adspace other people already paid to pollute with their own advertisements.
I think that advertising is on dubious grounds when it exists as a substitute for payment (dubious because of the extremely low payout compared to the inconvenience / damage caused).
In public spaces, on transport systems and so on, things that can't be avoided and are either already paid for or aren't even being used (e.g. walking past an ad on the pavement which pays for nothing other than the land it sits on) it's completely inexcusable.
We're trying to encourage people to use public transport.
We need to do _everything we can_ to make it a better environment, more comfortable, more homely, etc.
Knocking out advertising would be an easy win. (Killing off the OTT announcements would be another one... but I digress...)
I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I know of is 40km away on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop, and the second-nearest over 100km away. (Also one road safety billboard (TAC) 45km in a different direction, but that’s at least a bit different.) None in tech or other things, either: no newspaper, radio or TV, nothing on mobile (which I barely use anyway), aggressive ad-blocker and JS disabled by default in Firefox.
Just occasionally (considerably less than once a year) I get exposed to TV (which I was not raised with). It’s awful. How does anyone ever willingly subject themselves to it? I detest televisions. They’re far too effective at stealing your attention, distracting you, et cetera, and their ads are regularly just sickening from the rapidity of transitions and visual stimuli.
Fairly regularly I go down to Melbourne (where I grew up), mostly by public transport but sometimes driving. Ugh. So many billboards, so many things trying to steal your attention (and designed to steal your attention), so many such things even actively causing safety hazards while driving (especially at night). A lot of current billboard practices should be made illegal as part of road safety laws, quite apart from anything else. Almost all of these practices, I will add, have come about in in the last ten years, mostly even in the 5½ years since I left Melbourne.
Things have objectively been getting much worse (e.g. ads inside and outside trains; and digitally-cycling ads are almost ubiquitous instead of rare, and animated ads are common rather than unknown), but I imagine there’s also a good chunk of me becoming more intolerant of these things due to no longer being acclimated to them.
I don’t like being in Melbourne very much. Escaping ads and distractingly-dynamic or too-bright digital screens everywhere wasn’t (directly) one of the reasons I left, but it certainly is now.
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