I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).

I don’t get it.

EDIT: just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a special snowflake immune to ads ffs. I’m talking about the ads in the enshittification spectrum, like the ones that blare inside the media center of your brand new car, the ones that makes sites unreadable, the ones shoved every minute in your 10 minute videos, things like that. But I understand that I may be inside my own ad hate bubble, I really dislike ads in general and I try to avoid them them best I can.

  • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    This sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. Communicating with potential customers that your product exists and is good isn’t some concept that the advertising industry has somehow wrested from the hands of good hardworking people in return for their wages. It’s what marketing and advertising IS. It’s like saying the cheeseburger industry controls our access to cheeseburgers - like, kinda. But also, that’s kind of definitionally true. You can, of course, raise and slaughter your own cow to subvert the cheeseburger industry. And you can hand out fliers you made yourself advertising your business on the streetcorner. But it is a lot less work, and you’ll probably get a better product, if you outsource the work to a specialist

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.

      • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        I’m just saying

        They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control.

        You can hear the creepy piano music when you read this