My father, a marketing professor, used to shush us during the commercials.
I can remember when the internet was small and we picked our fast food based on the recommendations of talking chihuahuas.
It's turns out that talking chihuahuas have very poor information on human nutritional needs.
My son is constantly railing against YouTube ads and proclaiming he'll never buy any of their products. He has particularly strong feelings against GEICO.
The clogging commercial cracks me up. I pretty much embody the lowest common denominator.
YouTube is a thing, although the kid that watches it the most by far is Ace, because her teacher constantly lets them watch YouTube. 50° outside? YouTube instead of recess. Party before Thanksgiving? YouTube. They are constantly binging YouTube in that class and Ace is having her best year ever.
Because I now watch a fair bit of Amazon, which has both Columbo and commercials, plus network tv, which we use for local networks, I see a fair few old-type commercials. The holiday season perfume ads are still nuts.
Gen Z's kids: "How can you follow these influencers with a straight face? Their sponcon segues are so obvious!"
My son has the same personality as heebie's dad, where he explains things that are readily apparent to all observers. Whenever an ad pops up on Youtube, he explains to me that it's an ad, and what it's an ad for.
My wife and daughter have been watching Grey's Anatomy on Hulu, and my daughter finds the medication ads super-disturbing. She wants to know why people rely on ads, rather than their doctor.
I'm not sure if it was my inclination or my parents' successful indoctrination, but I have a horror of sitting through ads to this day - as a kid I remember holding my finger over the mute button so not a single second would pollute my ears.
That's the other thing about America's Funniest Home Videos - no ads on Netflix. Just constant, constant logo screens indicating that we're about to cut away, and now we're back. I truly don't know how anyone survived that many ads anymore.
Honestly, we didn't have anything else to do.
11.2: The only time I ever watch daytime TV is in the gym (back when we could go to gyms), and my impression is that ads during daylight hours are aimed entirely at hardcore hypochondriacs.
Hulu ads are painful. I don't know how I havn't managed to spring for the premium yet. I guess its because I already spend SOOOO much money on content subscriptions. Remember when internet content was free?
I was bored and looking for a new podcast mid-run, and so I randomly picked one that a friend rec'ced in the general genre of being a mom and keeping it all together. I picked a random episode about staying organized, figuring it would maybe help.
It was a crash course in how to develop an anxiety disorder. I couldn't believe my ears. The basic gist was, "The way to stay organized is to head off all disasters ahead of time. Scan your life. Scrutinize these categories until you find a way that things go wrong. Then prepare for such things." The problem was that her examples for what counts as a disaster were so absurdly mild - like not having the soup and lemon tea on hand when someone has a cold. I don't know, run to the store? I'm having trouble remembering examples now because they were such non-calamities. They were just situations that require at most mild deprivation or improvisation.
It was like you are not allowed to pause, take a deep breath, figure out how to react to something unexpected, and go with it, without filing it away as a disaster that must be prevented at all costs in the future.
I really feel like this culture grooms women and moms to develop anxiety disorders. It was such an unpleasant podcast that I stopped listening after ten minutes or so.
17. Just trying to be the best version of themselves possible! What could be wrong with that?
17: They've got a backend deal with Franzia.
6: I also find the clogging commercial hilarious!
5: I used to as well, but a few months ago when we were trying to buy car insurance for the first time in ~12 years, 2 or 3 other insurance companies gave us very high rates or no offer at all because of the lack of a record, and Geico was much more reasonable. Happy with them so far, knock on wood.
11: An acquaintance is going through medical coding school right now, and one of the things that she was surprised to learn was about the generally positive view even doctors have. Evidently, seeing an ad for a specific medication is a good prompt to bring it up with a doctor -- the ad is confirmation to people that *this symptom* is worth further investigation, not just something that everyone gets as they age (or whatever).
Obviously I'm the least knowledgeable person about motherhood, but in terms of podcasts related to motherhood I really liked Motherhood Sessions. (I'm pretty into the whole genre of therapy session podcasts, but I also liked this one in particular. Obviously being a therapy session podcast it can be pretty intense.) https://gimletmedia.com/shows/motherhood-sessions
I did listen to a few episodes of that at some point, and I do like the therapy genre in general. Thanks for the reminder about it.
23: I don't want to second-guess the acquaintance of an acquaintance, but I find this hard to believe. I keep on seeing ads on Hulu that say things like "If you have subgluteal cancer and want to avoid chemotherapy, then consider Proposec" or "If you have depression that doesn't respond to medication, then consider Hawaflax". They seem very clearly aimed at people who already have seen a doctor and aren't getting results fast/strong enough.
TV lawyer ads teach medical information too. So now I stopped licking the asbestos.
23: IME there are (at least) two different genres of medication ads, one like you describe which is obviously aimed at people who have been diagnosed with something and another like Mooseking described which focuses more on symptoms and aims to raise awareness of whatever disease the drug is meant to treat.
Really it's all just one big discourse.
I don't have a discourse. I have a slack but I don't know how to use it.
That doesn't make me want to ban pharma ads any less. If it helps to promote thinking about certain symptoms (and I still suspect a good chunk of that is disease-mongering!) then it should be PSAs, not ads.
Why should lawyers make all the money?
I won't watch any ad that doesn't offer me six Ginsu steak knives.
My guess is conventional advertising really does sound tinny to the youths. There was a DFW essay about the evolution of advertising from straightforward "Drink this beverage, it tastes good and is healthy" to more show-not-telly stuff to ironic deconstructions of the genre. Then product placement era, now we're in influencer era. What comes next?
12: My mom has that same compulsion about muting commercials.
This was a very important part of my childhood. This was way back in the times before there were remote control devices for TVs. When the commercial would start it was my job to jump up and turn off the volume, so our ears wouldn't be polluted by the sound of the commercials. When the commercials were over I had to leap up again to turn the sound back on so we wouldn't miss anything in the show.
Then my mom got a remote and I was rendered obsolete.
Oh yeah my family did the muting-commercials thing too when I was growing up. I also try really hard to delete political texts before reading even a word of them (which is hard because how else would I know they're political texts).
My dad built his own on/off switch for TV volume when I was a kid. Remotes weren't quite non-existent then, I was recently watching a Bob Newhart show from that era and he had a remote, but they weren't common for another 5-10 years.
My dad created a wired remote so that grandma could change channels without getting up.
36: Directly sponsored content and vertically integrated media/industrial/service conglomerates, perhaps.
Or perhaps, this is a long shot, but perhaps advertising dies back significantly? Advertising lets you reach a broad consumer audience. If the broad audience of consumers doesn't have much in the way of discretionary income to harvest, what's the point? I guess it still functions as a display of corporate fitness, like peacock feathers or whatever.
Right. The solution to no demand is going to be found upstream: not by eliminating ads but by stopping production. So long as there's a chance that someone is going to buy the product, they'll keep making it, and advertise where they think customers might and, as you suggest, where the leadership likes to think of themselves.
I loved that Ecuador Super Bowl commercial a few years back. Can they have remotely made enough money from additional visitors for that to have paid off? I can't imagine.
33: Seconded. I'm not surprised docs would like the ads; they also like pharma sales reps, free samples, and other nice things pharma does for doctors. A lot of "me too" drugs get approval via clinical trials designed to show "non-inferiority" so ads and name recognition are how to make a profit when your drug isn't actually shown to be better than the competitor. Other countries don't allow pharma ads on TV; it would be nice if we returned to doing the same.
Counterpoint: We should wait until I see if my son will get a college scholarship first.
I fixed or broke Facebook depending on your point of view. Always make every ad setting as restrictive as possible, don't allow any data sharing, hide every ad that appears, and now I almost never get shown ads. They've made the interface for doing this harder and harder of course- you used to be able to block a list of advertisers from one page and now you have to go three pages deep for each one you want to hide. I've blocked so many advertisers, maybe 3500, that now when I try to go to the list of those I've blocked it times out.
That seems harder than just trying to destroy the monopoly.
I think I messed up then because I bought an Oculus for The War on Christmas.
I had some long talks with my oncologist about her practice's relationships with pharma reps. She was sympathetic to my concerns, but said the office staff would riot if they stopped letting drug companies pay for lunch. What was interesting to me is that she said the reps all talked trash about everyone else's drugs, and so she felt like she got valuable information that way.
The medical school stopped letting pharma buy is lunch every Friday and nobody rioted.
I am another wielder of the mute button. AImustHMHB, I grew up without television in any language I could understand until I was 16, so I have no sense that ads are a normal part of life. I got an adblocker for the web in about 2002, as soon as they were available, and used it to kill any ads that moved in any way at all. I can generate quite enough distraction (hi there) from my own resources. I have always run adblockers on my phones and Google has not found a way to stop that yet.
On the other hand. American television ads are so unimaginably gross that I watch them happily when I get the chance.
And Ume and I play a game with the mute button where you have to guess what sort of thing is being advertised just from the pictures. It's quite easy to score 75-80%
You can usually tell, but the new hemorrhoid medications don't show buttholes.
And menstruation doesn't really involve thin blue liquid.
Loosely related, I don't remember the exact point where shows with laugh tracks became nearly unwatchable for me, but it was many years ago.
50 and 51: Yeah, academic offices don't allow it, though the cologuard sales reps get in. Massachusetts severely restricted their ability to buy dinner at one point.
Loosely related, I don't remember the exact point where shows with laugh tracks became nearly unwatchable for me, but it was many years ago.
When Hawaii was around 8-9 years old, she said, "I really like it when they put the laughing in the background, so that I know when to laugh." I found it very earnest and adorable.
59: Free admission to all three of the NC Aquariums.
49: We picked an Oculus up just a month ago. So far, there are a few cool apps (Beatsaber is great, as is the archery game.. Hollowpoint?), but it's not so much better than the PSVR that it's claiming much time yet. I suspect that games with friends (over the internet, since lots of people stumbling around a common space while lost in VR sounds dangerous!) will be the big breakthrough to earn its place.
49, 62: Lone Echo, Superhot, The Room, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Robo Recall. Also PC stuff playable on the Rift, or on the Quest via Link/Virtual Desktop: Elite Dangerous, Half Life Alyx, Star Wars Squadrons, Flight Simulator (very soon)
It's so real that the headset sticks a probe up your nose before you can get near the plane.