this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Personally I don't fundamentally despise the concept of advertising. I think it's acceptable for people and companies to share information about a potentially great product or service that they're offering, on reasonable terms.
The main problem for me is: advertising went too far and abandoned most safeguards. Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing. Most ads don't give you any information about a product or service whatsoever. Just some celebrity saying it's great. What is this supposed to accomplish if not manipulating people into mindlessly paying for a thing they know nothing about?
Every malware infection and online scam I've dealt with in the last 15 years has used advertising as an attack vector. I block everything.
I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it's all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.
Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to 'connecting with consumers on an emotional level' decades before the Internet.
While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.
You're saying "in 2025" and then listing a bunch of things that have been that way since the 40s at least.
Sad that you think that. Never noticed a netflix marlboro ad? Yea that was the point.
Joke's on you, I never saw a netflix ad
You have never seen a Netflix show or you have never seen an ad for marlboro on Netflix? My point was that Netflix puts subliminal advertising in their retro shows. So for example in The Get Down, there is multiple scenes with a wide street/city shot with Marlboro billboards in the corner the camera zooms in so the marlboro ad was indirectly visible for 1 second, not long enough for people who aren't aware of subliminal advertising to register consciously. A tactic Australia television was using in the 2010s was switching ads after 1 frame pretending it was programming errors when in reality it was one of the most egregious forms of subliminal advertising. I don't watch Stranger Things but they are accused of sexying smoking & subliminal marlboro advertisement. Remember the front of counter at grocery stores? Advertisements purposely placed at child eye level.
Jokes are on all of us I was only using an entirely modern example of this problem.
It's ultra-processed!
Jon Stewart made a point in some video not too long ago about how modern media presents us with a constant drip of ultra-processed speech and how it manipulates and harms our brains for our short-term gratification but the long-term benefit of others who don't give a shit about us. It is much like engineered ultra-processed food in that way.
Thinking of advertising through that lens, hell that industry has been at the bleeding edge of all kinds of manipulation and shady data gathering for decades! Ultra-processed speech and ultra-processed advertising are basically a package deal!
I don't know if this refers to politics, but in general, what politicians, and I mean all politicians do where they refer to their opponents and topics consistently with specific words meant to elucidate specific emotions is stomach-turning. And yeah, you're right, it's not only politicians, but corporations, newspapers and basically all PR orgs doing the same.
It's not a layoff, it's a reorg. It's not in-person attendance requirements, it's an inevitable "return to office". And so on, so forth.
Exactly. I'd be much more ok with a standardised block of text and maybe a picture. No music, no animation, basic machine voiceover if any audio.
My favourite advertisements (the ones I'm most ok with) are podcast ad reads, because they never gave music or sound effects or crass images, it's just the voice making the podcast reading some text. And they're personalised based on the context of the podcast, no personal information needed.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
It's never sharing information about a great new product unless it's a scam. It's always scams or large companies screaming how their 2026 version really is superior somehow to their 2025 product and how competitors somehow suck