I signed up for NextDNS for exactly this reason last week. So far it’s working quite well at blocking a lot of this junk. YMMV
But agree. And on social media it’s just groups of people yelling “look at me! Look at me!”
Eh. It’s enough already.
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Can’t stand ads everywhere myself, and I’m reminded of a couple of things.
Occasionally coming across old paperbacks that would have advertising inserts halfway through the book — often cigarette ads!
And the other is of course the famous Futurama clip about advertising in dreams:
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Yea, can’t wait until everything in life is “free” of any cost (money, barter, subsidy, hand-out on street, et. al. ), including giving my time to my customers and employer. 
Nevermind the dawn of television—advertising predates the printing press.
This is how it all came to pass: once upon a time, there was a blacksmith (say) in a small town. He didn’t need a sign since everybody knew he was a blacksmith, and even if they hadn’t known, they would have found out very soon, what with all the clanging. Still, he did have a sign of sorts: a horseshoe. Anything more would have been pure show, since nobody could read. Time passes; people learned to read, and so did the blacksmith.
One day an itinerant sign painter came by and made him a real sign, with letters; it said: “Blacksmith.”
Ad man Howard Gossage penned “How to Look at Billboards” for the February 1960 issue of Harper’s magazine, and his observations about advertising’s effects on public life and public space remain insightful:
. . . there is a very real question whether [advertising] has title to its domain. Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual’s air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.
Rereading the essay 60 years later, though, his argument about opting out of certain forms of advertising is less compelling. We’ve been trained to believe that advertising is a necessary evil, and adverts have wormed their way into almost every facet of modern life. Today, opting out isn’t a choice so much as it’s an ongoing battle. Especially when the American consumer economy is the last stop in basically every global production and manufacturing pipeline.
The sheer amount of data that’s become usable as a resource in the last 15-20 years is staggering, which has accelerated the process. If we consider Hayek’s description of the local knowledge problem, price variations and fluctuations have basically constituted ‘low-definition information at a distance’ for centuries, and the quality of information was strictly limited by the speed at which information could travel. Commodity prices in one market were a proxy for dozens of relevant informational inputs (wages, worker satisfaction, abundance of resources, infrastructural development, etc.) that couldn’t possibly have been measured in a single place, let alone compared across markets. But in the information age, the paradigm has shifted, and the most successful firms will be the ones who figure out how to instrumenalize the overwhelm of information.
Shoshona Zuboff explores this idea in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and argues that this new form of capitalist accumulation is an outright assault on human autonomy and free will. Her insight in this interview illustrates the shift from ‘mere advertising’ towards telematics and data harvesting:
Oh, well, look, online targeted advertising was the place where this started, but this is not the place where it ends. It’s like saying that mass production was only relevant to make you Model T’s. This logic is spreading to all these different contexts, and all these different predictive markets, so — let’s go back to the Model T, for example. Three or four months ago, the CEO of Ford says there’s a global auto slump, it’s really hard to sell cars, but we’re getting downgraded in the markets. He says, we want price-to-earnings ratios like Google and Facebook. How do we do that? We’re going to become a data company. We got 100 million people driving around in Ford vehicles. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna now figure out how to get all the data out of this driving experience.
So this is the telematics, this is the stuff that, you know, we can not only know how you’re driving and where you’re driving, we can know the gaze of your eyes — and that’s really important for insurers, to know if you’re driving safely. And we can know what you’re talking about in your car, and, like, Amazon and Google and so forth are already in a contest for the car dashboard, because that’s a way of hearing what you’re talking about and knowing where you’re going. So they talk about, you know, shopping from the driving wheel. So now the automobile itself becomes this little surveillance bubble. We can get all of this information, from your conversation to your shopping to where you’re going to what you’re doing to how you’re driving. And this has predictive value for all kinds of business customers.
See, it makes perfect sense that Ford is a data company and Starbucks is an unregulated bank. The scary part is that everything you do, so long as it’s connected in some way to these telemetric systems, generates data. So even opting out, or skipping ads, or whatever else—it all feeds the machine just the same. The only way to not participate is to not be generating data whatsoever.
Honestly I’m not sure how to truly escape any of this (especially going forward) without moving to the middle of nowhere and embracing the luddite lifestyle. Guess I’ll just have to drink a verification can.
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I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but when most things are a race to the bottom for price due to
Consumer behaviour, then providers either have to use Ads to make ends meet, or choose to use ads to make more profit.
It’s self Perpetuating and (for consumers) lowers the quality of the products they buy or use. But most consumers obviously don’t care.
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It’s an old story. If you are selling to a market of many millions of people, tiny increments in sales are worth a lot of money. An old-time prime TV ad might cost $millions but if a tiny percentage of the millions of viewers buy when they would not otherwise have done, it makes a profit. The internet (including streaming, podcasting etc.) has massively disrupted this approach.
The “prime-time TV ad” has almost disappeared (apart from a few events like the Superbowl). Newspaper and magazine readership has fallen dramatically. We’re all choosing to give our attention to a much, much wider variety of things and there is, in many senses, much less of a “mass-market”. Instead of a single audience of millions, you have millions of much smaller audiences.
No-one really knows what to do about this. One approach is to use the internet to target much smaller market segments, tracking us and following up on any of our interests and to tie personalised ads to wherever we give our attention. Google has been fantastically successful as the “middle-man” in this and they are not the only ones. The trouble is that advertisers need to convert a higher percentage of a smaller market to get a return. They are going to put us under more pressure to do so. That approach does not work well, but it might work well enough to be worthwhile.
I don’t want to live in a “Bladerunner” world but unless someone comes up with a new and better model (maybe micropayments, maybe subscriptions, maybe just having to pay more for less), the more we resist the advertising, the harder the advertisers are going to work on us.
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I detest ads. My position is best summed up by this quote
… the most devastating and most demonic part of advertising is that it attempts to persuade us that materiel possessions will bring joy and fulfillment. [Quoting Bellah, R N. (1975). "The Broken Covenant“. New York: Seabury Press. p134.] ‘That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to man, but is preached incessantly by every commercial on television.’ Advertisers promise that their products will satisfy our deepest needs and inner longings for love, acceptance, security and sexual fulfillment.
Ronald Sider. (1977). Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, London: Hodder and Stoughton. p41
To that end I have a raft of adblockers and anti-trackers installed in my web browser; Ghostery, Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, and (for Facebook) FB Purity. I “hide elements” too. Also have GreaseMonkey around to get rid of the persisent and pernicious stuff that the other addons cannot remove.
Most of the TV shows I watch are recorded over night by my cable STB. Then I skip through the ad breaks and programme trailers.
I don’t use many apps on my iPhone and certainly not ones that are simply encapsulated WebKit as they do not allow me to obliterate adverts.
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Talk about manipulation:
Our research suggests that firms should consider customers’ narcissistic tendencies as well as the ability to influence their current states of mind to exploit the largely untapped potential of mass customization systems … Another study demonstrated that firms can put consumers into a temporary narcissistic state of mind with marketing techniques. For example, customers were shown an automobile advertisement with the slogan, ‘You impress. Like the new Audi A6,’ that capitalized on their desire for admiration … The research also implies that firms need not increase customer share of true narcissists in order to enhance product uniqueness. Rather, a firm can realize similar benefits by creating narcissistic states.
Source title: The Influence of Trait and State Narcissism on the Uniqueness of Mass-Customized Products
EDIT - My contribution starting below this paragraph responds to the narrower issue of why I think advertising has spread like Hesiod’s many-headed Hydra (Hesiod, Theogony 313 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) C8th or 7th BC), not the broader issue of the morality of what advertising has become. I realize after scrutinizing this thread more that mine was too late to contribute meaningfully to where the discussion went. I should have studied more carefully before adding something that is practically tangential. I’m sorry for that. Enjoy the post for the historical value it may contribute on the question as to why we are where we are, but I apologize for this digression that does not seem to move our plot forward. Or feel free to skip it and scroll to the next post. 
I think there is a less nefarious reason behind it. Linear TV used to be king. For the first time in history last summer it dropped to 50% of all TV usage. Many of you may know that there is a TV industry custom/event called Upfronts. Upfronts starts in late May and goes until about the fall. The process is where TV networks sell up-front air-time to advertisers based on the strengths of their upcoming programming. Upfront money used to be devoted 100% to TV. Advertisers used to sell a lot of product on linear TV. That figure, however, has dropped to 40%. Still a lot, but the eyeballs are elsewhere; so, advertisers have had to diversify. Here are some interesting articles for anyone who’s curious.
This one, from the University of Michigan’s Media, Culture & Society, is a deep examination of Upfronts published in 2007, and makes some predictions about how Upfronts will be forced to change: The Upfronts are Changing: Here’s Everything You Need to Know.
So, we live in a world where advertisers are trying to sell product, but their go-to market for doing so since 1962 is not the market it once was. With fewer eyeballs on TV, they have to find other ways to get to those eyeballs.
Couple that with consumers (including me and my own family, regrettably) who have gotten comfortable paying for things with data rather than cash, and bang! Here we are.
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You don’t cite a date for your quotation but I find it hard to believe that tactics like this have been studied and used only recently. Assign some of your students a project to look back, say 75 years, through popular and academic literature on psychology, marketing, and salesmanship and I’ll bet they find the same practices being recommended that you find so nefarious today. 
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Indeed. There is no chronological limitation to nefarious activity. Here is the citation:
Emanuel de Bellis, David E. Sprott, Andreas Herrmann, Hans-Werner Bierhoff, Elke Rohmann. 2015. The Influence of Trait and State Narcissism on the Uniqueness of Mass-Customized Products. http://dx.doi.org/
My point is that the suggestion that companies should appeal to and strive to create narcissistic states is manipulative, dehumanizing and appeals to baser instincts. It is, in my estimation, evil. Advertising can be done without encouraging and likely promoting individualistic and socially destructive attitudes and behaviors.
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And my point is that it’s not new.
I agree with pretty much everything in this thread, but will be the annoying non-American who reminds Americans it doesn’t have to be this way. The amount of adverts you folks see is insane. I think even in a fairly Americanised country like Britain we’d probably have to at least double the quantity of adverts we stick everywhere to match what Americans see on a daily basis.
I was for example, quite appalled to learn just now that you have adverts playing when you fill up at the gas/petrol station! Surely you should just be filling up and staring vacantly into space like the rest of us 
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Surely you should just be filling up and staring vacantly into space like the rest of us
Actually that’s not a very accurate description of the filling up process in 2024. Surely instead you should be filling up and watching the price creep higher and higher in horror 
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So is the equation balanced by giving up half of your freedom of speech? 
A few things to note. Regarding the inherent evils of advertising psychology and narcissism:
- Marketing revolves around the production of desire, and most often about creating desire where there was none or little before. A basic observation of psychoanalysis is that desire is an end in itself, fundamentally premised on an endless deferral or lack–we cannot desire something we possess. So a society built on advertising is a society organized around creating desiring subjects, who are endlessly dissatisfied and always discovering that they lack things they did not yet know they desired. An advertising culture is necessarily a covetous culture: If a desire for xyz does not yet exist, it must be manufactured regardless of the real utility of xyz, which is why people are constantly discovering that something about their life they’d never considered to be a problem is, in fact, a problem to be solved (by buying xyz!).
- Even if you are individually resistant to this sort of strategy, the sheer volume of it all and the incessant pestering is designed to wear people down over time. There are very few opportunities to meaningfully consent to being marketed to, because the very idea of marketing is at odds with consent.
On advertising infiltrating paid products:
- Companies are not concerned with profits so much as the rate of profit, which is exponentially more difficult to keep up or improve over time. Looking for new ways to extract profit ends up looking a lot like milking blood from a stone, and adding more and more advertising is a relatively painless way for a firm to do this (compared to, say, layoffs), even if it compromises the quality and character of a product. Expect to see more of this in places you never expected.
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This. My setup mostly mirrors yours, except I have no TV or social media accounts and I use Mullvlad’s free and incredibly effective “extended blocking” DNS over TLS/HTTPS service. DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS
When my mother was still alive I would visit her in the US and be utterly appalled by the sheer amount of a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ behavioural manipulation Americans are subjected to in daily life, even in a small rural town. Significantly more than I remember growing up in the Maryland suburbs or even much later when living in NYC.
Andrew Simms writing in The Guardian a few years ago:
Advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind. Extensive scientific research shows that, when exposed to advertising, people “buy into” the materialistic values and goals it encourages. Consequently, they report lower levels of personal wellbeing, experience conflict in relationships, engage in fewer positive social behaviours, and experience detrimental effects on study and work. Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways.
Even worse, findings from neuroscience reveal that advertising goes as far as lodging itself in the brain, rewiring it by forming physical structures and causing permanent change. . . .
. . . Still other research demonstrates how exposure to different brands can influence behaviour, for example making them behave less honestly, or creatively. Customisable tools for neural profiling are now available to test the effectiveness of brands and logos on consumers, giving rise to what has become known as “neuromarketing”.
That’s bad enough for adults, but children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.
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Agree, but I’d argue that it is far more pervasive and intrusive than in the past.
Indeed! Isn’t there a command somewhere, “Thou shalt not covet?” Learning to be content is one of the best antidotes to coveting and advertising. Even so, having it in your face (and ears) all the time is obnoxious.
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