Episode 83: The Inundation of Advertising

Transcript

actually drinking coffee today while recording this is almost certainly going to at least be
partially a rant advertising has gotten completely out of control i'm not even going to like temper
this by saying you know well in my opinion or you know the way i see it or anything like that like
it's just out of control and i get it to a certain extent right the the returns i mean
and i'll try to break this down a little bit i'm probably mostly speaking about you know digital
advertising advertising on the internet stuff like that but there's there's other pieces too
we are in a world and probably and really have been in a world for a long time where you are surrounded
by advertising companies keep putting you know what they want you to buy from them in your face at all
times you know you drive down a highway like you know i'm near i-95 you drive down 95 it's all the
billboards you you open a magazine it's it's every few pages you you you get on the internet and i mean
my god it's just everywhere right and it has been for a long time but i i i have felt a shift in some
way and i think it's a combination of factors one piece of this which i think is a whole other
conversation but one piece of this is that because people are spending more and more time
on devices there's more and more opportunity to put things in front of them and and the cynical part
of me i don't even know if it's cynical it's probably just realistic the cynical slash realistic
part of me understands that this is the this is the true war right if you want to talk about how
people citizens are pitted against these massive companies particularly tech companies these days
it's that services like a facebook or an instagram or a youtube or a tiktok they're not really competing
with one another what they're competing with is other activities that don't involve a screen
it's if you think step back and think about it is far more profitable for something like a tiktok
or an instagram to keep you on your phone as opposed to you going outside because the minute
you go outside they can't reach you anymore i mean i'm oversimplifying this right because yes you take
your phone with you and you can look at your phone blah blah but let's just say you go out to do an
activity that is a non-digital activity once you do that once you make that choice they can't they
can't get to you anymore so the real competition is not between tiktok and instagram and facebook and
whoever else it's between all of those platforms and any alternative activity that you might engage in
that doesn't give you give them ready access to your time and attention i feel like i'm already
ranting that's a that's a that's really a separate conversation but bringing it back to the to the main
point here because they have been very successful in engaging people essentially constantly with
their time and attention there has been a shift in just feeling like these advertisements are even
more pervasive than they used to be and because of the rise of short-form content which if you've
listened to this show for a while you know i often rant and rave or i shouldn't say it that way
i often am very critical of feeds anything with a feed particularly an infinite scrolling feed and
by the way that's like one of the reasons that say not that it's a huge example or anything but why
you know i still use pagination for instance on my podcast website it's an intentional choice i'm just
trying to make my one little piece of like not diving into feed world but not that it has made
any impact or anybody cares but um i've been very critical of feeds i'm starting to believe that feeds
aren't necessarily the problem the problem may in fact be the increasing rise of short-form content but
you know aside from the time and attention that it robs people of every day
it also the other thing about short-form content is that it gives more opportunities more quickly
to advertise to audiences so you're getting bombarded by this even more than you may realize
because let's say you're scrolling through like a youtube you know shorts feed or something
you know all these short little 15 30 second videos first of all every few videos you hit is an ad
it's a sponsored direct advertisement and then throughout the videos that you're watching
some portion of those are also sponsored things that an influencer is doing outside of the youtube
you know uh advertising ecosystem so there's even more in there and then there's all this product
placement and then there's all of these you know um unboxings and reviews and you're watching
way more advertising than you realize in short-form content in particular but the problems don't end
at short-form content and at this point and at this point you know i feel i i so i pay so my family does
watch and myself as well uh a decent amount of like youtube video content i'm not really talking about
the shorts i'm talking about like you know regular youtube classic and i pay now for youtube premium
or plus or whatever the hell it is the thing that the middle tier that essentially it's not like the
all the way up paying for youtube where everything is ad free but it's like most stuff is ad free and
i felt that i had to do this ultimately because the if i'm sitting at my computer i do tend to have
some ad blockers running and it gets rid of a lot of the ads content however when i have it on like
the the tv in the house or whatever there's none of that there so we oh my god the advertisements were
getting crazy you know it used to be a five second ad you could skip through and then there used to be
only one of them and there was two of them and there was 10 of them it it has scaled up and up and up and
up to the point where i almost i was getting kind of stubborn about it like i didn't want to pay for it
because it feels like a shakedown it feels like youtube has intentionally i'm sure it is intentional
that intentionally ratcheted up the quantity and veracity of these ads to a point where it is so
unpleasant to watch that you have to pay for their service if you want to spend any amount of time on
their platform which is kind of an irony right because they're they're using the advertisers not
that i particularly want to sympathize with them either but they're using the advertisers to bring
in revenue and then using that very relationship to ratchet things up to just get direct payment
from the consumer instead because it is more if you think about how many ads you probably click on
in a day week month year lifetime right paying a six or seven dollar monthly charge directly to youtube
probably far exceeds the revenue they would have gotten for you from you if you didn't pay anything
and just clicked on a couple ads instead so a company you know like whatever google alphabet youtube
that has this sort of ecosystem they're abusing the relationship on both sides of the equation and
making it worse for everyone right they're abusing the consumer side by shoving so many ads in your face
that you literally have to pay for their premium service just to make make it tolerable to to use
and they're abusing the advertiser side of things as well because they're pulling it in and then using
that content to do the aforementioned abuse of the consumer so it's just this constant stream
of this and and all the platform i mean youtube is that a type of example where it's like oh you can
pay to get rid of them but the instagrams and the tiktoks and whatever of the world are are their own
ecosystem of problems as well again just this constant pushing towards short form content it it has
increased without you necessarily even noticing it it increases the amount of the surface area
of advertising that they can get in front of you and then we carry this thing in our pockets
and while we're killing time or whatever and sometimes not even trying to kill time sometimes
legitimately we should be spending quality time with one another and instead we're all sitting
around on phones because we it's become so addicting that we can't get off of these things and and
instead of anything useful being brought to our lives at all like think about how much of a joke it is
at this point to call these things social networks they're not they're they're just pipelines to feed
you advertising it's incredible and if you really if you try to disconnect yourself from the day-to-day of
whatever you're doing right and just think about how much of this is being fed directly like you're
just mainlining this into your brain on a daily basis it's intolerable and it's everywhere but you
know what there you there's always been a trade-off okay and so let's talk about the other side of this
which is sort of the setting aside the fact that this has ramped up to such an extreme that it's
it's i feel day-to-day like i'm tripping over advertising and i don't even engage with a lot
of these platforms that heavily but there used to be a trade-off right there was a whole advertising
um there's a whole advertising industry right where people get paid to make advertisements and and
creative directors are are paid to come up with campaigns and you know at and and i always kind of
in the past i like weird thing i almost always enjoyed radio ads because they only had audio
to work with and they kind of forced them to be a little more creative sometimes you know local radio
ads were actually kind of amusing entertaining to me but there was a whole there's a whole industry
around this right and the trade-off used to be that advertising used to make an effort to entertain us
to some degree to capture our attention you know you'd hope if you think about like you know before
digital or whatever you'd open a magazine flipping through pages they needed to do something to grab your
attention there had to be some creativity there and there's an industry again of employees who work
on this stuff and who are being paid and making a living doing it and it's good to make a living
it wasn't necessarily an uh an evil thing right it that some of these folks are very creative
and they're doing a job and that props up the economy and it props up all sorts of things gives
people a living wage and that's good but now i feel like we've turned a corner because we're not even
doing that anymore because they no longer really have to grab our attention because we're voluntarily
giving it to them at all times and with the advent of generative ai
so much advertising now is converting over to just just ai slop and i find this supremely
disrespectful because it's like the company's saying we don't even have to care anymore to grab
your attention we don't even have to care anymore to make anything of quality beyond just one of these
you know slightly robotic off-putting ai voices going over some you know garbage that they put on
the screen that was generated five seconds ago by a video producer you know and they're they're
cutting the people out so even these folks that again like have i ever loved advertising absolutely
not however at least i knew like there were some creative brains behind it they're diminishing and and
these these these these advertising brokers which at the end of the day is what a facebook or an
instagram or a youtube or any of these they just they're just advertising brokers and they have such
a stranglehold on us as the consumer that now they don't even the advertising their aside doesn't even
need to respect our time anymore or our attention they don't even care it doesn't even matter they
can just now we're just getting fed true slop right nobody thought about this nobody cared to put
anything quality together it's just like well you're gonna buy our shit eventually you know it it's it's
so disrespectful to the consumer and the consumer at the end of the day is what holds all this
up and we're just giving it away i find it to be an increasing area of pessimism for me as i look around the
world and really take stock in how much advertising we're all consuming constantly it comes to our email
it comes to our entertainment it comes to and i don't think that the companies standing behind this
even have respect for their customer anymore and and that's really bugging me and i don't know how to
fix that i don't know how to help kind of wake things up and find different business models because these
have been so successful particularly across tech i mean all all the so many not all
so many of the the largest companies in the world have survived on this ecosystem that is just
increasing in volume and decreasing in anything resembling quality or respect you know when things
were probably a little more local and a little more a little less scaled out people probably could
have voted with their dollars but i don't think that's i don't think that's reality anymore i don't
think it's because the the the level of it the the scale of this the scale of where advertising can
reach and combined with the this like blend of how addicting content has become and the platform
really i mean it really it's the the mind games the platforms with the content on them play on you but
whatever splitting hairs you know if some segment of people decide they don't want to engage with this
a can they even get away from it because i i don't feel like you can anymore i i feel like even even if
our phones have become so integral i mean god i go to restaurants and it's like you just you need to
think about the restaurants you go to it's like oh scan the qr code to get the menu that implies a lot
of stuff right that means you've got to have a phone with you with a scanner or with a camera that
understands how to scan a qr code and a web browser and the connection to do all of that and by the time
you get there like you know you can't just put that away and not engage with that anymore like
and there's so many things like that um you know driving places how many of us can really survive
without a map anymore like the the you know on on the phone map look i'd love to at some level i would
love to run and hide from this right and be like you know what you're all not getting to me but i can't
it's so all-encompassing and i don't feel like voting or not voting with my dollars does any good
so i'm not sure what the answer is here it it i just feel like not i mean advertising has always
been in your face and always a certain degree you know manipulative and irritating i guess but at this
point it's it's not even respectful anymore they're not even respecting their consumers and i think that's
become like some sort of final straw for me between the youtube shakedowns of hey we're going to play
an ad for you every 30 seconds until you pay us that combine with you know now half of these things
are just ai garbage videos that have been put together not even attempting to care about who
their consumer is something's got to be done and i i don't know what but i'd you know i'd love to
i wonder if there are movements out there that they're trying to deal with this because man it
just feels anymore like we're all just being so constantly manipulated and just giving it away for
free