#Marketing Advertising Marketers Marketing

[3liza]

you guys know that cortisol and adrenalin arent "toxins" right. and that chronically low cortisol is as much of a problem as chronically high cortisol. I just thought I would mention it because the advertising trends RN are even stupider than usual and it's really bothering me. like all hormones the correct amount to have is "enough" and anything higher or lower than that is bad. how bad it is depends entirely on how out of gamut your levels are for your particular needs and it's not something you can just guess at based solely on how you feel. too much and too little have a lot of identical symptoms. feeling crummy doesn't automatically mean you have "too much stress hormone", and all the marketing you see about "lowering cortisol levels" is complete nonsense. if you're stressed, removing cortisol or adrenaline from your body isn't going to automatically lower your stress levels or make you feel subjectively better. in fact the opposite is often the case.

extensive research on hormone levels and chronic and acute illnesses show that cortisol being too LOW is just as likely in CPTSD and autism (for example) as it is to be too high. low dose hydrocortisone (synthetic oral cortisol medication) self-administration is one of the more promising and effective treatments that's been trialed for fibromyalgia and ME-CFS, for example.

I'm just posting this so you have some mental resistance to the snake oil ads that are constantly circulating. cortisol is a real hormone with real effects on how you feel and how your body functions, but it's not just a chemical you can remove from your body to magically feel better. it doesn't work like that. you need cortisol for basic functions, and while having too much definitely happens and can make you sick, many chronic illnesses actually result in cortisol levels that are too low. much of the time, feelings of stress and illness result from lack of cortisol, not an abundance of it.

either way this is not an issue you can take Instagram supplements about to fix anything, so don't even be tempted. those people are trying to balance your humors and it's bullshit

[existennialmemes]

So I want to laugh at Musk picking fights with other billionaires, because it is, objectively speaking, extremely funny

Especially when you consider that his argument essentially boils down to the idea that other companies deciding which platforms they want their brand associated with is somehow infringing on his ability to participate in the "open market place." Suggesting that the only "fair" way to support a "competitive" market is to FORCE advertisers to advertise on his platform even if they don't agree with his practices.

However I also feel compelled to point out that he is possibly one of the most dangerous men on earth right now, and he literally must be stopped. The kind of precedent he is trying to set here would be disastrous for all of us.

He's essentially trying to make boycotts illegal at any level. If he can do it to the giants, nothing will stop him from doing it to us, which we already know has been their plan all along.

They want to make any form of dissent illegal. Now is the time to dissent with all your might.

[dandyads]

Levi's, 1969

Theme Week: Black Ads 🧑🏾‍🦱

[bloomingkyras]

Long story short..Rosé falling in love again.. They start to know each other after they both start some projects together. Noah have being helping Rosé with some of her book especially regarding advertising and marketing. And he also start falling in love with Giselle too..

[elbiotipo]

Also I've said this before but advertising is an industry that should be considered as pointless and harmful as fossil fuels.

[maniculum]

I tried a few different photos, and the computer seems to consistently overestimate both my age and my income. It’s also dead set on me being christian and having a woodworking hobby, which… I have no idea where it’s getting that.

Some weird phrasing:

I feel like calmness & contemplation are like. The opposite of “ideal for targeted marketing” actually.

Also I took this picture of my dog, who happens to be asleep on the couch a few feet away, and got this:

I thought the system might just be defaulting towards these answers. What about this dog says “christian” or “democrat”?

So I sent it pictures of a few other things in my apartment that have faces, to see what happened. It was unwilling to speculate on the demographic info of the National Bohemian logo, a ceramic elephant, a rubber duck, or a plastic skeleton. It also would not speculate about a clay sculpture, though it did describe it as “grotesque”, “macabre”, and “demonic”, then suggested the owner might enjoy “vandalism”. It gave me this about an enamel pin:

At this point I gave up. Apparently it doesn’t assume everyone is a christian middle-class democrat, I and my dog both just look that way to it somehow. The only thing it’s fully consistent on is that the person or whatever in the image is perfect for targeted marketing — there’s always some kind of spin for that. I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for Google’s targeted-advertising system to be able to say, like, “this one isn’t going to buy anything; don’t bother.”

having fun with the google vision API tool, i love panopticon world...

[uncanny-tranny]

This might seem like an "old man yells at cloud" situation, but it's just wild growing up and being told how dangerous distracted driving is - how, at highway speeds, you can traverse the length of a football field (100 yards, 91 meters) in a matter of seconds - how one split second sending a text while driving could result in a potential fatal crash, and then getting on the road as a driver and being surrounded by billboards. Their entire purpose is to catch one's attention, so they're lining major roads, which tend to be highways. How is it that you're told how important it is to never be distracted while driving, but still being advertised to?

At best, this type of advertising is an eyesore to pedestrians and motorists and a general waste of electricity to light it, and at worst, it is an active danger considering they are there to advertise and therefore, must catch people's attention.

I'm not even against advertising in theory, but this particular mode bothers me so much and I hate how pervasive it is - especially in large cities or highways.

[malakandmasa025]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by K E N I A 🌵 (@jm.umbrella)

💔💔Urgent appeal from a mother🙏🙏

Hello dear friends! ❤🤍🖤💚

🍉I am doaa Ayyad, a Palestinian from the besieged and destroyed Gaza 😭😭,amothers of tow girls Malak &Masa, Malak suffers from Down syndrome and has a heart problem and needs urgent medical intervention due to a birth defect.

We are suffering😭😭 for 405 difficult days from an aggressive war.

Our lives are harsh because we lack all the basic necessities of life. Everything has become scarce and unattainable. There is no food, no water, no medicine.

So, I ask you to help me keep my family safe and alive, especially after we had lost all our sources of livelihood.Please do not leave my family to struggle and suffer these difficult days alone. You can support my campaign by donating whatever you can or by sharing my posts to reach others who can help us survive the war to safety and peace. You are helping the lives of many people with your small contribution. Every donation makes a difference in our very difficult lives. But this is a legitimate campaign and has been checked by 90-ghost and gaza-evacuations_fund

https://gofund.me/79e8f40a

@godmybackhurts @90-ghost @creating-something-stuff @kryaaas @staff @creating-something-stuff @gazavetters @gaza-evacuation-funds @gaza @honeygordo @heydreamchild @quotemadness @elfi-knell @equipebrasil @usoppsfattit @dreamertrilogys @depressed-changeling @x0pluto @breadedsinner @bearrxx

[fluffyartbl0g]

PFTDGEHSJSJDYTE I CANT BELIEVE MONKEY D. LUFFY HAS TAKEN OVER TUMBLR!!!

At first sight I was like, oh cool! I see they’ve added a Luffy tab on my dashboard, because I love one piece. And then I look down the luffy tag,,, AND THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO JUST. DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS XD. That must mean THEY’VE JUST ADDED HIM TO EVERYONE’S DASHBOARDS WAHAHAHA!

First of all, it’s pronounced loo-fee. Second of all, he’s from hit series One Piece and you better not forget it!!!

[zaprowsdower27]

I literally wrote a paper in college (undergrad term paper, not journal article, lower your expectations) about how American foreign aid is (was) deliberately structured to set up an export market - a lot of food aid in the form of stuff that grows a lot in the US but not locally, so once they get back on their feet and have a taste for it they start importing it.

The classic example of course is ramen in Japan, since ramen is made from wheat and Japan mostly grows rice; it exploded in popularity there after postwar food aid of mostly wheat flour. But that's far from the only example, aid officials have literally bragged in the past about increased export percentages to former aid recipient countries.

And Trump just threw that "advertise to people and make them thank you for it" soft power freebie away. Even from an American nationalist/mercantilist perspective he's horrible at his job and needlessly cruel.

The funny thing about the USAID thing is that it's just. Such an own goal, and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber just can't possibly wrap their shriveled sociopathic brains around it. US international development aid is pretty much the only reason anyone in the developing world still likes us after all the, yknow, bombing, war crimes, coups, and government interference. You'd think that an actual America First policy (which these morons are not, but etc etc) would want to big up America as the Best Provider Of All Things, Love America, AMEERRICA.

But instead, because these withered braindead fascist toerags simply cannot tolerate the idea of less than 1% of the American federal budget being spent on (gasp) HELPING SCARY FOREIGNERS, they've chosen to ride in roughshod like the world's worst destruct-o-clown show and make the entire country fucking FURIOUS at Musk and his band of juvenile delinquents because of it. (Also for stealing financial information belonging to the entire country, but yes. One thing at a time.)

Now, I don't know what will happen, if they're just trying to do their usual performative thing where they "shut" USAID down and then reconstitute it to fund money to their preferred terrible, terrible causes, but it makes total sense when you consider that Putin has wanted USAID killed for ages, precisely because it builds American soft power and creates pro-US goodwill in the exact areas that Russia also wants to influence/control. So all he had to do was order the Bloated Orange Bilge Monster and Felonious Muskrat to jump and/or chop it, and lo and behold, they have gotten themselves into a stupid, stupid mess about it. It would be much more amusing if they weren't trying to destroy the country and kill a lot of people while they were at it, but y'know. Here we are.

[good-advice-ganondorf]

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Jaguar XK-E FHC, 1962. For the US market the E-Type Jaguar took its model name from the DOHC 3.8 litre XK engine that powered it and so became the XK-E. These early cars were fairly basic with only partial synchromesh transmissions and fixed (non reclining) seats. Many improvements came in 1965 with the XK engine increasing to 4.2 litres. Over half of all E-Type production went to the US.

[dandyads]

More Menthol Cigarettes, 1986

Theme Week: Black Ads 👩🏿‍🦱

[angelsndragons]

friendly reminder to the failure crowd that 2024 was

the year of the dragon

the 10th anniversary of dai, the culmination of that story.

and marketing didn't do shit with that. at all.

like that's the easiest advertising layup in history and they threw the ball onto their own damn faces.

also i cannot overstate that veilguard was not a failure, it is a critical success and well reviewed and 1.5 million players for the 4.5th entry into an rpg series that hasn't had a new game in ten years is ABSURD and it would have been better served if they hadn't done one of the worst marketing campaigns and pricing models ive ever fucking seen

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[blank-house]

Kickstarter Countdown Begins!

Your friendly student body president is here to remind you that our Kickstarter for Keyframes is set to launch in two weeks!

For the next fortnight (hah) we will be dropping teasers of the merch for the KS, and some really cool art collabs from artists that the team looks up to. Assss well as a little something something with a dope indie studio.

If you have any questions about the KS, don't hesitate to drop it in our inbox andddd we'll get to answering those as soon as we can!

Otherwise, look forward to the upcoming days with us!

(BLANK) House

[ ◉ ¯]

Art by Red Pen

Follow our Kickstarter pre-launch page HERE!