#but got interrupted by ads

[surfingthehttps]

i'm not into idol groups much but if next harmeowny was real i would breathe harmeowny be harmeowny live harmeowny think only harmeowny if harmeowny have a million fans i'm one of them if harmeowny had a hundred i would be one if harmeowny had ten i would be one if harmeowny had one i'll be their fan if harmeowny had none i'll be dead i

[arimarushunya]

I'm sure I'm not the first person to feel this way, but man, Starfield really just feels like Bethesda got mad at the popularity of Outer Worlds and wanted it for themselves

[salora-rainriver]

We're talking about Ads Again

Context for those followers of mine who weren't there: I made a post about tumblr ads being weird back in 2016 and it's literally still getting notes to this day. People responded GREAT to it. honestly, despite being like. ass old at this point and written by a literal high schooler, it's still pretty good! I thank my dad being in advertising helped significantly. I had an expert witness.

Tonight, I'm writing the sequel to that post. the sequel is this post.

let's just fucking dive into it or whatever.

why am I doing this?

okay for starters I made that post in goddamn 2016 and I refuse to believe my insights into the marketing world have not improved since then.

Also, the marketing world has CHANGED. Huge swaths of my old post are no longer relevant. What we saw with tumblr ads in 2016 was in some parts a passing fad, and in other parts the harbinger of a new wave of influencer marketing and corporate parasociality (I coined that term just now).

Honestly I've been thinking for a while that I should make an update post, but what with, yanno, adulthood, that's been kinda hard!

Well, I've missed a train, and it's Christmas, so I've finally found the time to do that.

What has Changed?

in my personal life... dad got fired! yeah it fucking sucks. the good news is he and his wife are working towards their retirement now, shifting away from the industry overall. Good news as far as life is concerned, but it does mean I no longer have as clean a connection to the Industry as I used to.

but more importantly, why he got fired. The fact is, dad's old! I know, shocker. More than just being old, though, his field (and my stepmom's field - they both did the same work) represents an older paradigm of advertisement. he did TV spots and posters, not ad reads for Raid Shadow Legends. He was great at his work, but we're in an era of data-driven, maximalist, google adsense, low-barrier-to-entry, super-fast and super-cheap digital advertisement.

Well, more specifically,

We're on the cusp of an extinction event poised to bring said era crashing to the ground.

Pictured: the current vibes in the ad world

Siberia is on Fire and Everything is Dying

So given that my typical source on stuff like this is currently unemployed, I decided to hit good ol google (well, google and duckduckgo. fitting given what we're talking about) to see if I could get any insights into what the current state of advertising is.

and the short of it is that everyone says the end is nigh. check this out:

Digital is dead, and so is TV. God fucking damn. BY THE WAY, I loved these two articles. Chris Gadek, a man I only learned about today, is clearly an excellent writer and his professional insights are probably gonna be way better than my amateur synthesis of the half-dozen different articles I read today, including his.

blatant shilling for random article writers aside, let's get on to my half-baked synthesis, starting with:

What Set Siberia on Fire

In small part, it's the same issues facing most major companies and industries in our late capitalist world: Hubris.

As this New York Times article points out, we've got a low barrier of entry into a gargantuan industry that's increasingly pumping out slop to follow a strategy of 'more is more'. And we've all seen the bizarre mobile game ads and shady scams that have resulted from THAT.

On top of that, we've also got the fucking digital privacy issue shaking up the entire world as consumers increasingly don't like being spied on (imagine that), and the EU starts rolling out heavy restrictions on the data harvesting that was fueling a bunch of this advertisement bubble.

There's also the ad fraud. Oh, you didn't hear about that? Well, it's nothing much, just that lots of bots are clicking ads to falsify click metrics, artificially inflating the effectiveness of said ads. look, it even has a wikipedia article

oh and Facebook did it. Facebook did ad fraud. :)

and I'm not even getting into everything that works to shake up or demolish basically every advertisement channel out there - the decline of cable tv and print newspapers, the increasing use of ad blockers, the crisis of consumer trust, etc etc.

In short we are looking at a multitude of micro-crises all working together to make the environment unlivable for most current forms of advertisement.

in other words: an extinction event!

Who's Gonna Survive

And just like in a real extinction event, whether or not you survive depends on how good you can adapt to the brave new world you've found yourself in. Old school advertising needs to drastically rethink their everything if they're gonna stay afloat, and every field of the industry needs to recreate itself. As my new favorite writer Chris Gadek says,

"These crises show that there are no safe havens. You can’t substitute one advertising medium for another. Rather than pivot, the advertising industry must adapt and learn to effectively use the channels at their disposal (TV included), factoring in the seismic societal and technological changes that have occurred over the past decade and beyond."

and what is that going to look like? what's going to be the new face of advertising?

The field seems torn, at first... but also aligned, at least when it comes to the core principles:

privacy is a big issue. Seems like a lot of advertisers are seeing an end to wanton consumer surveillance, and looking into less invasive ways to gather important and meaningful data

companies that rely on selling ad space and propping up their engagement metrics are going to be relied on less, probably, because the metrics themselves are being seen as less reliable (for good freaking reason)

regaining consumer trust is going to be a massive priority in the future.

overall, we're probably going to look at a massive downturn in ads, as people turn to a quality-over-quantity strategy in an attempt to stop flooding the attention marketplace.

that's the gist I'm getting from reading oh so many different articles of varying quality from so many different sources.

So, yanno, there may be some hope out there. If smart people start leading this industry (lol), we may get to actually enjoy ads.

Yeah. Enjoy ads.

Unironically.

I know, it's crazy.

PS: if you start seeing affiliate links on mainstream TV ads, thank our lord of excellent business analysis Chris Gadek for calling it early. God, that's such a crazy left-field idea and I really want it to actually happen.

[boigyu]

can anyone tell me how to fix my spotify giving me ads when I've gotten premium LIKE HELLO??? I paid for this 😿 I got the mini one just to try out and I still get ads and none of the benefits are working?? like I can't download songs, still have ads etc

[marklikely]

i was doing an experiment to see how long i could just completely ignore young vlads existence without it affecting my game and the answer is you can get pretty far but it breaks one of the most important dream sequences for making panacea and also rubin WILL die.

[thethingything]

I really don't like our brain's ability to jump from "I'm going to organise all this stuff and catch up with a bunch of tasks" to "it's time to get stuck in an increasingly distressing thought spiral for several hours, accidentally trigger yourself, then feel like shit because you haven't done anything but also haven't managed to rest".

like please can we maybe have like a nice middleground where we do a few things and then rest for a while and don't experience the full range of human emotions over the course of about 3 hours

[the-prima-vista]

I'm trying to play through FF16 but it's honestly such a struggle for me. The combat isn't my sort of thing, and I feel like everyone talks at like... half the speed of normal dialogue so I just lose interest in every single cutscene.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

With all the mystery around who Ruby is and who her mom is, I really, really hope it isn't actually the Trickster like others have been saying, because while yes it would be nice to see something from SJA appear in current DW, it also would just feel weird at this point as the Trickster was such a Sarah Jane villain that it just feels wrong to give him to the Doctor as an enemy just because Sarah Jane is gone.

[katierosefun]

i think being an adult is realizing that adults will continue to act shitty and that no adult is somehow more mature purely because they’re older than you. like damn, when you’re a kid, you might be treated badly by adults from time to time, and you might argue back against them, but you’re still shadowed by the fact that you are a kid and you’re a little too aware, even as a kid, that you might not know everything in the world--

and then you’re an adult--a pretty young adult, but an adult regardless--and you realize very quickly that oh, no, you weren’t wrong as a kid: adults can still act badly and they can be actually almost just as if not even more irrational and immature than your local five year old. it’s a little bit odd, just because i think there might be a part of you that thinks, hang on, no, but you’re an adult, adults are supposed to be more mature at this point, but also, i think it’s a little freeing as well: look, we are both adults. look at how immature you’re acting--now i know that just because you’re older doesn’t mean that you know better.

[an-autistic-with-personhood]

Every time I see that tiktok ad with the dog heads on paintings I want to destroy the very concept of tiktok itself. The mouth noises drive my misophonia up the wall

[the-heaminator]

y'know the fact that i was one of those kids that never did anything until was like 15-16 might explain why i am the way that i am

Like i am a badly socialised labrador who is either sweet, chaotic but is too much or just is plain scary and has no idea why.

[oh2e]

The funniest thing about the ads on tumblr mobile is that 90% of the time I think they’re slightly blurry screenshots of an ad that someone is making fun of.

[thethingything]

went downstairs and immediately saw a tiny moth. fuck yeah

[keeps-ache]

and i forgot :)👍

[gemharvest]

One thing they don't tell you is that video games are so super fun when you don't scare yourself out of playing them.

[snortshort]

how are u guys still using adblock on youtube