#local ads

[minzi2024]

found this weighted baby on local ads...trying to get her^^

[thingsifoundongeoguessr]

BRAD BRADSHAW

[friendlycursedspaceotter]

Search “wheel and sprocket bike store ads” for more examples.

The exception is cheesy local commercials. Those should be the only ads. I will listen to someone who runs a store in my city doing an awkward rap. We once had a furniture store with these awful CGI ads and the slogan "where the deals are so low, it's almost criminal!" and then they got shut down, by the cops, because it turned out. It turned out the deals were so low because. You're not going to believe this but the prices were so low it was in fact

[jolikmc-thoughts]

[Music] Ironic Juxtaposition on a Nu Metal Radio Station

So, I'm listening to a local radio station that plays grunge music, heavy metal, and alternative rock. You know, songs with people screaming about death and tearing themselves apart… that sort of thing.

Anyway, as they're part of a local crime syndicate radio network, they play local ads for, like… a company that creates signs and posters, or a tire repair service, and so on. It's not too infrequently I get stuff like this:

♪ "I don't want your cure! I don't need your savior to give me a sign of life under me!" ♫ [station break hits] "Hunting season is coming up, so let's talk about gun safety."

Today, though, I heard something that actually made me change the station. After a thrash-y song I don't remember the name of, the DJ pops on and talks about the last couple of songs, then he starts going on about how it's "okay to not feel okay" or something, and talks about how "suicide prevention is important to our community".

That, right there, is what we call ironic juxtaposition.

    Read More (LiveJournal)

[icallmarketing]

Local Ads Services for the UK: Boost Your Business Visibility

In today's competitive digital landscape, businesses are constantly searching for effective strategies to enhance their visibility and attract local customers. Local ads services have emerged as a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach their target audience effectively. This article explores the importance of local advertising in the UK, the benefits it offers, and how to choose the right local ads services for your business.

Understanding Local Ads Services

Local ads services are marketing solutions specifically designed to promote businesses within a specific geographic area. These services utilize various platforms, including search engines, social media, and local directories, to ensure your business reaches potential customers in your vicinity. Local advertising can take many forms, such as:

Google Ads: Targeting local customers through paid search ads.

Social Media Advertising: Using platforms like Facebook and Instagram to reach local audiences.

Local Directory Listings: Ensuring your business appears in online directories like Yelp or Yellow Pages.

Geotargeted Ads: Serving ads based on users' geographical locations.

The Importance of Local Advertising in the UK

1. Increased Visibility

Local ads services significantly enhance your business's visibility in your community. With the rise of mobile usage, consumers frequently search for nearby products and services. By leveraging local ads, you ensure your business appears prominently in search results, increasing the chances of attracting local customers.

2. Targeted Reach

One of the key advantages of local advertising is the ability to target specific demographics. Local ads services allow you to tailor your marketing efforts based on factors such as location, age, interests, and more. This targeted approach ensures that your advertising budget is spent effectively, reaching the right audience at the right time.

3. Improved Conversion Rates

When your ads reach individuals actively searching for products or services in your area, the likelihood of conversion increases. Local ads services can lead to higher click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as potential customers are often looking for immediate solutions.

4. Cost-Effective Marketing

Local advertising can be more cost-effective than broader marketing strategies. By focusing on your local market, you can optimize your ad spend and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI). Many local ads services offer flexible pricing options, allowing businesses of all sizes to benefit.

Choosing the Right Local Ads Services

Selecting the right local ads services for your business is crucial for maximizing your advertising efforts. Here are some key factors to consider:

1. Define Your Goals

Before choosing a local ads service, define your advertising goals. Are you looking to increase foot traffic to your physical store, boost online sales, or improve brand awareness? Understanding your objectives will help you select the most suitable service for your needs.

2. Research Providers

Not all local ads services are created equal. Conduct thorough research to find reputable providers with a proven track record in the UK market. Look for customer reviews, case studies, and testimonials to gauge their effectiveness.

3. Check for Customization Options

Effective local advertising requires a tailored approach. Choose a service that offers customizable ad campaigns to align with your specific business needs. This flexibility will allow you to adapt your strategy based on real-time performance metrics.

4. Evaluate Reporting and Analytics

A robust reporting and analytics system is essential for tracking the success of your local ads campaigns. Ensure the provider offers detailed insights into key performance indicators (KPIs), such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and customer demographics. This data will help you refine your advertising strategy over time.

5. Budget Considerations

Determine your advertising budget and find a local ads service that aligns with it. Many providers offer various pricing plans, so ensure you choose one that provides the best value for your investment.

Conclusion

Local ads services are essential for businesses in the UK aiming to enhance their visibility and attract local customers. By leveraging the right local advertising strategies, you can improve your chances of reaching your target audience effectively, increasing conversion rates, and achieving a strong return on investment.

When selecting local ads services, be sure to define your goals, research providers, and evaluate customization and reporting options. With the right approach, local advertising can become a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, helping your business thrive in a competitive landscape.

For More Information please visit us our website - https://www.icallmarketing.co.uk/

By investing in local ads services, you're not just promoting your business; you're building a connection with your community, ensuring that local customers know about the products and services you offer. Start exploring local ads services today and watch your business grow!

[taxi-davis]

Bayshore Mall - Eureka, California - TV Commercial - 1996

[succubussally]

Fuck yeah Steakadelphia got a new location!

[erice549]

nostalgia of the day #2 cuz fuck it

this one goes out to my grandma

[koniknits]

Had some fun drawing kitten mittens on stitchfiddle.

[anomalousmancunt]

this disability pride month i'd like to remind y'all that "visibly disabled" does not imply "mobility aid user" (nor anything else other than "people can see there is something about you that doesn't fit abled hegemony")

OP is autistic and talking about its experiences being autistic (AND multiply disabled). don't fucking touch if you have no solidarity towards autistic people.

[inverse-problem]

if you go to an active construction site with lots of heavy machinery and close your eyes you can imagine that’s what gay robot sex sounds like

[you-are-willcome]

If you're in the greater Seattle area i run a small knife sharpening business! Get your knives sharpened!

[fumifooms]

Wait one darn diggity second what’s this about unmarried half-foot women being embarrassing for the family, what’s this about being unmarried as a half-foot being "different [worse than] for other races". Maybe Flertom and Puckpatti’s intensity about finding a husband is the norm, maybe Meijack, despite Chilchuck approving of her disinterest in romance, is the one who’s considered weird by social standards.

Maybe they’re less well-adjusted than I thought. Don’t misunderstand me I’m aroace, but if there’s a lot of societal pressure and it’s considered a failure if you’re not married, it is notable when all 3 of your kids haven’t married past the time that’s expected. For reference adulthood for a half-foot is reached at 14, Chil got married at 13, Puckpatti is 14 while Flertom and Meijack are 16. The other half-foot character we have is Mickbell who is also unmarried, unsurprising considering his situation. I don’t think them not having married is about their family being poorer, if anything I’d think Chil’s family is on the comfier end of half-foot families with the high wages he gets paid with and the nice living conditions we’ve seen (although we don’t know when he started being paid well). We know about Flertom having high standards, but she and Puckpatti are actively looking to date, so there’s something going on here whatever it is.

It is nice that it doesn’t seem like Chilchuck cares at all, he even seems to generally dislike the idea of his daughters dating. I imagine that their mother must have also not pressured them into marrying at all, maybe even encouraged them not to marry if they didn’t have someone, which is sweet. And understandable, considering she might not want her daughters to rush into it and live with…….. Being stuck in an unhappy marriage. And here comes in what I meant when I said well-adjusted, daddy issues. We aren’t shown a lot of Chil’s married life, but I would bet my life on there having been tensions and warning signs. Especially since, since the daughters and Chil hadn’t seen each other since the separation before post-canon, there’s an air of not having been very surprised or panicked about the whole thing: the separation wasn’t unexpected. Having to watch your parents fall out of love and growing up seeing them in a taxing marriage can be hard, and not exactly put you in the mood to try and find romance and marry. Fear of abandonment, fear of intimacy, stunted emotional intelligence, fear of commitment… Oh girlies I am about to extrapolate so much from this

Half-foot society has a lot of coding I don’t have enough specialized knowledge to pin down, but they’re a poor working class people, anglo peasant vibes. They have tightly knit communities, but then the double edge is that if your community has expectations and rules to belong, the pressure will be harsh and it can end up being more isolating if you deviate from it. Marriage historically and in Dunmeshi has a lot of economical aspects, in Laios’ Adventurer’s Bible profile for example dowries are hinted at.

So the pressure to marry might very well originate from the need to bring money in to your family, and to unite families as allies. And from there it grows into an expectation, and thus if they aren’t married it’s "an unmarried woman was deemed unfit by suitors, something with her must be off"/"This woman was unable to provide for her family, she must be a burden on them" which results into the family having a bad reputation. If Flertom says it’s worse for half-foots than other races, the reasons must be either social or economical or both. There’s of course their lifespan being shorter too, so that might play into it, expectations to go about things quickly and to have a fast life cycle and making sure to have kids. As we see with Laios, having kids is a pressure that does exist globally as well. Elves are another interesting example of how familial expectations are like in Dunmeshi with heirdom and whatnot, but free me I just wanted to bring up the possibility of Childaughters being societal misfits and having relational issues.

I will also mention that in a similar way, Chilchuck’s wife leaving him may have damaged the daughters’ chances, in a "what if they’re like their mother, the type of woman to abandon her husband!" way. Chilchuck also has a reputation especially as an union leader, which can paint him as dependable as much as it can paint him as someone harsh and stingy, which would be an intimidating. It’s possible they’re a bit more well-off from the rest of the half-foot community as mentioned, which could add to the intimidating factor or a bad reputation as an overall uptight family or one that has drama. Again, double edge of community being very tightly knit and important, with family as one of its highest values.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]