#marketing products

[chappellrroan]

i LOVE severance marketing

[chloesimaginationthings]

Yall ever think about how Nightmare bb is canon in FNAF

[thenumberfives]

[galaxypromoe]

Marketing Products | Galaxypromo.co.nz

Galaxypromo.co.nz offers an extensive range of marketing products that will help your business stand out and make a lasting impression. We provide quality products with an emotional touch to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts.

[fantastic-nonsense]

comic sales are down because the industry is inaccessible and expensive, not because piracy exists

Higher piracy rates are what happens when you make buying comics expensive, difficult, platform-dependent, and inherently exclusionary while pretending trades and digital don't count as sales.

if any single comic book company decided to be a competent publishing company for even a year comic piracy rates would plummet

[brekkie-e]

Thinking a lot about how the devs basically said there is no conflict in the team or between historically opposed people in Thedas in this game because "the stakes are too high, everyone has to work together." When the stakes are very very similar to Inquisitions?? Albeit we as a player know it's "real" this time. The big one.

But correct me if I'm wrong here (I'm not) the previous antagonist was a blighted OP mage with a knock off Archdemon trying to tear down the veil and ascend to godhood? And we are currently trying to *checks notes* defeat a blighted OP mage with an Archdemon trying to fuck up the veil and ascend to godhood? Oh sorry. Two.

Yes, the Blight. But it's hardly as though there weren't Blight concerns in Inquisition. Adamant, anyone?

Anyways, my point being is that the characters of Inquisition have no reason to see the stakes of that story as any less dire than the characters of Veilgaurd. And bless their hearts, those kids have Issues™️. They're all in on petty conflict. That was part of the genius, that the stakes were so high these deeply different people had to find a way to work together despite butting heads.

And the rest of the world didn't suddenly forget it's drama as well? Halamshiral's underlying elven rebellion. Orlesian civil war. The Mages vs the Templars. Chantry infighting. Seeker infighting. Tranquility. They didn't all go, "wait! there's a hole in the sky! we should put aside hundreds of years of systemic issues in the name of togetherness." Excluding the Inquisition that is.

Okay, Blight. Let's talk about the Blight. The Fifth one. You have the most rag tag group thrown together to stop the spread. This is literally the game that founded the series. Its defining features were political conflict. The king was betrayed! In a battle against Darkspawn! During a Blight! What a time to not stand as a united front, Loghain. In your own party, you're trying desperately to prevent Morrigan from emotionally assasinating Alistair. Oh! More conflict. While we are here, let's murder her mom real quick because *checks notes* Blights are when we all come together to hold hands.

If you play as an elf, you're putting up with human nonsense. If you play as a mage, you put up with mage nonsense. If you play as a woman- oh boy. I would make the argument that the realness of that setting, the way it highlighted human nature's best and worst qualities- is why it sunk it's claws into so many fans hearts.

It just.... whatever they've got going in Veilgaurd on only works for a YA novel. Which Dragon Age has never tried to be before. And, frankly, is a weird thing for it to aim for.

[drusill-a]

[WWDitS finale spoilers]

Aside from the obvious – the gross shipbaiting and mocking naive viewers who dared to believe an m/m dynamic could be treated as anything other than the butt of the joke – my biggest issue with the WWDitS finale is that it’s an ending that could have made sense… but at most after s2. Back then, we were still watching a story about characters who didn’t share any particular bonds (except for Nadja/Laszlo) and who were entirely static, unaffected by the things they experienced.

The thing is, the creators themselves realized you can’t build a long-running story on that formula – eventually, the characters had to evolve at least a little, and their relationships had to deepen so viewers would have any reason to root for them. And so Guillermo’s position in the group began to change – first, he earned their minimal respect, then a very solid place, until finally, in season 5, all the other characters had reached a point where they didn’t even hide that they genuinely cared about him a lot. The same happened with Colin, who at first was completely left out by the other housemates but gradually earned an equal spot in the group and developed that stupid yet sweet bond with Laszlo (erasing those memories was, imo, one of the writers’ biggest mistakes). Laszlo showed himself capable of empathy, which he proved again in s5 by helping Guillermo, and even Nadja, who used to completely disregard everyone’s feelings, had several moments in later seasons where she openly cared – at least in her own way –  about the others.

And of course, that’s how we got the romantic subtext between Guillermo and Nandor. Over all those seasons – from s3 up until s6 – I was certain it was a classic will they, won’t they dynamic that would end with them getting together. I just couldn’t believe the writers would spend the last 4 seasons making their relationship more equal and showing Nandor’s journey to realizing Guillermo genuinely mattered to him, only to do nothing with it – or worse, regress them back by three seasons. But the late s6 Nandor’s “no homo” attitude has very little in common with the Nandor from seasons 4 and 5, who was openly pining and lusting after Guillermo.

From Guillermo’s perspective, this ending is an absolute tragedy – even the end of the previous episode gave him much more hope. Maybe he’d lost his lifelong dream and still hadn’t found a new purpose, but he had found a family and a place in the world, with a potential chance to build something meaningful with Nandor in the future. I don’t understand why this episode had to undo all of that – to show us that none of his friends really listen to him, that the power dynamic with Nandor will always be uneven, and that ultimately he wasted 16 years, and no one would really care that much if he left. Considering how great Guillermo’s development was, especially in gaining confidence from s4 onward, this ending feels so unfair and insulting to his character.

I feel like the writers’ biggest mistakes have been forcing a return to the status quo after every season. After the breakup in s3, the characters should have stayed apart for at least an episode or two. Colin should have remembered that Laszlo raised him, and they should’ve kept their funny, fucked-up father-son relationship until the end of the show. Guillermo should’ve been a real vampire for at least a full season—or, in my opinion, permanently—because, as it turns out, the writers had absolutely no idea what to do with his character once he lost that goal. Relationships that had evolved shouldn’t be randomly reset by a couple of seasons just because the writers couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to write anything new for them.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too – if the writers were so dead-set on giving us an  ending that says “nothing in these characters’ lives matters, and nothing will ever change,” they should have made the show half as long and spared viewers the trouble of getting invested in character and relationship arcs that ultimately went nowhere.

This is a comedy show that was supposed to make people feel better. After this finale, I feel mocked by the creators for believing that the queer ship they sold me for 4 seasons had a chance of being treated equally to an m/f ship. I’m also sad because the characters were regressed and left stuck in eternal limbo, and generally I feel ridiculed because the writers openly made fun of us for getting emotionally invested in the story they wrote for us.

And maybe the biggest crime of these last few episodes was that they weren’t even remotely funny—so you can’t even say they prioritized comedy over character development, because it failed on that front too.

[edwinisms]

i get such a sense of primal envy when looking at edwin’s clothes up close because god you can just tell his coat is real wool and made to last and not cheap flimsy mass produced garbage and auggagghhhh that was just STANDARD in his time. by no means am i saying i was #borninthewronggeneration because i like having vaccines and household appliances but. man. to have a personally-tailored coat like that that’d last for years and years……. and fabrics of fine thread-dense quality………. if only

[bambeptin]

BFS

[badninken]

Little Hearts Chapter 3 - Practice

[buf309]

Well… is that face captivating enough to entice you to buy this W.I.S.E cosmetics collection? 🤔

--------------

***Disclaimer***

1/ The "Honey" slogan was coined by @nire-the-mithridatist

2/ The perfume bottle was based on the real Spy x Family Fragrances

3/ The other two pieces were based on the lipstick and blush balm I randomly found in my mother's cosmetic bag.

[toxiccaves]

English product packaging has come out for Metal Cardbot!

These will be coming soon to Russia and you can find their listings online over on the Rosman toy company's website (coming soon). No listing for Dexter, Wild Guardy, Buster Gallon, or Buffalo Crush yet. This also comes with the release of the Russian dub, airing on Karusel on the 20th.

No word yet on any other territories that may be receiving these on store shelves.

[valentingaio]

Tangled

Just a silly doodle based on this! teehehe

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Paying for it doesn't make it a market

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies.

Here's the way that story goes: companies that fear losing your business will treat you better, because treating you worse will cost them money. Since ad-supported media gets paid by advertisers, they are fine with abusing you to make advertisers happy, because the advertiser is the customer, and you are the product.

This represents a profound misunderstanding of how even capitalism's champions describe its workings. The purported virtue of capitalism is that it transforms the capitalist's greed into something of broad public value, by appealing to the capitalist's fear. A successful capitalist isn't merely someone figures out how to please their customers – they're also someone who figures out how to please their suppliers.

That's why tech platforms were – until recently – very good to (some of) their workforce. Technical labor was scarce and so platforms built whimsical "campuses" for tech workers, with amenities ranging from stock options to gourmet cafeterias to egg-freezing services for those workers planning to stay at their desks through their fertile years. Those workers weren't the "customer" – but they were treated better than any advertiser or user.

But when it came to easily replaced labor – testers, cleaning crew, the staff in those fancy cafeterias – the situation was much worse. Those workers were hired through cut-out shell companies, denied benefits, even made to enter via separate entrances on shifts that were scheduled to minimize the chance that they would ever interact with one of the highly paid tech workers at the firm.

Likewise, advertisers may be the tech companies' "customers" but that doesn't mean the platforms treat them well. Advertisers get ripped off just like the rest of us. The platforms gouge them on price, lie to them about advertising reach, and collude with one another to fix prices and defraud advertisers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Now, it's true that the advertisers used to get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them. Then, once the users were locked in, Facebook flipped a switch, started spying on users from asshole to appetite, and then offered rock-bottom-priced, fine-grained, highly reliable ad-targeting to advertisers:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on them, too. Of course they did. The point of monopoly power isn't just getting too big to fail and too big to jail – it's getting too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

In this frame, the advertiser is the platforms' customer, the customer is king, the platform inflicts unlimited harm upon all other stakeholders in service to those advertisers, the advertisers are so pleased with this white-glove service that they willingly pay a handsome premium to use the platform, and so the platform grows unimaginably wealthy.

But of course, if the platforms inflict unlimited harms upon their users, those users will depart, and then no amount of obsequious catering to advertisers will convince them to spend money on ads that no one sees. In the cargo-cult conception of platform capitalism, the platforms are able to solve this problem by "hacking our dopamine loops" – depriving us of our free will with "addictive" technologies that keep us locked to their platforms even when they grow so terrible that we all hate using them.

This means that we can divide the platform economy into "capitalists" who sell you things, and "surveillance capitalists" who use surveillance data to control your mind, then sell your compulsive use of their products to their cherished customers, the advertisers.

Surveillance capitalists like Google are thus said to have only been shamming when they offered us a high-quality product. That was just a means to an end: the good service Google offered in its golden age was just bait to trick us into handing over enough surveillance data that they could tune their mind-control technology, strip us of our free will, and then sell us to their beloved advertisers, for whom nothing is too good.

Meanwhile, the traditional capitalists – the companies that sell you things – are the good capitalists. Apple and Microsoft are disciplined by market dynamics. They won't spy on you because you're their customer, and so they have to keep you happy.

All this leads to an inexorable conclusion: unless we pay for things with money, we are doomed. Any attempt to pay with attention will end in a free-for-all where the platforms use their Big Data mind-control rays to drain us of all our attention. It is only when we pay with money that we can dicker over price and arrive at a fair and freely chosen offer.

This theory is great for tech companies: it elevates giving them money to a democracy-preserving virtue. It reframes handing your cash over to a multi-trillion dollar tech monopolist as good civics. It's easy to see why those tech giants would like that story, but boy, are you a sap if you buy it.

Because all capitalists are surveillance capitalists…when they can get away with it. Sure, Apple blocked Facebook from spying on Ios users…and then started illegally, secretly spying on those users and lying about it, in order to target ads to those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

And Microsoft spies on every Office 365 user and rats them out to their bosses ("Marge, this analytics dashboard says you're the division's eleventh-worst speller and twelfth-worst typist. Shape up or ship out!"). But the joke's on your boss: Microsoft also spies on your whole company and sells the data about it to your competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revengel

The platforms screw anyone they can. Sure, they lured in advertisers with good treatment, but once those advertisers were locked in, they fucked them over just as surely as they fucked over their users.

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis depends on the existence of a hypothetical – and wildly improbably – Big Data mind-control technology that keeps users locked to platforms even when the platform decays. Mind-control rays are an extraordinary claim supported by the thinnest of evidence (marketing materials from the companies as they seek to justify charging a premium to advertisers, combined with the self-serving humblebrags of millionaire Prodigal Tech Bros who claim to have awakened to the evil of using their dopamine-hacking sorcerous powers on behalf of their billionaire employers).

There is a much simpler explanation for why users stay on platforms even as they decline in quality: they are enmeshed in a social service that encompasses their friends, loved ones, customers, and communities. Even if everyone in this sprawling set of interlocking communities agrees that the platform is terrible, they will struggle to agree on what to do about it: where to go next and when to leave. This is the economists' "collective action problem" – a phenomenon with a much better evidentiary basis than the hypothetical, far-fetched "dopamine loop" theory.

To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in? The more any stakeholder to a platform stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure. Thus the beneficent face that tech companies turn to their most cherished tech workers, and the hierarchy of progressively more-abusive conditions for other workers – worse treatment for those whose work-visas are tied to their employment, and the very worst treatment for contractors testing the code, writing the documentation, labelling the data or cleaning the toilets.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can't just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn't whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it's whether you're locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

It's perfectly possible for market dynamics to play out in a system in which we pay with our attention by watching ads. More than 50% of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, the largest boycott in the history of civilization:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Ad-supported companies make an offer: How about in exchange for looking at this content, you let us spy on you in ways that would make Orwell blush and then cram a torrent of targeted ads into your eyeballs?" Ad-blockers let you make a counter-offer: "How about 'nah'?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But ad-blocking is only possible on an open platform. A closed, locked-down platform that is illegal to modify isn't a walled garden, a fortress that keeps out the bad guys – it's a walled prison that locks you in, a prisoner of the worst impulses of the tech giant that built it. Apple can defend you from other companies' spying ways, but when Apple decides to spy on you, it's a felony to jailbreak your Iphone and block Apple's surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

I am no true believer in markets – but the people who say that paying for products will "align incentives" and make tech better claim to believe in the power of markets to make everyone better off. But real markets aren't just places where companies sell things – they're also places where companies buy things. Monopolies short-circuit the power of customer choice to force companies to do better. But monopsonies – markets dominated by powerful buyers – are just as poisonous to the claimed benefits of markets.

Even if you are "the product" – that is, even if you're selling your attention to a platform to package up and sell to an advertiser – that in no way precludes your getting decent treatment from the platform. A world where we can avail ourselves of blockers, where interoperablity eases our exodus from abusive platforms, where privacy law sets a floor below which we cannot bargain is a world where it doesn't matter if you're "the product" or "the customer" – you can still get a square deal.

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

Rather, as tech platforms eliminated competition, captured their regulators and expanded their IP rights so that interoperability was no longer a threat, they became too big to care whether any of their stakeholders were happy. First they came for the users, sure, but then they turned on the publishers, the advertisers, and finally, even their once-pampered tech workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

MLK said that "the law can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me." It's impossible to get tech bosses to believe you deserve care and decency, but you can stop them from abusing you. The way to do that is by making them fear you – by abolishing the laws that create lock-in, by legally enshrining a right to privacy, by protecting competition.

It's not by giving them money. Paying for a service does not make a company fear you, and anyone who thinks they can buy a platform's loyalty by paying for a service is a simp. A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will never love you back. It can't experience love – only fear.

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/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

[dandyads]

Afro Sheen, 1972

Theme Week: Black Ads 🧑🏾‍🦱