this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.
If the ads were untargeted I'd feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.
I don't mind if they used either data I entered or general trends of my watch history to serve me Degree For Men rather than Secret ads. "Data indicates this viewer is a male in his mid-30's, serving this viewer a tampon ad is unlikely to generate sales." I get that.
It's when I got the same exact ad for a Mission Impossible movie that had that annoying "Ready or not, here I come" song thing in front of every single video for three weeks straight that I downloaded uBlock Origin, stopped using the official app in favor of the website in the browser.
It's gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products. I've had good functional search engines for most of my life, I've been able to find the products I want and need. The more you feel the need to pay to have your brand shouted at me the shittier I think your product is. Case in point: I've never seen a commercial for Sennheiser headphones but holy SHIT I've seen ads for Raycons.
I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I'm looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.
If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don't want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser's standpoint, and I have to imagine I'm not the only person in the world who rolls this way.
The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people's attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn't matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.
The most recent ad that actually got my attention was on Reddit, so this was at least a year ago now. It was an ad for caffeinated chocolate candies. I don't remember the brand name but they had an owl motif, because caffeine = awake. I saw that ad in passing ONCE. Just enough for me to learn the product existed.
In the case of that Mission: Impossible movie, if it had played the long form of the trailer at me once or twice in an entire week, and then the shorter version of the trailer once or twice the next week, I might have gone "You know that looks like a cool movie I might go see it." But I got served that ad and only that ad several times an hour for weeks on end, and I have now resolved to never watch another Mission Impossible movie, a movie starring Tom Cruise, or any film distributed by Paramount Pictures ever again. When it comes to boycotts I do my brain surgery with a backhoe.
Gonna blast another ad I hated: A scarecrow dancing around on a GE coal-fired powerplant to the tune of "If I only had a brain" from the Wizard of Oz. Apparently the show I was watching was sponsored by General Electric's heavy industry division, which okay fine, but...what decision was the average SyFy channel viewer supposed to make based on the contents of that commercial? "Gee Tina, we should run out and buy a 1.5GW steam turbine generator." Why'd they feel the need to bother me about it?
Yeah, repeat ads are the worst. One of the best targeting thing that could be done is simply prevent seeing the same ad more than once in a 24h period. It would do so much to make the hellscape a little more bearable.
Especially with something like a movie trailer. Do they really get asses in theater seats via stockholm syndrome?
That's how I feel too. If it were to die, it gives more room for things like peertube to grow from its ashes.
My ads aren't targeted, at least I don't think they are... I honestly don't notice what they are for most of the time, so that's a failure right there, they're not memorable - but when I do notice, they're for either trump or sports betting, two things which I have negative interest in...
If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn't shore up, so they think "huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone". Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn't lock down her tracking data at all.
But I don't even like them trying to match me to ads, I don't want to incentivize their data collection practices.