With a looming iron-grip marketers and advertisers have over pretty much anything in their reach, why aren’t the masses collectively making harassment campaigns to them?
I think if we actively told every single marketer off in a prolonged effort, they’d get a hint as to how much of their commercialism we don’t need shoved down our throats.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that the only way to stop the excesses of capitalism is with a concerted effort to gum up the works, one business at a time, from most to least evil.
Everyone who has worked retail knows how to waste the company’s time, money, and effort.
Let’s say it’s a chain of megamarts:
Pick a busy day. Load up a cart with rotisserie chickens, raw meat, and ice cream, and abandon it in the garden center. Window shop and ask as many questions as possible of every employee you encounter. Ask dumb questions. Ask what the battery life on a pair of wired headphones is. Ask how many eggs are in a dozen. How do they know the chicken is boneless? Have they looked? Don’t buy anything you ask all the questions about. Buy only loss leaders. Pay with a combination of loose change, a check, and a card you know will decline at the end. “Oh wait I need just one more thing. I’ll just be a second!” then leave through the garden center. Go to the automotive center and talk to them about financing a large tire purchase. Back out at the last second. Get paint mixed and then wander off absentmindedly while they’re mixing it. Pretend to be interested in signing up for their store credit card. There are so many time wasting questions you can ask about a credit card. And so many ways to fill out a form incorrectly so it’s useless. Try to pay with any coupon but one that you know will work. Expired coupons. Coupons for other stores. Coupons from defunct stores. Coupons from Arby’s. Chuck E Cheese tokens. Gift certificates from that one comic book shop across town that’s run by a sweet old man that still uses gift certificates because he’s old fashioned that way. Traveler’s cheques. Ask if your membership card from their direct competitor entitles you to any discounts. If you speak a language other than English, that is now your only language. You understand English only when it is disadvantageous to the company for you to do so.
Time is money. Waste their money. And since this is being done to one business at a time, their competitors don’t have an entire movement of people acting like plausibly deniable problem customers dragging them down. You’re distorting the margin at which they can operate. If they raise prices while it takes forever to buy anything in the stores, well, none of their competitors have that problem.
Yet.
Leave glowing reviews of every low-level employee you encounter. Tip them. Make up a few employees and give them glowing reviews. Leave scathing reviews of anyone in management you encounter.
Rather just figure out where the board and C-staff lives and take a shit on their porch
Every day
You can do both.
Please don’t contribute to the abuse, torture, and murder of vulnerable individuals just to make a totally unrelated point. Chickens and cattle are not lumber and steel, they are individuals who would have been loved by their mothers if they had been given the opportunity. The animals we create are all morally entitled to the exact same unconditional love and protection as our own children.
Oh my. This is so well planned. Props to you.
it sounds fun but
And since this is being done to one business at a time,
how can people coordinate that?
Pick a chain. One that’s everywhere. Then pick a day to start and a condition for ceasing. Then get the word out.
The thing is to be indistinguishable from a run of the mill garbage customer, so if they crack down on people for acting like that, they’ll piss off the boomers who genuinely act like that as a matter of course.
This reads like a George Carlin bit
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Because I try my best to treat other people the way I wish to be treated myself. I have no desire to harass anyone, and if I did, I’d feel awful about it. There are enough jerks in the world already, and I don’t want to add to that. Nobody has ever stopped acting shitty because people responded by acting shitty toward them. What you’re advocating isn’t virtuous, no matter what story you tell yourself about it. You’re just trying to justify your own bad behavior so you don’t have to feel guilty when you go to bed at night.
Nobody has ever stopped acting shitty because people responded by acting shitty toward them.
Absolutely not true, and also contrary to the entire premise of the justice system.
But while you go too far in some of your arguments, your point is sound.
It is more about treating people with the respect that you wish to be treated with.
Marketers and Advertisers don’t respect you, though. Why respect anybody who just doesn’t respect you? People are just going to act shitty or have potential to be shitty anyways even if you respected them, that’s just how some of it goes.
I don’t respect anybody who feel they’re entitled to my time and sometimes, money.
My unwillingness to mistreat a stranger doesn’t mean I respect them.
Spot on.
They’d probably enjoy it.
All in all we’re just another brick in the wall.
- I’m not that type of person. I don’t have it in me to rip someone apart that I don’t know personally.
- They aren’t personally responsible. They’re on the bottom just like us.
- The people who make the money will just continuously recycle employees because they know they can.
I’m sorry but this answer right here is why they win.
Sure, you may not know them personally, but they’re getting to know you more than you’re knowing yourself. Enough to specifically push and market products specifically and particularly at you.
Yes they usually are personally responsible and they aren’t always on the bottom. They make $56 ~ $161k a year, entry to senior. They’re just above the grind.
That’s nothing new because that’s applicable to any job, not just marketing.
Who exactly are we talking about here? Are you saying I should be harassing the people in the marketing department at my company? Or are you saying we should have visibility campaigns about the companies involved in the Internet ad networks? Or someone else?
Fuck comms/marketing. They harrass me and misrepresent my work all the time, they swap out carefully selected words and distort meaning for spurious reasons. They bend over backwards for ignorant journo scum and feed their misinformation just trying to “spin” it. They sound like ai, i wish they were ai. I wish all fucking comms cretins would quit and get a real job, like a fucking cleaner or binman or something actually helpful.
But that’s just it. I just ignore it and move on. I will feel worse emotionally and morally if I yell at someone than if I passively move on with my life. I don’t care of they win according to their rules. I’m winning according to mine.
I think you’re doing it exactly right. The three things I try to remember: 1) Do what you can, 2) When you can, 3) For as long as you can.
Some stuff is out of my wheelhouse, it’s not something I can not or will not do. Sometimes I have other obligations I need to keep in order to honor commitments I’ve made or help those in my circle that need it. And sometimes, I need to rest so I can be my best for those other stages. All of that is OK. Do what you can, when you can, as long as you can. Exceeding those boundaries is a recipe for trouble. Others will help plug holes once they see something is already happening and your community support system will self-reinforce and grow over time.
I assume you mean unsolicited phone calls with this? I haven’t gotten any of those in about a decade, if not more. And those were isolated cases as well. We have laws against that sort of thing. It’s not been a problem for a very very long time (early 2000s or so).
Let me tell you about my friend adnauseam
Even better then just harassment, it actively wastes advertiser money by messing with their click-through stats. The more people that run it the less valuable advertising online in general becomes.
Also i would say to a leaser degree Adblocking in general is why people arent more active about fighting back, since they work its enough for most folks to just avoid the problem rather then confront it head on.
This only works when the site, ad network and advertiser are three distinct and separate entities.
Given that pretty much all social media now runs its own advertising systems, it won’t actually have much effect. Sure it wastes some money, but given how precise site analytics are, most can actually discern between real clicks and these automated tools.
Not to mention that the whole website for this tool looks like is itself riddled with ads, and also, over 2/3 of all internet traffic happens on mobile devices, which this extension doesn’t support.
Fair point, if the majority of your browisng is social media or phone apps i dont think you are the target audicence for this.
I know google hates it because even before the manifest v3 stuff it was banned by them, its probably a not insignificant part of WHY they forced the move to manifest v3.
With how anyltics work, just like with adblocking in general its a constant cat and mouse game, and that in itself also costs the advertisers money in having to keep up with the anti-advertising methods.
I was going to mention how 80% of that site just looks like ads
Wait so not only will I not see all this junk due to uBlock Origin but the sites I frequent will make a bit more revenue because it’s registering clicks on all their ads???
If the site has pay-per-click ads, yes.
That’s legit, tossing it on my computers, thanks!
Word of warning - you will have more bandwidth usage since the ad clicks are being loaded in the background sandbox, so be careful if you have something like a capped data plan for things such as smartphones.
Do people still have those these days ?
Oh good to know, thank you!
YouTube recently broke when it’s enabled, just so people are aware.
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Everything flows down from the C-Suite. They tell Marketing to increase sales. Marketing tells Advertising to make “creative” ads (but then only approves “safe” boring ads). Then Marketing runs those uninteresting ads based on the number of times a spreadsheet says will get the most sales. They are disassociated from the customer experience, and will likely not be moved by public outcry. They only care when it doesn’t work, and it does or they wouldn’t do it. Sorry.
While I mostly agree, for many kinds of ads there isn’t a great way to correlate particular ads with efficacy, so there absolutely are as campaigns that the c suite is convinced are working that are just practically not at all.
I’d imagine there are ways to control for that, to some extent. Ie you run an ad in market A but not in market B to see if it works. Wouldn’t with for all contexts though.
Bill Hicks had a good template for this.
Create special waiting queue on your home telephone system with the most horrible waiting music loop. Maybe some Texas country music yodel. Marketer calls, feign interest, “oh, there is someone at the door!”, put them in the waiting queue, and leave them there until they give up. Repeat until lesson learned by marketer.
Good question, I got an ad on my fucking banana the other day…
It’s one banana! How much could it possibly cost? $10?
It’s because people have generally accepted that marketing is a thing, and will be a thing - and that as long as it isn’t directly harmful, it can actually be beneficial to the consumer.
Which, to be fair, makes some sense. On one hand you have people who want a service, on the other you have the service that wants to make money. But running that service costs more than people are willing to pay so you bring in a third party who gets to advertise to the people while giving money to the service for this, subsidising costs and making a cheap service possible. It’s a win-win-win situation, isn’t it?
Well it would be if it wasn’t for this damn end stage capitalist constant hypergrowth requirement. Everything has to make a constantly growing profit. If the profit GROWTH isn’t higher than last year, your business is crap. So now everyone is milking every last drop of money from every possible angle, leading to more ads, shittier services, and people moving on. Thanks to the greed of the few, the otherwise good thing, or acceptable status quo, is now crap.
Marketing isn’t at fault for this, it’s just a symptom.
Back before I blocked every type of ad, I would click through ads every time they pissed me off. I would click, let the page load, and click two more links within their page before closing it. Ad views cost them a small fraction of a cent. That click through cost them an order of magnitude more money. That is how AdSense works. All you have to do is get everyone to do the same and the entire system fails within a few weeks. No one cares if you whine to some low level employees. If you want to protest, molest their bank account like they do your time. They are actually extremely vulnerable if you simply understand how the system works.
It’s actually a bit more complicated.
AdSense indeed used to work through ratios of views and clicks, but Google (and all other ad networks) have been tinkering with it to benefit them even more.
Today, it’s about conversion, and conversion as a KPI is not well defined. Clicking into an as might simply not be enough to make it cost more.
Yeah. I’d assume they do it at least as a ratio, not an absolute. They can’t be that stupid . . . can they?
Did you know there is a browser extension that does this for you while also blocking ads from view?
I heard there is a browser extension which does this
Being right isn’t as important as doing right. I have better things to do with my time, unlike marketers.
