I’ve seen others recently, but the two I saw today are a Capital One commercial and a Progressive commercial.
In the first, the Capital One guy is talking to a couple of people. He is asked what he does for fun, and he does not know what to say. Then, they cut to him getting ready to sleep at the bank.
Another is the Progressive commercial where Flo talks with another woman about vacations. The other woman doesn’t seem to know what a vacation is. Flo begins describing what one is. In the end, she says she doesn’t really know, gives up, and says she’s never been on one either.
I was thinking about them while driving and came to the title thought.
Did you see those LinkedIn commercials from a couple years ago that were about children looking for jobs on the site, talking about “getting a headstart” or some shit?
The first one at least seems to think people want the people who do work for them to not have a life. Indicates they think their customers have no empathy or class solidarity; which is probably mostly true. We use a lot of products that involve slave labor or something close to it.
most upper middle class professionals I have met in my life do not have lives other than work. they take their 2-3 weeks off on expensive international vacations, but have no hobbies and their social life is just drinks with co-workers. Work is their religion, their family, and their entire identity. Your job is who you are and there can be no separation from it.
even if they do have a hobby it’s only viewed as valuable in terms of productivity. like working out for more energy/health so you can be a more productive worker. or reading non-fiction to improve your work productivity/knowledge, etc.
they ‘have it all’ but yet they are deeply unfulfilled and unsatisfied with their lives and think more work and promotions is what is going to fill the hole.
i just went out with a woman this weekend who is a head pharma research scientist. asked her what she does in free time/hobbies and her response was “i don’t have time for enjoying life.” and she was really proud of this and started condescending to me because I actually enjoy life.
Who TF watches commercials?
Haven’t seen one in decadesWe all have those agonizing moments where an adblocker fails us or we suffer through a friend’s device!
Forget commmercials. Most people I know/met lately seem to think anyone who isn’t working 60-80 hour weeks is a ‘loser’.
working 30-40 hours now is considered ‘lazy’.
Not by me! I work my 40 and the rest goes my family. I’m lucky I can get by with 40.
Met a vet doc that disparaged a vet that leaves at 5: “8-5 and then she’s gone. Nobody wants to work any more”
I have thought this very thing with the progressive one.
I had the exact same thought. I get the intent, it’s a “hello fellow kids, we understand you!” but the fact that there are so many people in that situation to make it relatable is already depressing enough without making it sound like it’s the normal everyone should just accept.
That isn’t even the message, the message is “our workers don’t have lives because they are so dedicated”.
Its not something to accept, but aspire to.
I was relieved during the early stages of the pandemic when I stopped seeing the sick? Take drugs and go to work! advertisements around, but we’re back there now
What!?! Where was that a thing? Who would pay for that? Who would even want to be associated with that message?
Probably the company making the drugs lol
“Got the flu? Pissing out your ass? Take some fucking DayQuil™ you lazy whore, get back to work.”
The cold medicine commercials are big on going to work while ill. If you can’t sleep because you’re sick as fuck, please don’t come to work and pass it to the rest of us!
I just saw a new one from the NyQuil company last night that they’re now making pain quill? So now they’ll sell you what I believe is just liquid ibuprofen and liquid cold meds so you can go to work even with that awful headache from being sick
🎵 SOLDIER ON WITH CODRAL SOLDIER ON SOLDIER ON! 🎶
But if the virus doesn’t spread the medicine company can’t continue to sell sell sell!
God in three persons, that’s bleak.
Then please give sick pay to EVERY job. My options while I’m sick? Go to work, or be homeless.
Over here in Germany there’s no sick pay when you’re self employed, but there is (by law) when you are an employee.
I had been self employed from my 20s to 50s and am an employee for 6 years now.
I was in hospital last week to get my back fixed and am on sick leave for 4-6 weeks now. It’s still fucking amazing to me, that I can heal up now and will still get my payment into my account end of the month.
Having things like that written into law is amazing.
Must be nice…
coughs up a bloody lung diseased with covid
'Scuse me while I go work my job assisting the elderly and disabled.
Ah fuck I hate that, when people go to work sick and infect everyone else. (Yes I understand you need to, and it’s not your fault. So I hate your boss.)
The history is interesting, we got health insurance and paid leave in the 1880s from Bismarck. He was trying to appease workers so they won’t flock to the socialist or social democrat parties which were booming at that time. At the same time Bismarck outlawed left wing parties. (It was a stick and carrot approach).
In 1969 we had a bipartisan left - right government (“great coalition”) and they put up to 6 weeks of paid sick leave into. law.
I’ll be sure to do that the next time i’m making these decisions.
There was one cellphone company advertising WFH, as work from highway. I vomited in my mouth a little to think that companies would absolutely try and make my commute more “productive” rather than let me work from home.
There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.
It’s astonishing, really.
They got so close…
Me: Oh, I don’t have a personal driver. I need to focus on the road. I don’t even put the radio on. Do you have ANY idea how many idiots are out there on the road looking at their phones, driving into oncoming traffic? You know they did a study and found that drivers who text and drive are actually 3x more dangerous than drunk drivers? It makes sense though. A drunk driver sees the road, but reacts late. A distracted driver isn’t even looking. So I gotta watch the road at all times! I even carry a shotgun in the drivers seat just to shoot out their tires. Yeah! That wakes them the fuck up. Once you disable a tire, it’s stupidly easy to perform a pitt manuever. Then when they spin out, you pull the driver out of their car at gunpoint, hogtie them with zipties. Load them into the back of your van, and then tickle their feet until they agree to never drive distracted again. Really hammer home the point that is why this is happening to them. Some people use a horn, I use a feather. It’s so absurd that they never do it again.
Wait, I got off track. What were we talking about? Oh, right. You want me to start being a distracted driver on my way to work! You wait right here, I’ll be right back with a shotgun, a few dozen zip ties, and a feather. Be right back!
Cue the helicopter mom turning right in her SUV, not noticing the crosswalk while furiously texting.
At least her own kids are safe in that tank.
A Brad Pitt maneuver?
Your life will be much better if you avoid commercials, it isn’t difficult, they creep me out whenever I am unfortunate enough to see/hear one, they are so contrived and so clearly aimed at people who have forgotten how to think.
I usually let them go for me out of laziness, but I mute them for my family to spare them the exposure. I also regularly discuss the problems with the way things are advertised with my kids so that they won’t get sucked in by them. Crazy world. Hard to avoid adverts in the U.S.
I cut the cable TV cord in 1999. For whatever movies/TV we’ve wanted to watch, we’ve just gone to our public library to get DVDs and later on, streamed stuff.
uBO in all the browsers as well.
If you make a concerted effort, you can de-TV the household and it takes little time to find ways pick up on watching the things you like - w/o commercial interruption… I could not imagine watching an evening of broadcast TV.
Given that the average show is now 40 minutes long - thats an hour of commercials between the 3 primetime hours of 8 and 11 pm.
I’m not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.
Fuck that shit.
wait they’re 40 now? i could have sworn we has 22s and 52s. fuck.
Yup! Pull down a torrent of a current season broadcast TV show and check out how long it isn’t.
52 minutes was the length of shows in the 60s and 70’s. This is why it’s almost impossible to see uncut episodes of the original Star Trek on a cable channel, let alone a broadcast one…
It was already all but impossible to find when I cut the cord in '99.
Looking at the commercial TV cable channels - I have the first 8 seasons of The Walking Dead… they run from 43 to 51 minutes in length (though the longer ones appeared in the 8th season (?) - was that when the channels started overlaying ads during the credit rolls? I know that’s a thing.)
huh i always thought they just sped the broadcast up 10% or so. almost imperceptible unless you’ve got good pitch.
You implicitely mentioned the internet, but I want to make it explicit:
I haven’t had a need for linear TV for over 20 years. News and entertainment over the 'net, much better to have a choice both in time and content.
I’m not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.
WHY WON’T YOU LOOK AT ME??? I LEFT YOU A BANANA IN THE MICROWAVE!!!
YOU! YOU are the one that left the frigging banana in the microwave w/o telling me?
The fucking thing rotted and became a fruit fly farm… When I went to heat my leftovers, last Friday… I released the swarm o’doom!
BASTARD! I curse theeeEeeEe for eternity!
that was for op? sorry, i thought it was a gun.
Look into setting up Pi-hole. Blocks ads and trackers. Been using it for years.
Also uBlock Origin as was mentioned.
Haven’t seen any ads in a very long time, and that’s only when watching over-the-air local TV and my finger stays near the mute button.
Advertising has become an omnipresent psychological assault.
Hard to avoid adverts in the U.S.
Unless you watch live sports, it’s really not.
I’ve watched NFL games for years. 2.5 minutes is engrained into my brain. Mute just before the fade out, and I just feel that the time has come where I can look at the screen again.
Your life will be much better if you avoid commercials
Yes, but far too many people don’t know better, and they are the majority. They love targeted ads and especially that’s why so many of them are radicalised by targeted political propaganda. That’s why it’s a Sysiphean task to tell people about this, tell them to dismantle capitalism because we’re heading to its logical conclusion-- fascism. I didn’t think that Brave New World’s soma (the digital devices in our case) will directly lead to 1984’s Oceania. And what a great combo!
Home Depot ad earlier literally said “Earn your Sunday”
I mean, that’s one of the downsides to home ownership. If it’s not yard work, there’s always some sort of maintenance that needs doing.
You can either put it off until it becomes an emergency, pay someone out the ass to do it, or you can find some way to force yourself to do it.
I say this as I’m taking a break from climbing in my attic to replace the AC condensate pump line that I’ve been putting off for 3 months, so I don’t have to keep dumping 5 gallon buckets of water out twice a day. The quote to have a pro do it was $750
I love the example you used–i have battled with the condensate drain system in my cramped crawlspace on numerous occasions… I had the misfortune of discovering it stopped working on at least 3 separate occasions, leading to standing water in the crawlspace until i figured out a way to get rid of the water and fix the problem. I’ve luckily come up with a solution each time (first 2 times was a clogged line, most recently it was a bad GFI outlet–curveball!) but i can’t imagine how much I’d be paying other companies to get rid of the water and fix the problem each time. No doubt it’s better than renting in certain respects but just like someone else here said–you can have a $20k problem happen, and you are the person responsible for putting up the $ or figuring it out yourself (which isn’t always possible, or a good idea to attempt)…
I feel that. Ex-wife and I called it the “Home Depot tax”.
Crappy power washer took a dump washing the living room area rug. Well fuck. Haven’t figured it out yet, can’t afford a new one.
Wife: “I’ll scrub it by hand.”
That’s not the problem! We have to have a power washer to keep the house clean. I am no clean freak, not by a long shot.
Dated a girl with kidney issues. She couldn’t get out and work at all. The outside of her house was disintegrating for lack of cleaning.
Where do you live where you need to power wash your house on the regular? Also, that can’t be good for the paint.
I’ve got vinyl siding. A couple areas of my house never get direct sun. It doesn’t take long for mildew to grow. It’s easy to clean just a hassle. I do it a couple times a year.
Anywhere with a lot of pollen and/or high humidity. Building exteriors can become covered quickly.
I live in an area with lots of pollen and high humidity and I just rinse the house off every so often. A pressure washer absolutely isn’t a requirement.
Wow so it’s like renting but you get to fix things before they become a big issue, and you get something to show for it at the end?
No, it’s nothing like renting because you’re financially responsible for literally everything. Need a new roof? Better be prepared to shell out $20k minimum. Need a new HVAC system? Yeah, it’s not much cheaper.
You don’t necessarily build as much equity in a home as people seem to think. With the costs of maintenance, insurance, property taxes, etc. it’s entirely possible to lose money with a house.
Sure, if you’re only looking at the purchase price vs selling price it looks nice, but there’s tons of costs that only serve to keep the selling price from dropping.
And it’s an act of constant, willful effort by yourself and your community.
One neighbor is a rental, they are a large immigrant family and are barely getting along. Property owner lives out of country. Another neighbor thought it would be a fun idea to feed neighborhood stray cats. They wound up creating a very healthy breeding family of raccoons out the run-down garage of the rental. For years their offspring have wreaked havoc in our neighborhood. Every fall I’ve had to call a pest control company to trap the tiny raccoons that are small enough to climb downspouts (the big ones aren’t) and destroy the siding and soffits of my neighbors houses. The cat food guy moved away, I figured out how to occlude the raccoons from my downspouts with ample and unsightly flashing, and along with other neighbors, have built or repaired fencing in in our backyards (mostly because of pets and trespassing neighborhood kids, honestly).
It seems like the raccoon misadventure has finally concluded. I’m now stuck with damaged soffits that squirrels have moved into (on account of a looming walnut tree that lives in a neighbors yard and is so large it overhangs my roof), and a repair estimate that was $5k a year ago, when I had the garage roof redone but wasn’t sure I’d gotten the raccoon problem licked, so I didn’t want to proceed with those repairs. Who knows what it’ll be now. … yay.If a rental turns a profit, the renter ends up paying more for the property than the landlord does.
The propaganda goes deep. Listen to country song lyrics, and what they are actually saying, convincing working class people to keep working, and buy alcohol, and not question reality.
As recently as the 90s you had mainstream country acts releasing songs like “Pass it on Down” and “We Shall Be Free”
And they got a ton of play on the radio. The former hit number 3 on the billboard country charts. The latter hit number 12 on the country charts.
Then again, the lackluster performance of “We Shall Be Free,” particularly considering the megastardom of Garth Brooks at the time, was due to some stations boycotting it for the line “when we’re free to love anyone we choose.”
But even then, there wasn’t a massive company that owned most of the radio dial back then, so boycotts had limited influence.
as an amateur musician, #12 does not feel lackluster. #100 feels like a life goal.
It’s low for Garth Brooks in the 90’s, but I get what you’re saying.
the height of my musical career was either getting paid in tacos instead of money or getting paid in spaghetti instead of money.
i’m not complaining, i fucking love tacos. and spaghetti (though i’m more partial to cavatappi) i’m just trying to give a sense of what skill level amateur musician i am.
Somehow I’m not surprised that the music genre attributable to poor rural white folk is heavy on boot licking, especially considering how many voted for Trump.
Country music is just as commercial as any other music these days. Nashville is a machine that pumps out corporate friendly garbage.
It’s striking how much better country was when they had class consciousness
Edit: no pun intended
Tyler Childers gets it. You just gotta stay away from the shit that airs on the radio.
Well you had songs like Sixteen Tons, what else am I missing?
Oh, so many! Check out Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Sixteen tons was written by Merle Travis, who’s got a bunch of other great music as well.
were those country (was that even a genre back then idk) or “folk”? I mean i think of the Guthries as folk musicians now, but i missed their heyday.
Tbh, I think they started early enough that it all still fell under the same umbrella, but folk, bluegrass and country gradually diverged between the 40-60s
i should ask my brother he plays “americana not country” whatever that means.
I don’t think it’s propaganda. The music and the ads too are just trying to do a “fellow kids” move, and that’s what they’re seeing. Because that’s what we’ve become.
It’s like seeing a mirror and getting spooked by how disheveled the person in it looks.
It’s like seeing a mirror and getting spooked by how disheveled the person in it looks.
Don’t judge me! I turned the camera app on, and didn’t realize it was going to start with the front facing camera! I got spooked!
And drive their trucks on the highway
I notice more and more ads just try to be my friend.
They don’t advertise anything about their product, I have nfi what they do. They’re just trying to align with me in the weirdest generic way.
“This is Sam. Sam works hard every day. Sam likes their family. Sam laughs with their friends. Sam enjoys a movie on the couch with their partner. Sam uses Product1234.”
I first noticed this tactic specifically aiming at women. They just show footage of girls doing girl things and the product is there. What does the product do? Why is it worth my money? What makes it better than other ones? Who the fuck knows?
But now that seems to be the same targeting for men just as much, if not more.
Like, this shit is happening and apparently working when it should be making people feel massively patronised and insulted.
it makes you laugh at salad.
I think because ads just want to be that product you remember when you see it. You dont have to know why you remember it, but if you remember seeing it, you may pick it in front of competing products because you have seen it before.
When I go the shop, I do buy the same brands i ate when I grew up over 30 years ago. So I guess it works…
Ask me why I buy those brands? Because I like them. Could be competing brands i like also but that means I have to take a chance to try them out. The incentive to do that is often not so big if you already have a product you like right in front of you.
I guess thats why they bombard us with dumb ads. Just seeing it means we may pick it later. And if we like it, we will probably keep buying it for decades.
Old news.
🎵 You know we have more prescription drugs now
Every commercial that comes on TV is a prescription drug ad
I can’t watch TV for four minutes without thinking I have five serious diseases
Like: “Do you ever wake up tired in the mornings?”
Oh my god, I have this! Write this down. Whatever it is, I have it
Half the time I don’t even know what the commercial is:
There’s people running in fields or flying kites or swimming in the ocean
Like: "That is the greatest disease ever. How do you get that?
That disease comes with a hot chick and a puppy." 🎶
We don’t really get drug and insurance stuff in my country like the US. Product1234, if it can actually be determined, is often some sort of web service that helps by doing something “all in the one place” or some shit.
But as I said, often literally nfi. Like maybe their plan is to have their isolating commercial cause me to go to the effort of Googling them.
I do find US ads funny, though. Its like they’re made by non-humans trying to do humans. Fake children laughter, soft voices, lots of smiles and well-ironed light clothes. Often ends with a slightly slow-mo shot of someone turning to camera and smiling, like that person has anything to do with anything and I know them, a voiceover trying to me like, “Because we’re in this together” or some weird shit.
Like, “Wow. I didn’t know Super United Allied Mega Insurance cared.” sniffle
i miss interesting commercials. modern commercials, not so much.
Ads don’t need to make you explicitly go out to buy the product to be effective. All they need to do is make you feel more familiar with the brand next time they and a competitor are next to each other in the store, and you need to decide which one to pick.
TL;DR: For stuff you’ll need to buy anyway, brand awareness is all the ad needs to do.
A lot of people claiming advertising doesn’t work on them don’t grasp this. I realized how hard it is to get around this when I first went to buy car insurance.
But now that seems to be the same targeting for men just as much, if not more.
sigh
Advertising to men is super easy, barely an inconvenience! Just show a big tittied blond bimbo saying “Hehehehe, guys who drink this disgusting product will get their dick sucked by girls like me!!!”
Sales SKYROCKET!!! Just throw some fine print that guys won’t actually get their dick sucked. Their eyes won’t be at the bottom of the screen. They’ll be in the middle. Watching big boobs in a bikini.
if there’s too much boobage they might miss the product. it’s a fine line to toe
Wait, why are you having to watch commercials?
honestly I sorta like to just to be aware of the dystopian things like this. when I see big upticks in military recruitment ads im always wondering.
I think that the repeated use in marketing and advertising of people telling you to make others experience envy for something they are selling is really depressing. Envy is one of the worst human emotions. And to do things to create it is not for the good.
