I feel the same about SEO stuff. Stuff that’s designed to attract peoples attention doesn’t just not work on me, it often repels me. Some of it actively irritates me. Some of it I can’t even stand to look at.
Modern marketing is paying influencers or posters to spread the product propaganda „organically“. Most people don’t even recognize it and take it as opinions, including ND people.
Oh for sure. I’m sure there are times I am fooled by it, but I also see through it a lot and it’s so gross and manipulative when you can spot it.
Counterpoint: people who believe themselves to be immune to propaganda are actually the most susceptible of all.
ND people (specifically autism spectrum) disproportionately think they are more resistant to propaganda than NT people.
Ergo, ND people are on the whole more susceptible to propaganda than NT people. Especially propaganda that makes them feel superior
Disclosure: I am AuDHD
Everybody thinks they are immune to ads and nobody is
I’m immune to ads because I’m broke.
Edit: if a piece of advertising for, say, a video game caused me to pirate it, would that be considered as the advertisement working? Like is me downloading the fitgirl repack of Oblivion a win or a loss for Bethesda’s marketing department?
You just did a word-of-mouth for Oblivion
I did word-of-mouth for Oblivion in the same breath as a location for where to obtain it without giving money to capital. That’s hardly guerilla marketing.
I didn’t even say it was good. I’d recommend not paying money for it, at the very least.
Sounds like you fundamentally don’t understand how advertising works
Quite literally, not figuratively, literally the opposite. I only recognise the fundamentals of advertisement as real advertisement.
Fundamentally. Truly fundamentally. Think of advertising is hawking what you have and want to barter. Before the written word, before currency, before metalworking, before fire. I have pretty rocks, give berries for rocks. This I recognise as advertising. Spoken word can be put to heiroglyphs, it can be carved into rock, it can be written on papyrus. That’s a natural evolution. A billboard, a radio spot, a TV segment, whatever.
What is not natural is the corporate metrics invented by suits in a boardroom to justify their salary. I do not recognise that simply mentioning [product] is advertisement for the product. If it’s not a liminal endorsement, then it was invented by rich people to swindle other rich people. They’ve taken us for fools.
“Oh it keeps [product] in the minds of the consu-” “We will market laterally through synergising with grassroots discus-” “So we can optimise for emerging trends to keep-” “We can implement an ARG to supplement our SEO optim-” listen to these sentences. Ramblings of the deranged. That’s not advertisement, that’s white collar astrology. If their sales increase (by pure co-incidence), then they get to have a cocaine party and pat themselves on the back. If it does jack shit, it’s everyone else’s fault but theirs. I’m sure that capeshit vampire movie was the most discussed film of that year, but if the corporate strategy actually worked, it would have been the most profitable film of all time, and yet it ate shit. Twice.
This corporate bullshit is advertising in the same way a chiropractor is a healthcare worker.
You think poor people are immune to propaganda hahahahahaha
As much as I would like to classify the Micky D’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle as propaganda, I don’t think it fits
really? I think its a prime example. Compare mcdonalds to burger king, of which i cant think of an applicable jingle. music is a type of media and any form of media can be a vehicle for ‘propaganda’, a very broad term itself
Maybe it’s because I don’t own a TV or radio, but I’ve heard more parodies of it than heard sincerely. It’s like hearing a Weird Al parody 1000 times before listening to the original.
Edit: Also, no jingle is going to make me cross a picket line or break my boycott of Americans. It’s as effective as the Kars4Kids commercials to me. I don’t own a car.
So you don’t understand propaganda, that does help explain your opinion.
It’s not propagating anything to me, even if I wasn’t boycotting McDonalds due to Israel, I can’t afford McDonalds.
And yet you, yourself, are propagating it to others
It’s very rare to ever overtly be convinced by one to buy something on the spot, but that’s not the primary function of ads. Simply getting the brand name into the zeitgeist as one of the available options is sufficient. Just reminding you of the existence of a brand so the next time in 4 months when you’re buying a product you will consider it in your list of available best options - it has done its work. The effects of ads on each individual is minor, the effects of ads on the population is major.
Just reminding you of the existence of a brand so the next time in 4 months when you’re buying a product you will consider it in your list of available best options - it has done its work.
The effects of ads on each individual is minor, the effects of ads on the population is major.
Ads don’t need to convince you or even remind you of their existence. They just need to convince your family and your friends. So when your family and friends remind you of a brand existing 4 months later, it feels like part of a completely organic conversation and not something a corpo planted in their heads 4 months earlier.
Super Bowl ads are the most obvious example. The number of people who actually see the ad airing is not that high all things considered. But the countless “hey, did you see that ad during the Super Bowl” water cooler conversations in the following week means the entirety of the US (and much of the Western world) is reminded that the brand still exists.
That used to be more true of superbowl ads, now it’s a bunch of unremarkable AI slop. The heyday of superbowl ads is decades past. Now it’s just normal quirky insurance and epic car commercials and more of the same gambling ads
I’ve immunized myself to ads as best I can by refusing to engage with any technology or service which I can’t get an adblock into.
I use a speech to text LLM to remove them from podcasts, I don’t watch TV, I don’t have traditional social media, I wear headphones in shops with radio ads, haven’t watched youtube or listened to music without an adblock. If adblocks ever stopped working I would just stop using a service outright.
I still understand they influence me because companies wouldn’t use them otherwise. They are mental pollution and I’ve had to do a lot of work to get rid of a fraction of them.
Wow, that’s hardcore. I suppose even the labels on things are ads but at least at that point, you’re seeing all the options
i’ve done this too and now advertisements annoy the ever living fuck out of me – i struggle to understand why others tolerate it.
Their entire purpose is to make you feel incomplete or missing something. Horrible industry
Same! Except I don’t listen to podcasts with ads. I hate ads so much because I know they work. It’s even quantifiable: the damage in form of lost value to society in form of people spending more then they need on junk is at least twice the cost of producing and spreading all those ads: once because the firms wouldn’t pay for them if they didn’t get at least their investment back. They get it back from people working more then they’d need to make and buy useless (no added use value) or overpriced commodities. And a second time, because making the ads takes work too. So you have people working on pointless ads and people working to make pointless junk. All those work hours could have been spent on something with actual use value. And that’s not even counting the psychological and societal damage of making people feel inadequate.
1.6 trillion dollars annually because of ads alone. Without marketing and public relations.
I don’t think I’m totally immune but most of them annoy the hell out of me.
any press is good press
real lol
-
I hate the conflation of autism and ND. Autism is a type of ND. It’s not the end-all be-all.
-
Marketing is first and foremost you being aware of brandTM existence. Every commodity has thousands of brands competing for your attention. Just getting you to be aware of their existence is like 3/4 of the battle. It’s a fight to not be a no-name brand but a brandTM that you are vaguely aware of it existing.
-
Corpos absolutely target autistic people because an autistic person with disposable income who has adopted brandTM as their special interest is a near bottomless goldmine. They will chase that whale.
Yes, to point 2, those who think they’re wholly immune should look up the mere exposure effect.
-
If autistic people were immune to propaganda there would be no autistic anticommunists.
Nobody is immune to propaganda.
Nobody.
read the hat and weep
Federal Boob Inspector
Marketing is about incepting or forcing a product into your brain whether you like it or not, so that if you are in a purchasing decision you are oriented towards choosing the one that got there first or is there in front of you first, to whichever degree you are aware of it or not. Whether by allure, or repetition, or product description and explanation, or placement and convenience (including mental availability, familiarity, heuristics, novelty vs comfort seeking, etc.), there will be a method or confluence of methods that works on you. It’s not just ads. It will wear you down and you will be influenced in some way or form. You are not immune to propaganda, you are not immune to marketing.
(The example I like to cite is those irritating 5s KFC YouTube ads. They are designed to be irritating to deliberately displace the competition (Hungry Jacks, Red Rooster) both within the advertising space and within your active recall. Then, when you see a KFC ad in other locations you think of that irritating ad and it reinforces those neural pathways, further cementing it in your brain and locking out competitors whether you buy from KFC or not)
Many times it’s just about just creating a need that isn’t there in the first place, and then selling a product to solve that need.
People who think they’re immune to marketing are just immune to bad marketing. There’s also so much more money being spent in B2B marketing than B2C, and the former ultimately decides what’s on shelves before you get any choice in the matter.
People who think they’re immune to marketing are just immune to bad marketing.
Not even that, they’re just not self aware or egotistical like everyone “built different”
I got served the annoying Icona Pop “I don’t care, I love it!” KFC ad one too many times and went to Red Rooster out of sheer spite.
I haven’t been to a KFC or even considered it as an option in decades. I go to the places I like when I feel like it and try new things every so often to see if I’ll like them too. I’m with the owl on this one, that shit doesn’t work on me.
Now advertising as a form of customer awareness is a different matter. “Restaurant X is now nearby” or “product Y exists” works to alert me to try something out that I would have already been interested in if I had known about it beforehand.
Yep, I think recognising that seemingly ‘informative’ marketing is still marketing is key in looking at the ecosystem of a brand trying to announce its existence and attract you to it. Smaller stores may not have the same dominant ad spend, but they still market.
I think there is also a maximalist trap that I kind of fell into in my TLC that is ‘everything a brand does is marketing’. To a certain degree that’s true with hyper optimised products like Coca Cola, they’ll have whole teams dedicated to the bottle design, for example, and marketing budgets to promote the bottle design as a cultural symbol. But to be like ‘Mom and pop store down the road not having the budget to run YouTube ads is actually a marketing choice’ is fatuous.
The net result of the mom and pop store not advertising and therefore not provoking a negative ‘this brand advertised to me so fuck them’ response just coincidentally works in their favour for people who don’t like ads, but if that mom and pop store could afford an advertising budget you bet your bottom dollar they’d run jingled on every platform they could.
Mostly calling myself out here because yeah the god of the gaps-esque argument ‘it’s the ads you don’t notice that work best’ is mystique that marketing fuckheads like to use to present themselves as omnipotent.
Sometimes if you have a monopoly, you don’t need to advertise. I lived in a town that had only 1 dry cleaners. So my dry clean only clothes went to them. They run no ads, have no social media presence, and just relies on the fact that all the locals know the one dry cleaners that has been there since 1970 and all the newcomers that Googled “dry cleaner near me”, it’s them and one 3 hours drive away, and no-one is making a 6 hour round trip for a 2 piece suit for a job interview. Now, they definitely had the money to afford advertising, because the previous owner did run local ads. But the Chinese couple that bought the business stopped running them immediately. I asked them about it and they said “We stopped paying and business is still the same”.
Now, if they retire and their shitty 富二代 kid takes over, I’m sure it’ll be different.
Yep if you’re the only game in town then you can dispense with the ad spend. Some probably do out of inertia
Yeah, this is absolutely not true. Otherwise Pokemon, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh wouldn’t have an adult fan base.
My AuDHD friend back in high school got into Pokemon for the very first time in 2010 because the girl he had a crush on had a Pokemon trinket thing on her backpack at school. I believe it was a Piplup. So of course, he went and researched Pokemon and bought a Nintendo DS with his Christmas money and also developed encyclopædic knowledge on Pokemon.
Does this count as advertisement working on him or not?
That is what, in the business, is sometimes referred to as peer to peer advertising. Basically the concept is that one of the best ways to advertise something is to convince someone they look up to, or consider attractive, to buy an aspect of the product, thus convincing others to get into it and buy it. It is the basis for influencer advertising, which works through the pseudo-peer, but much more subtle.
Marketing people are operating at a bunch of levels, much of which is convincing the people that pay them that even their indirect advertising is purposeful, which to a large degree it is.
Perhaps. One might call random merchandise as a form of advertisement. I’m not sure whether or not I subscribe to that line of thought though.
All I can tell you is that it doesn’t really matter if you subscribe to that line of thought, the marketing people absolutely do.
If a new PC game looks interesting enough for me to pirate, does that mean the marketing people won but the company lost?
Depends on who you are listening to and/or what studies you believe. However, yes, the marketing team has won either way because they got paid to do the thing, the sale itself is more or less irrelevant.
However, most studies indicate that a pirated game is unlikely to be a lost sale, because a person in the first world who pirates a game had a very low intention of ever purchasing the game legitimately. A much larger area of ‘lost profit’ is from regional pricing, where one region is priced cheaper, but then games are resold on the market for lower than the expensive regional price. However, without regional pricing, you do get into the issue where pirating is actually lost sales, because customers in poorer regions who would ordinarily pay for the game are forced into pirating because they are priced out.
So… The marketing team wins and the company kinda loses, maybe?
I’m not up to date on the data but if I’m not mistaken there’s not all that much evidence to suggest a download of a pirated game is a lost sale
I like pokemon because it’s a fun rpg with monsters in it. If anything the advertising makes me cringe.
There are lots of fun RPGs with monsters in them. Why Pokemon specifically?
There really aren’t very many games quite like Pokemon and most of the ones that do exist were made in like the last 10 years specifically to address the unfilled niche of games like Pokemon
There aren’t actually that many monster tamers out there that have an interesting battle system/strong meta or good monster designs. I do enjoys a few of them though. Cassette Beasts and a couple of the SMT games are pretty fun
Oh yeah I forgot about cassette beats, thanks for the peer advertisement
HAW
Advertising is like an attack on my sense, it repulses me when I’m forced to sit through an ad. I use ad blockers in my daily life, but my parents listen to the radio and the ads are insufferable, I have to leave the room when they come on. I don’t know how they can bare it, ads are the most grating and inhuman thing you could listen to constantly.
Advertising is such a massive waste of labour. So many creative and hardworking people end up making fucking ads for the sake of selling product after product instead of doing something helpful to society. Imagine a world where you don’t see ads 24/7, and the energy put towards making ads is used for actual communication with communities, art, education, fucking anything but advertisement.
It’s awful. I hate advertisement so much I hate it I hate it I hate it
Imagine a world where you don’t see ads 24/7
Pyongyang has joined the chat
Erm actually this is a fake picture of a fake city that was built just to trick enlightened westerners
I yearn for this
Ugh I hate how it looks like any western city, overly wide road and all.
There are criticisms to be made of it but I don’t think the wide road is a major one even if I share some of your feeling because the big roads in Pyongyang were built in part to facilitate military vehicles like tanks.
Carbrain:
Cheonma-2 brain:
ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!
Also for defence, I’d guess, that it’s easier to relocate rocket batteries through a thoroughfare
Look at the sidewalks and bike lanes though!
Why would they plant deciduous instead of evergreen for the noise muffling plant wall
Hey, even Pat Tillman fell for the propaganda (with the worst possible outcome), so don’t be too hard on yourselves.
It’s probably the best propaganda in human history. Very had to switch it off in your brain.
Can’t buy more things if you spent all of childhood without the agency to buy things and the first 8 years of adulthood without the ability, so you’re conditioned to only spend money on shelter, food, transportation, and making sure you continue to have these things in the future.
Shelf placement has 10 times the purchasing effect on me that any commercial ever will. Worldview and subconscious is probably a different story tho.
The best deals are often on the very bottom. Sincerely, the short one.
I don’t like it. I can imagine an autistic person who is less susceptible to a car advertisement about how cool you look driving it still being interested when they say it’s the 2nd safest car with the 1st most fuel efficiency.
Then a lot of modern marketing isn’t really introducing you to the idea of McDonald’s, but more about giving you a couple seconds to think about McDonald’s. Therefore next time that market sector is hungry, a larger (perhaps 0.3%) section of the fluid dynamic movement of people going out to eat will choose it over Wendy’s this time. In that sense, an investor meeting where they admit that customers don’t have any discretionary money left is as much advertising as a brand account commenting on a tiktok
SEO is not meant to appeal to humans, it’s not “human interest optimization,” it is “search engine optimization”. It is meant to take advantage of how search engines work and common terminology people use to have higher search engine rankings. Allistic people also find crass SEO writing annoying.
The third textbox in the meme looks like an AI summary, and either way I think it’s basically wank. To the extent there is a difference in marketing working on autistic vs allistic people, it’s just a matter of which tricks are more effective, and you can fry an autistic person’s brain with pseudo-science just as much as an allistic person’s. You can say that the phrasing means my statement and the textbox’s are not strictly mutually exclusive, which is true but misses the point of what it means to be misleading, and the text still is clearly overgeneralizing about things not working on autistic people when it’s just that some things don’t work as well while other things that are also used also work.
Incidentally, this meme is an example of autistic people not being immune to extremely low-effort propaganda.
Yeah that’s why I said immune is a strong word but fair point. My bad, I didn’t know SEO was purely a search engine thing (despite the name lol), I do have the same kneejerk discomfort towards advertising aimed at people though. Which is weird because I’m people.
Since most of the good discussion has been had already, I’ll say that seeing
ads outside on billboards while 
and bds is just a 
moment
ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!
Great emoji usage
