this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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I think about this all the time. Kids today have no experience of the media without ads. Like we had commercials, but imagine Mr. Rogers stopping his show every 5 mins to sell you athletic greens and test boosters.
This image has a totally different context today then when it was first created
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Anyways, these kids will grow up and make even worse and more annoying ads. They'll be the next Gen of marketing executives in a decade or two. There's nothing we can do about it.
I prefer the obvious product placement in old movies, tv shows. How funny it is to see product placement all over the place on the kitchen shelves of Seinfeld, the sugar cookie of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
The list could go on.
Larry David said Seinfeld was just before studios did product placement deals and that they missed out on a lot of extra money from it. He said a lot of things they referenced were just plot devices. I'd say the one clear exception was George and his Rolled Gold pretzels that he was a commercial spokesman for at the time.
well i don’t know about no rolled gold, but i can tell you that these pretzels are makin me thirsty!
I don't know about Seinfeld, but I know in Friends, they used look-alike, but not real products.
It's not Sprite, it's Sprita. Same logo (for the time), but not the same.
It wasn't skittles, it was skitles.
You see where I'm going with this. They wanted the feel of a real apartment, without the legal trouble from using real products.
Honestly product placements in shows often made them feel more real. Yeah they’re drinking Coke…that’s what me and my friends do too. Products are already placed all over my house.
I'm really torn here. Like people complain when superman flies through an ihop or there are billboards. But they make it more grounded. My problem is that they frame it like a commercial. Or world war z where brad pit is drinking every pepsi(?) or Heineken(?) like it was a commercial. In one of these godaweful tranformers movies, they just show products in a way that is so disgusting not even an actual commercial would do it.
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The worst was Tony Stark pulling up like the movie was a car commercial in Endgame. That was pathetic.
Fucking weird, isn't it? Another rant would be about where is all the advertising money coming from?! Imagining being a buyer, I'd have to wonder how well my spend would be profiting.
A couple of decades ago I played around with being a salesman. Top advice was to try this ad, try that ad, compare results. Surely these people are finding revenue from spending on these ads? It just seems impossible to me that there's profit for all of these cockroaches.
There are so many garbage ads out there now that either advertising is very cheap or businesses are pissing away lots of money.
I think a lot of it is a MAD scenario.
Actually for my kids at least it's different. They're so used to ad blocked YouTube and ad-free Netflix. That when the adblocker fails for whatever reason they get first delighted to see something new and very soon after annoyed at having to see that shit all the time and cry for someone to help them.
We watch regular TV so little. The other day we didn't have internet for several hours, maybe a few days. That's when we discovered that the TV is actually too far away to reach the cable of the satellite dish.
Or imagine the Flintstones advertising cigarettes to kids in the middle of the show.
Or comedy shows named after the sponsoring toothpaste company with sponsor breaks throughout.
Sure it’s gotten really bad lately, but mass media has always been rife with obnoxious advertising, both in-your-face and subliminal. The early days of Netflix streaming were really the anomaly as far as access to non-pirated ad-free media. The broadcast TV generation had their coping mechanisms with the mute button and eventually DVRs, but “media without ads” has basically never been a thing.