No Stupid Questions

1. I’m not that type of person. I don’t have it in me to rip someone apart that I don’t know personally.
2. They aren’t personally responsible. They’re on the bottom just like us.
3. The people who make the money will just continuously recycle employees because they know they can.

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.

Good question, I got an ad on my fucking banana the other day...

collapsed inline media

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.

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.

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 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.

Being right isn't as important as doing right. I have better things to do with my time, unlike marketers.

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.

Time to post the classics Bill Hicks and George Carlin.

I think you’re fluffing the ego of marketers a little too high.

They'd probably enjoy it.

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).

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.