Re:What does privacy mean under surveillance capitalism?
by godelski on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @10:39PM
(#25514128)
I linked this in another reply, but the most common ads now are native ads[0]. The point of these is to not appear as ads. With this in mind I believe that you can say that shows like Top Gear are partially ads (obviously not all ad). But like I said before, most car ads aren't actually trying to get you to buy their car. They are trying to get you to think a certain way about a brand (e.g. "A Lexis!!!! WOW! HIGH CLASS!). This should be obvious (post hoc) when you realize that luxury car brands advertise a lot to the general public (Superbowl, prime time TV, etc) and not just to the rich (you can actually find a lot of literature on this). People don't buy cars frequently and honestly when they do, they tend to do more research than most other purchases because it is one of the biggest expenses they'll have. You can also question Coke advertising. They could never spend a single dollar on advertising and you'd still know about them. Cars and Coke are just the obvious examples of advertising not just being about awareness, but other things as well (other things depends on the market).
So what I'm trying to say is that you think you see 5 minutes of advertising but I'm fairly confident you see substantially more (and if not, you're not just an outlier, but an extreme outlier). I'll give another example: the link from this post not only contains several ads on its page, but is an ad itself([0]). And I want to re-emphasize that many memes you see are also ads (again falling under the native category).
Ads have changed a lot in the last decade and if you think ads are just popups, the things on the side of your screen, or what plays between your favorite show, then you're not keeping up[1]. And more importantly, you have to think beyond products (I think this is our major disconnect).
I think the difference is that I live in a different country. I don't consume much local media and even if I did there are few enough local products that you would've heard of all of them by word of mouth. Take the soda as an example. I've certainly seen Coke and Pepsi ads, but I've not seen (or at least can't remember) ads for about half the sodas in my local supermarket. Even when Coke released Coke Zero the first time I found out about it was seeing it on a shelf in a store.
But let's say that all of what you're saying is true. The effect from it seems quite small. I'd estimate that I spend at least 5 minutes a day seeing ads.