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.
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
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!
🎵 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!
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.
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?
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.
Somehow I’m not surprised that the music genre attributable to poor rural white folk I’d 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.
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
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.
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, 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!!!
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 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.
If a rental turns a profit, the renter ends up paying more for the property than the landlord does.
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.
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." 🎶
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.
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.
Wait, why are you having to watch commercials?
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.
Commercials exist solely to convince you to spend money. Turning to commercials for life advice is gonna give you a bad life
This isn’t really what “normalizing” means… no one is “turning to commercials for life advice”. OP is talking about commercials projecting an unhealthy impression of what normal looks like.
Commercials have always done that, though. They exist to lie to you
Their agenda is to make you spend money on their products. Might not be the best product for you, might not even be a decent product to begin with. Who cares, as long as quarterly profits grow and stock holders are satisfied.
Companies will say anything to make that happen. Well, it has to be legal to say that, but borderline legal and grey area claims work too.
Work-life balance is super subjective (what works well for one person may be debilitating for another) - and using it to make weird jokes like this is probably alienating for many in their audience. Poor choice all around.
It is individual but its also cultural. Many in Europe and Canada look at work life balance in the US and see it as toxic, for example.
I was shocked to find out many women don’t get more than 3 months maternity leave (FMLA) in the US and it may be unpaid. That’s a dystopian work life balance compared to other high income countries.
In Canada, women get 9 months paid leave and most end up going back to their old job. In the US I find many women come back in 3 months because they have no choice (accepting the psychological burden that comes with this) or they switch to part time work which can put their health care coverage at risk (extremely problematic since they just had a baby).
I find the American system to be fundamentally misogynistic.
I personally find the thinking on this is too rigid. I get putting boundaries in place so people are not abused. But it isn’t a moral failure of a person if they don’t fit into this box. I work a ton, but it is from home, with family, and supported by a stay at home husband. It isn’t right for everyone, and people should be protected from this if it isn’t right for them - but there isn’t anything wrong with it. Likewise, my maternity leave was 8 weeks, because I was ready to work and my work situation allowed for it. The American system is absolutely misogynistic, but the fundamental problem underneath both issues that we have managed to get ourselves into an economic situation that requires a two income household or to work a crazy amount.
