What's life like in advertising these days? When I was a child you could buy a commercial during the Saturday morning cartoons to sell your toy (or buy the whole cartoon) and you could put your car commercial on during the Evening News.
And you'd reach most of your "demographic."
But now? a maze of influencers and fragmented media (I don't think influencers really matter much, they are just the most familiar item in the new landscape for advertisers.)
The ability to hold a big audience in the millions of a predictable demographic is deeply sought after. To me that just seems like trying to wind the clock back to the 80s when things were simple.
Social media plays a huge role here, and that is exactly why I think we should promote the idea that advertising on social media is as rude as advertising at a funeral or bat mitzvah.
Oh and to be clear I don't really count someone selling things they made by talking about them, or saying "I wrote this book" or whatever as "offensive" advertising.
In fact, it is the only way that promotion should function along side people talking about stuff and criticism.
advertising back in the day was heavy on correlative data to determine success.
Advertising today gives has more direct cause and affect traceability for ROAS (return on ad spend) especially in the form of online advertising, direct marketing, and SEO. Happy to dive deep into this stuff with you if you want.
However to be honest, as far as I know, all this "improvement" hasn't really lead to any sort of decrease in marketing spend as a function of gross revenue.
My soap boxy thing is that a lot of people in marketing departments today want to think they're being very quantitative but in reality they're really bad at it and lack a lot of functional skill. As a result a lot of departments no longer deep dive into customer personas and demographic focused messaging.
Everyone just wants to do scattershot marketing to hit kpis but pretend they're not.
@grumpasaurus To be fair, there's also the story of how someone (Uber?) halved their ad spend, bracing themselves to see what effect it had, and... nothing happened, there was no perceptible change
Apparently the more direct metrics were so dominated by fraud that they were meaningless
feel free to ignore if this isn't the conversation you're looking for, but in my opinion all advertising is rude - we have the Internet now so we no longer need help finding products. It serves no socially useful purpose and should be simply banned. "simply" lol
I would be delighted if there were more restrictions on advertising:
* It should always be labeled "This is a paid advertisement." * It should not target children, gamblers or make outlandish claims. * It should not be on social media or built into apps. * It should be subject to an obnoxious public review process.
Everything would just be better. People will pay for entertainment and games.
remember the old days where they had the “Best Commercial” shows. Ads were actually entertaining! They should be entertaining, to make me seek out the product, and associate that enjoyable experience with the thing. Instead these days ads have become *required*, I think that’s the thing that irritates me most.
@futurebird@sauropods.win@sauropods.win @hjwp@fosstodon.org@fosstodon.org The industry doesn't want to pay attention to the study that shows people who block ads don't just buy better stuff, they're happier in general. Most people in the USA report they're running an ad blocker now blog.zgp.org/b-l-o-c-k-in-the-…
@hjwp Also the "advertising" that people are blocking today is different from what "advertising" used to be. Fewer agency people, doing more ads each, means that each ad carries less info on brand quality and reputation, and it makes more sense to block them
Michael Farmer, author of 'Madison Avenue Manslaughter' and consultant summarises the thoughts and recommendations from the 'Agency Business Models' workstre...
We have let out sales staff go. We no longer rely on Advertising for main income. We do get some money from Government ads.
Our main income streams are now training and production. We do some promotion of artists for festivals, but it's programming rather than ads (eg. Interviews)
Selling Ads was nearly impossible. TV ads are dead, they just don't know it yet.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and, in the last two years specifically, the number of minutes spent advertising has at least doubled. I think there is a correlation with the 'end' of the pandemic, big companies sort of realized that there are no "everybody watches" platforms any more and seem to be scrambling.
I even get new ads when I relisten to old episodes of podcasts, so they are up cycling ads everytime!
I still think nothing that needs advertising is worth buying.
WTF?? I buy a car once every twenty or so years, I hope each year that it won't have to be this year, and when I do eventually need to buy a car the models, or even the brands, that have been advertised to me over the decades will no longer exist.
What *is* the point of showing me SEVERAL MINUTES of car ads every time I watch telly? Is the targeting really that bad? And it's not that they know when my car is finally going to break down, because it's been going on for years.
I'm on the anti side of this. In 1999 I wrote an app called Ad Extinguisher. I cannot read while something is moving on the screen, so have gone to a lot of trouble over the years to avoid that. Have pretty well removed ads from my life, and as a result they really bug me when one does show up.
Advertising IMHO is a form of pollution. The first 10% might be useful, making you aware of something you want and don't know about. Past that it is an attack on the mental wellbeing of...
the public. For example, if you are waiting, there are two ways to avoid waiting becoming suffering. You can either find something interesting to think about, or do the mindfulness thing and intentionally keep words out of your head.
Neither option is possible if there is an ad playing. Medical ads are the worst. Health fear is one of the worst mental states, and deliberately inducing that is just evil. When those ads are playing, I get out of the supermarket faster, and buy less.
So to me the breakthrough would be finding a way to reach the public without causing annoyance or pain. If I am trying to find something online and an ad gets in the way, that is unpleasant.
However, I look through Slickdeals and Vine every day. Sometimes buy something too. Those are ads but I want to see them. How can we make advertising more like Slickdeals, and less like pop-ups on phones and shingles vaccine commercials in Ralphs?
Mount Umunhum Summit, Los Gatos, CA 16 June 2024 Two captures with Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR-Digaron-W lens, Phase One IQ4-150 digital back (@ ISO 50), Cambo WRS 1250 camera (shifted left/right 15mm) to produce a 230MP stitched image.
This is a stitched imaged made from two side-by-side captures with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR-Digaron-W lens and a Phase One IQ4-150 digital back (@ ISO 50) on a Cambo WRS 1250 camera, shifted left/right +/- 15mm, producing a 230MP final image.
From 1958 through 1980, this incongruous four story (82 foot) monolith was the centerpiece of the "Almaden Air Force Station", a long-range radar site that was part of NORAD's SAGE early warning system. The blast-hardened concrete building served as the platform for an FPS-24 radar system, a massive 120 foot wide reflector that emitted a 5 megawatt VHF pulse, continuously rotating at 5 RPM.
Notoriously, the signal disrupted TV and radio reception throughout the San Jose area.
It's unclear if the SAGE system would have actually been effective in detecting incoming bombers, which presumably would have employed radar jammers. Fortunately, we never found out.
The huge rotating antenna was removed shortly after the site's decommissioning in 1980, but the building, a prominent local landmark visible from downtown San Jose, has been preserved.
I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they're artifacts of what was perhaps humanity's most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn't seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.
On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.
Like many bad things, we need to be reminded of them to prevent them from happening again. I think there is a need to preserve some of these spaces and tell their story, along with the stories of people who suffered in the so-called Cold War. I try to remember that I am only here because it never became even a “limited” Hot War. I’m not sure folks nowadays understand that.
The dish had been dismantled before I had come to the area. But I can spot this from my neighborhood. I've yet to make it to the Nike missile site they turned into a museum in Marin. I always felt the kids were too young to be interested. As teenagers I believe they are now too interested in other things to be interested. Might be something I should just do for myself one day.
A very useful resource for understanding the meaning of shell commands and how they work. Entering examples in the search bar and getting accurate explanations is great. Oh, I really wish I had known this sooner. explainshell.com/
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Trump’s recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Executive Order shows that this Administration is dedicated to America’s global
The Newton’s clock is actually good for about 15 years. There was a patch to let it reference dates after 2010, and now there’s a new replacement patch for 2025.
As a novelist, George Orwell did not traffic in subtleties, but then neither did the authors of Medieval morality plays. The allegorical Animal Farm performs a similar, if secular, function, giving us unambiguous villainy and clear didactic intent.
Pals! Page from a National Geographic in my collection, 1925. The article is “Collarin' Cape Cod. Experiences on Board a U.S. Navy Destroyer in a Wild Winter Storm” by Lt. H.R. Thurber.
Realistically, that's questions you can only answer by means of statistics, how many injuries, fatalities and so forth over a span of time. Because accidents happen, either way.
This isn't on the FAA: it was an engine fire in an older 737-800 (manufactured before 2001). Either a bird strike or maintenance, nothing to do with air traffic control or the airport.
15 March 1935 | A French Jewish girl, Paulette Wajnryb, was born in Metz.
She arrived at #Auschwitz on 6 November 1942 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy. She was among the 639 people murdered after selection in a gas chamber.
In the eerie depths of space, a legendary relic has resurfaced and is back for a reboot - the G20 "Semiotic" keycap set! Harking back to 2017, this masterpiece, designed by Zslane, draws its inspirations from Ron Cobb’s "Semiotic Standard for All Com…
i want to try to collect up some observations about programming in this mode, and how it differs from usual programming even in languages like Agda, which have much richer interactions than usual
ok, let's continue looking at these issues, but instead asking how we could go from the recursive factorial to a product definition calculationally, without insight
the recursive factorial is
fac n = if n == 1 then 1 else n * fac (n - 1)
https://k…
or by cases, at least. in those situations, you either need to be able to split your equational proof down two paths, or be able to go out to some external not-yet-existing lemma
relatedly, a very common top-down programming move that one finds, especially in literature like SICP, is what the SICP folx call "programming by wishful thinking", whereby you write a function and make use of functions/etc. that don't yet exist
another thing we see is that sometimes you need to define new constructors for something. this also has a kind of By Wishful Thinking mode, where you use the constructor you wish you had, and then go back and add it
all of the Wishful Thinking methods require that the thing being wished is a logical possibility currently
for top level functions, that's fine -- the totality of functions which exist within a program is indeterminate at programming time and is only known at compilation time
but for data types, we usually program in languages that have closed data types, i.e. the syntax for data types doesn't permit an open-endedness to what's in them
this makes sense from a compilation perspective, but not a development perspective
so another thing we kind of would benefit from is the ability to have not-quite-open types
but rather something more like not-yet-fully-defined types. that is, being able to say that this _definition_ isn't yet finished (even tho the type is closed)
same thing goes for functions, actually. we often find ourselves finding partial solutions for a function, so being able to say that a function's definition is partially specified is also useful
but interacting with these partial definitions is usually remote. like, in the quoted thread, adding a new constructor to a type happens during a calculation for a function `f`, where we have to make a decision about how `f` is defined
the wishful thinking about what `f` could be applied to means that there's kind of an automatic obligation to make that constructor exist in the definition for `A`
just like top-down programming wishes obligate us to give definitions for functions
wishful thinking obviously is in conflict with type checking, because normally, referencing something that doesn't exist is a error, and ought to be caught
we wouldn't want to _automatically_ create function stubs, or constructor stubs, or proof stubs, simply bc of those errors
probably a good reference point here would be something similar to how some Lisps in the past have debugging modes where, when an error is encountered, the program shifts into a REPL that lets you fix the error live as the code is running
Although the DoD won't share it, Gen Rogers' Wikipedia page has his Medal of Honor citation. He charged through multiple waves of incoming artillery fire to lead his men to repel an attack, and was seriously wounded TWICE in the process.
"DEI" should not be not a smear, but in this case, DEI my ass.
This racial discrimination also includes 21 MoH recipients from the all Nisei #442nd RCT (Regimental Combat Team, Go for Broke) during WWII. The 442nd had the most MoH recipients for a unit of just 4000 men. Most were #American citizens who had enlisted to "prove" their loyalty to the #US while their friends and family were incarcerated in #concentrationcamps.
If there's a fuss about this (as there should be), the web page will no doubt be restored and they'll no doubt say it was removed by "mistake", even as they go around enthusiastically making the same "mistakes" elsewhere.
@jef @danmcd This could be a URL rewrite setup made as a hack to comply without deleting pages. Modifying the rule that would have looked up the right page to add "dei" to the beginning, causing a 404. This would be easier to reverse later.
@crazyeddie @jef @danmcd Who cares what the exact mechanism was? The fact of the matter is that they tagged non-white medal recipients as "DEI" and disappeared them. That's simply outrageous, un-American bullshit. Period.
@crazyeddie @jef @danmcd The message is pretty clear: Not a white guy? No matter how much you contribute, no matter how much you sacrifice, you're less valuable and will always be suspect.
@crazyeddie @jef @danmcd My parents were both WW II US Army officers who served abroad. It is just as well they’re deceased as they’d be furious at this sort of betrayal.
@jef @danmcd Because it would mean that the people who actually have to upkeep this are taking steps to make it reversible at least. The website could actually be completely intact, this could be done in a reverse proxy.
Being unable to stop it from happening, this would be the next best thing. As soon as whoever needs to get their head out their ass to stop this does, they could put it back.
Sam Sethi said, on bsky: > If the racists [sic] US Govt really want to dishonour their black or female veterans, odd they have not replaced the 404 image
Grabbed image while I could; great JPEG with full details!
Caption: U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Ava Alegria, a combat photographer [...] , and Sgt. Kevin Cherry, a drill instructor with Lima Company, 3rd Recruit Training Battalion [...] Parris Island, S.C., Dec. 19, 2024. (U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Lance Cpl. Ayden Cassano)
One particular challenge in the barrage of terrible news is distinguishing among the worst harms. Getting distracted and chasing diversions such as geographical names and wiped web sites means less time focusing on the critical. It is difficult to know where to focus, and exhausting. Having lived through Nixon's deceits, the operative phrase that comes to mind is "follow the money." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_t…
One of the reliable things about Mastodon is that if you mention something you’re bothered by, someone will scold you for failing to be bothered by something they think is worse.
I think it’s much more productive to let people feel things and express their concerns as they see them.
That may have already happened. All the links seemed to work for me but this message was at the top of the page for all the MoH recipients who are Black (that I checked):
"You have accessed part of a historical collection on defense.gov. Some of the information contained within may be outdated and links may not function. Please contact the DOD Webmaster with any questions."
The group that drafted a key blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term convened a meeting in Washington D.C. this week to consider proposals for bulldozing the European Union (EU).
Army Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers worked for gender and race equality while in the service. But he's perhaps most well-known for his leadership during an intense battle in Vietnam, which earned him
@light A bug - that just happens to insert three random letters that just happen to be the same abbreviation that MAGA uses as shorthand for non-white-dudes, that just happens to manifest itself on pages about non-white-dudes. Sure. Sounds totally like a random bug.
What is the bug in the sociopolitical environment? I.e. how did good faith criticism of DEI (I.e. you can't optimise for two different metrics (such as diversity and merit) at once, you shouldn't discriminate on the basis of skin colour, etc) turn into or provide cover for blatant racism (assuming that's indeed what this is; it seems likely)? Why are people so selfish and irrational
See if the DoD marked some white guys as DEI too: that could happen if they used software to detect a face and a white guy's face was dark enough due to poor lighting to trick the software into classifying him/her as non-white.
It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think anything through: their 1st priority is to generate those 5 sentences for Musk describing each thing they accomplished in a week.
Is there a writeup of this from a Journalist organization? I've got some maga family members that have recently been on the fence (I know). But recent events have made them doubt their support. This is the sort of story that might knock some sense back into them.
I've got a long held a theory that if a store's cash register says "IBM" on it, that store is a dead man walking. But anyone who's been in a Bay store or tried to buy something from their website recently has to have known this day was coming.
The company announced late on Friday that it has been able to secure only limited financing ‘that will require the full liquidation of the entire business’
I was confused why "landlords" are on the list of reasons that a company older than Canada had to shutter but then I remembered that absolutely bonkers trend starting in the 90s and 2000s where businesses would sell their own real estate to renter companies and then rent the real estate back from those companies because that made Green Line On Graph Go Good Direction, and even as a callow yoot I remember thinking, what the actual fuck are you actually fucking doing, you short-sighted donkeys.
It looks like the end of the #HudsonsBayCompany has been coming for a while:
"In 2006, Jerry Zucker, an American businessman, bought HBC for US$1.1 billion."
The real estate was apparently reorganized under its own holding company:
"It also owns or manages approximately 3.7 million square metres (40 million square feet) of gross leasable real estate through its HBC Properties and Investments business unit."
(Granted, that "or" seems to do some heavy lifting to obfuscate how much it actually "owns" vs. just "manages".)
Despite the rain, despite the government shutting down every form of public transport towards Belgrade, the amount of people on the streets of Belgrade right now is absolutely *insane*.
Today's protest is already being referred to as the biggest protest in Serbian history — and rightfully so.
The people are still pouring in, the peak of the crowd isn't expected until 8pm.
"Protesting university students have led the nationwide anti-graft movement, which started after a concrete canopy collapsed at a train station and killed 15 people in Serbia's north on Nov. 1.
Many in Serbia blamed the crash on rampant government corruption, negligence and disrespect of construction safety regulations."
Large crowds of flag-waving protesters converged after meeting up at several agreed-on protest venues in various parts of Belgrade, which was placed on high alert.
Robert Heinlein was wrong about many things, but about the bald eagle: "the American Eagle eats carrion, never tackles anything its own size, and will soon be extinct".
Playing chicken with my supply of toilet paper again. I learned an important lesson from last time and used a black marker instead of a red marker because the red marker bled into the paper and left red spots that alarmed me at a glance during use
Some company should make a novelty roll like cash register tape that has a warning stripe. Or like the end of the roll turns to Brawny for a sensory notification.
Intro 5/10 This paper circuit project became my all-time favorite for parent-child workshops. It never fails to amaze kids or parents as the result is just fun to use and the build process is easy and straightforward. The idea is quite simple, and you can also repurpose an old PC fan for it. You can check my workshop instructions here: voltpaperscissors.com/spinartr…
This simple DIY art robot spins a paper disc, and you draw circles simply by holding down a pen. Kids can combine different colors and techniques to create an endless array of artworks.
myrmepropagandist
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •The ability to hold a big audience in the millions of a predictable demographic is deeply sought after. To me that just seems like trying to wind the clock back to the 80s when things were simple.
Social media plays a huge role here, and that is exactly why I think we should promote the idea that advertising on social media is as rude as advertising at a funeral or bat mitzvah.
myrmepropagandist reshared this.
myrmepropagandist
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Oh and to be clear I don't really count someone selling things they made by talking about them, or saying "I wrote this book" or whatever as "offensive" advertising.
In fact, it is the only way that promotion should function along side people talking about stuff and criticism.
Allan Chow
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •advertising back in the day was heavy on correlative data to determine success.
Advertising today gives has more direct cause and affect traceability for ROAS (return on ad spend) especially in the form of online advertising, direct marketing, and SEO. Happy to dive deep into this stuff with you if you want.
However to be honest, as far as I know, all this "improvement" hasn't really lead to any sort of decrease in marketing spend as a function of gross revenue.
My soap boxy thing is that a lot of people in marketing departments today want to think they're being very quantitative but in reality they're really bad at it and lack a lot of functional skill. As a result a lot of departments no longer deep dive into customer personas and demographic focused messaging.
Everyone just wants to do scattershot marketing to hit kpis but pretend they're not.
myrmepropagandist reshared this.
sabik
in reply to Allan Chow • • •@grumpasaurus
To be fair, there's also the story of how someone (Uber?) halved their ad spend, bracing themselves to see what effect it had, and... nothing happened, there was no perceptible change
Apparently the more direct metrics were so dominated by fraud that they were meaningless
Harry Percival
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •myrmepropagandist
in reply to Harry Percival • • •@hjwp
I would be delighted if there were more restrictions on advertising:
* It should always be labeled "This is a paid advertisement."
* It should not target children, gamblers or make outlandish claims.
* It should not be on social media or built into apps.
* It should be subject to an obnoxious public review process.
Everything would just be better. People will pay for entertainment and games.
myrmepropagandist reshared this.
BoxOfSnoo
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Don Marti
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •B L O C K in the U S A
blog.zgp.orgmyrmepropagandist reshared this.
Don Marti
in reply to Don Marti • • •@hjwp Also the "advertising" that people are blocking today is different from what "advertising" used to be. Fewer agency people, doing more ads each, means that each ad carries less info on brand quality and reputation, and it makes more sense to block them
source: youtube.com/watch?v=-Vv7bWP7U0…
Michael Farmer Business Models Workstream
YouTubeWulfy
in reply to Harry Percival • • •@hjwp
I work in (community) #TV (Australia)
We have let out sales staff go.
We no longer rely on Advertising for main income. We do get some money from Government ads.
Our main income streams are now training and production.
We do some promotion of artists for festivals, but it's programming rather than ads (eg. Interviews)
Selling Ads was nearly impossible.
TV ads are dead, they just don't know it yet.
Urban Hermit
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I listen to a lot of podcasts and, in the last two years specifically, the number of minutes spent advertising has at least doubled. I think there is a correlation with the 'end' of the pandemic, big companies sort of realized that there are no "everybody watches" platforms any more and seem to be scrambling.
I even get new ads when I relisten to old episodes of podcasts, so they are up cycling ads everytime!
I still think nothing that needs advertising is worth buying.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Streaming services keep showing me ads for cars.
WTF?? I buy a car once every twenty or so years, I hope each year that it won't have to be this year, and when I do eventually need to buy a car the models, or even the brands, that have been advertised to me over the decades will no longer exist.
What *is* the point of showing me SEVERAL MINUTES of car ads every time I watch telly? Is the targeting really that bad? And it's not that they know when my car is finally going to break down, because it's been going on for years.
mike805
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I'm on the anti side of this. In 1999 I wrote an app called Ad Extinguisher. I cannot read while something is moving on the screen, so have gone to a lot of trouble over the years to avoid that. Have pretty well removed ads from my life, and as a result they really bug me when one does show up.
Advertising IMHO is a form of pollution. The first 10% might be useful, making you aware of something you want and don't know about. Past that it is an attack on the mental wellbeing of...
mike805
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •the public. For example, if you are waiting, there are two ways to avoid waiting becoming suffering. You can either find something interesting to think about, or do the mindfulness thing and intentionally keep words out of your head.
Neither option is possible if there is an ad playing. Medical ads are the worst. Health fear is one of the worst mental states, and deliberately inducing that is just evil. When those ads are playing, I get out of the supermarket faster, and buy less.
mike805
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •So to me the breakthrough would be finding a way to reach the public without causing annoyance or pain. If I am trying to find something online and an ad gets in the way, that is unpleasant.
However, I look through Slickdeals and Vine every day. Sometimes buy something too. Those are ads but I want to see them. How can we make advertising more like Slickdeals, and less like pop-ups on phones and shingles vaccine commercials in Ralphs?