
Bets, burgers and booze
Bogan church!
I credit the copious betting adverts (+ reality TV) as the reason I long-ago ditched the goggle box.
Good on SBS.
Australia’s SBS will allow users of its video streaming services to opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting. SBS commenced operations in 1975 as the “Special Broadcasting Service”, a name that reflected its mission to reach Australia’s ethnic communities with programming in multiple languages. A television station …
Wouldn't allowing people to opt out of a specific class of ads simply give gambling, burger and booze advertisers confidence that people still watching are receptive to their product and therefore the advertising money is being effective?
It's good that SBS is taking at least some steps to limit these ads, but would it be more effective simply to stop displaying these sort of ads altogether?
Better still, block all ads and charge some sort of flat fee.
Then the broadcaster would have a steady source of income to develop innovative new programs (or at least a reboot of Skippy the bush Kangaroo) and wouldn't have to chase ratings or be beholden to advertisers.
I assume the politicians would love this since it kept the corrupting hand of big business out of the national media and the public would love it since they weren't being tracked.
Waiting for it to get expanded.
Opt out of ads for cars (climate change), fast food (health concerns), banks (I'm a anarcho-communist) etc etc
Then you end up with only the most inoffensive ads for Shackleton's Original High Seat Chair and whatever it was JR Hartley was trying to buy
I'm an avid SBS On Demand viewer. They have some fantastic TV shows on, especially the so called Nordic Noir stuff.
We are suffering an absolute fucking plague of sports betting ads on TV here. They are impossible to avoid on any commercial TV station. A recent report stated that a million ads had been aired on TV in the last year.
Good on SBS for at least doing something about it. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it's a start.
I use free Spotify sometimes as background music.
Have always been OK with putting up with the ads as "payment" to subsidise the service (don't use it enough to justify premium as partner has apple music sub & so I mainly use Spotify occasionally for music that is not available on apple ).
However recently it has been full of adds for "Cex" where "c" pronounced as an "s", and the company name shouted out lots of time in the ad.
All good juvenile fun, but as I'm working at home, with other people of various ages & sensitivities around, who may hear my music playing, I don't want "sex" shouted out loudly and often from my speakers as need to be considerate of them (also censor the music I play out of consideration for them).
So I have blocked Spotify ads* - which means Spotify loses out on ad income, all due to one particular irritating ad being incessantly played .
* Will remove the block in a few weeks & see what happens, in the hope of Cex ads having stopped as I would like to support Spotify via ads, not happy "freeloading" even when it was effectively forced on me.
That's companies are going to product placement rather than ads.
You can't skip James Bond drinking a Newcastle Brown
I've seen demos of a system which replaced products for each market, so Bond is drinking a Japanese beer in Japan. With better GPUs and DeepFake they can personalise this to your shopping profile. Bond can wander into the bar and ask for "a nice cup of Yorkshire tea, luv" and be seen sardonically dunking his biscuit.
What if we could train AI to spot ads in a video stream
Phil O'Sophical! Remember his name!
He is the one they will blame in the future!
He is the one children will go to sleep cursing! The fool! The one who taught our own computers to hate us! The one who caused our AI's to turn sentient and to decide to destroy us all!
When the Terminators come to kill you - remember that we started it.
"And old Billy the blacksmith, the first time in his life, why he's gone home cold sober to his darling wife. He walks in the kitchen, she says you're early Bill dear, but then he breaks down and tells her the pub's got no beer." - a song by Slim Dusty written and performed in 1962.
Maybe we'll see a new song from Australia soon to cover the changes?
As an aside, on the general subject of blocking ads, I am a bit mystified. I use an Adblocker and see very very few ads, not even the gambling ones. Why arn't more people using Adblockers? And if they don't, why are they complaining that the internet is unuseable because of all the ads?
Because they don´t know any better?
I wouldn't expect my dear dad to even *realize* adblockers are a thing, if I don't inform him. How could he find that out by himself and move as to install the appropriate add on or program?
Like him, most people accept online ads as a fact of life, because it has been like this since the times of TV and newspapers, and because it is not obvious that one can deal with them. Plus the fact that it requires a smidge of investigation most people is not willing or able to do.
It is not like one can see ads for adblockers, is it?
One of my customers a long time ago was a guy who branded himself as "Silent Selling" (He did the kind of signs you see as menus in chip shops, or the signwriting on ice cream vans)
As he said - he had a lot of repeat business because his stuff worked and it worked because it DIDN'T annoy punters
I think we'd all be happy to allow banner ads if they weren't animated/noisy/malware infested/dozens plastered all across the entire page
Advertising contains a few people who know full well that "less is more" and a lot of twunts who believe in saturating people into submission