Poll of the Day > Are commercials / advertisements worse now than they've ever been?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why do you think so?

In my opinion commercials now are really in your face and annoying. I think their main goal is to get you to remember them with the mindset that there is no such thing as bad publicity

I always record TV shows and fast-forward through the commercials. But when I listen to the radio classics channel on Sirius XM, they have some of the most annoying ads. Especially the time share cancellation guy.

I actually like listening to the old commercials ("Quaker Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice, the cereals shot from guns!") and I've often thought that some of these companies should deliberately make their ads sound old-timey

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2025/01/20

I'd say yes, but it also depends on where you're seeing those ads.

A lot of ads online are clearly targeting Millennials and Zoomers. And since Millennials and Zoomers are generally terrible, any ad designed to appeal to them will also be terrible.

The worst are probably the faux "Hey look at me, I'm an Internet influencer just here casually offering my opinion of [insert product here]", because it always has hugely cringe "Hello fellow kids" energy for me. Whenever I see one of those ads, it's pretty much a guarantee that I will go out of my way to never buy a product from that company.

The other overarching category of marketing technique that sucks is when an ad goes full performative advocate/activist, and try to sell a product by pointing out how environmentally or socially conscious it is, because they know that's something the younger generations supposedly care about, and hopefully they can be tricked into thinking that buying that product somehow makes the world a better place. Aside from the fact that it's usually horseshit, it usually comes across as condescending at best and disingenuous at worst, and generally lowers my opinion of any company that resorts to it as a sales tactic.

I long for the days of ridiculously over-exaggerated problems and APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. At least that stuff was amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvELbWfA2UY

I haven't seen a good commercial since about 2006

ACAB

All
Commercials
Are
Bad

Most of the ones I see are in Vietnamese, so I try to use them as a learning opportunity.

Same ol, same ol

Used to have tons more toy commercials thou

They are worse. Everything is getting worse.

I spot no real difference in how they affect me, I just let them wash over me. Where the commercials are gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Dune aside, I am extremely likely to be uninterested in what you're selling, and it's not you, it's me. I never really got shopping.

dunno, I use adblocker and don't watch cable TV.

It's become easier than ever to ignore ads, so no

Definitely.

Yes, I can't click on a topic on this site without a full page ad appearing or a pop up ad which never happened well over a year ago or 2 years ago.

I never remember what they're for, I'm so used to tuning them out and these days it's all some nonsense that has nothing to do with a product, so nothing really sticks in my brain.

MagicalPrincess posted...

Yes, I can't click on a topic on this site without a full page ad appearing or a pop up ad which never happened well over a year ago or 2 years ago.

GameFAQs had ads..?

MagicalPrincess posted...

Yes, I can't click on a topic on this site without a full page ad appearing or a pop up ad which never happened well over a year ago or 2 years ago.

Funny, I haven't seen an ad on this site since like 2012.

After getting a few pop-up ads that were literally locking and crashing my computer every time they got served to me, my reaction was basically "Yeah, fuck you and your ad revenue GameFAQs." They've been on my NoScript block list ever since.

Worst part is we get them in real life now, not just when we're using our devices. The gas stations near us play ads while you pump gas. I've seen ads above the turkey freezers in the supermarket during thanksgiving. Have one of those self-pay computer things on your restaurant table? You may see an ad or two. Saw one guy online showing a picture where they had ads playing in the exam room of the doctor's office he was at. Probably 25% of what I see in a day, whether I'm online or not, could go on r/ABoringDystopia. It's so depressing.

most of them are Tide ads

Worse now. More than half are for medications that show medicated people living fairy-tale lives, and using acronyms that I'm sometimes unsure what medical condition is being referred to.

'They are better now than ever'

If I'm just talking about the insurance ones, most of them have humor I would assume is being written by comic writers these days. There was once a Geico tv ad where the gps in a car was playing the Cha Cha slide. Some of these commericals stick with me due to the wild ideas.

Pharmaceutical ads sometimes end up with good background music as well.