"Is everything a commercial now?" immediately preceeding an ad read is the best juxtaposition of a phenomenon and its critique you guys have ever done. You really could've ended the video there and it would've been fine.
@WisecrackEDU oh shut up you're not being witty or clever you just couldn't let that add money go even for one video because you're just as greedy as everyone else
American culture is capitalism. That’s it. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want with that. Everything here runs on money. The stereotype…is very real.
Thats a topic that i've thought about many times. You can find contemporaries by talking about what toys you played with as akid that were popular, or just the ads for them. Even looking at thumbnails on youtube are all formatted to seem like attention grabbing flashy ads.
@@tomifost I follow art channels and vintage fashion channels. The former is currently on their "This painting is , here's why" era and the latter is going through their "I took and made " era.
Military / war capitalism is what america culture is ,not just any capitalism. That is why there is a us or them divide within that culture to a extreme extent and militarization of any long term beneficial concept into a volatile short term gains one.
Yup. As a European, it was actually insane to learn how much of American culture is just…consumption. Buying things. From 10k Christmas lights, to special greeting cards for every holiday imaginable. Spending $10-15 a day on lunch? Normal for many people.
@@WisecrackEDUBut is capitalism not always "late stage"? It persists, thrives even, with the decline of what we would figure is necessary to life. People have been saying capitalism was in its last days since the early 20th century English gothic/romanticists.
@@kf8113I don't think that is what LSC means exactly, it's rather that capitalism is just at its "mutated" stage, post-golden-years. Besides, capitalism in the 19th century was definitely not the same one that was in early 20th c. or late 20th c. or especially not the one right now.
@@kf8113While it does persist and thrive, it utilizes the material that is not infinite, including societal stability and people's patience on waiting for their well-being. It's like filling up a longitudinal balloon with water vertically - while at first it might seem the same amount of water is distributed along the balloon, the more water you pour in, the bottom of it gets bigger and the top gets thinner.
It makes me annoyed more than it makes me think, "Oh how quirky!" Im not even going to finish the video, because it feels like im just encouraging the idea if you lampshade some rotten practice sufficiently you can get away with it.
I used to work at a newspaper I hated how the whole paper was centered around the ads to the point the only proof reading done was for the ads. So many grammatical errors, missing punctuation and typos got through on the news stories it made us look very dumb. But we were told to make darn sure that full color double page car ad was perfect. As a result I now hate advertising in all its forms.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click ads” feels a lot like Idiocy with all the scientists working on solving E.D. and male pattern baldness
These are legitimate avenues of research for gender-affirming healthcare. They're not idiocy. Prioritizing them as valued above other kinds of research solely because of a profit motive IS idiocy.
This feels like a tongue-in-cheek response to all those comments that accuse this channel of "selling out" lmao. Especially in light of what Michael's been saying on the live stream. I love it so much i literally laughed out loud when i saw the title in my feed
I thought a fair amount about this and I do believe that commercial interest is bound to ruin the art of everything it touches. Art is driven by connecting and sharing human experiences, commercial interests have the objective of limiting your choice and perception of life, or to control it at least. I see advertising as the voice of a self appointed ruling class by now which somehow have turned producing goods into something you should be careful of.
Speaking of Pepsi, did you ever notice in the movie "Twister", when they used hundreds of soda cans to help provide lift to those little weather tracking devices, 100% of them were Pepsi, as if nobody drinks anything else. Also at one point the weather map forms a Pepsi logo, which was a poor attempt at trying something subliminal.
I think this is the real cause of today divisiveness. Living in such a world leads you to mistrust “society” as a whole because the messages that come from it have an ulterior motive. Which voice can you trust? Can you really trust your neighbor? And you are slowly primed into not trusting anyone. It is subtle but it has a material effect in my opinion.
"Living in such a world leads you to mistrust “society” as a whole because the messages that come from it have an ulterior motive." that's precisely the motivation behind conspiracy theorizing throughout history: "things are not what they seem on the surface. There must be something behind that explains my anxiety and suffering better."
@@williampan29the subject matter is ads that target your subconscious to get you to buy their products. That's not a conspiracy that's a fact and everyone should be mistrusting of anything that portrays itself as something it isn't.
@chrism8180 I knew my comment would get misunderstood. I am not saying op is conspiring. Rather, I'm pointing out that the neurology of conspiring is sense of untrustworthiness. And it doesn't matter if it is a fact or not.
Hmm although i get your point, cant you say that there always was and is hidden messages in speak/interactions between people. Now its just much more blatently, in a movie with sponsored products for example. So what is the real difference here?
“Is everything a commercial now?” No, no, no…well yes, but it’s been like that since the 80’s. God Bless Ronald Regan for making it possible for my childhood to be full of some of the most entertaining commercial disguised as programming a child could ever ask for.
I used to have conflicting feelings about whether a few channels or if 1000 channels is a healthier media ecosystem. Now I see that both of these have existed, and neither one was all that great.
Personalized ads are the bane of my existence. I'm just constantly harassed by the same handful of ads to the point that I just vow to never buy their products simply in spite of them.
As opposed to, socialist culture gloating about the fact we're not allowed to NOT buy the thing we don't need, they will just repeat advertising their agenda anyway that is bought and paid for through taxation. Here in reality land, capitalism is much more liekly to keep ads OUT of a product, because every trademark needs explicit permission to use as a simple background item, even when reflecting the world in which those ads already exist in. If ticket sales actually FUNDED the product, which would be captialism, it wouldn't be covered by advertisers who get money printed straight into their pockets. Like Jeff Bezos, through inflation and tax exemptions draining buying power out of every dollar YOU could put into the ticket price. Instead, you just want the number GO DOWN while you sneer that captalism is all about making a number go up. No, that's Zimbabwe, that's USA, that's Bidenomics.
I always remember Senecas quote Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
There is an important movie that needs to be discussed here. The movie Idiocracy had millions in product endorsments. The corporations knew the movie was satirical but these corporations wanted there advert benefits in the movie anyway. When these advertisers saw the completed movie they felt that the movie insulted thier product too much and everyone, including the studio pulled their money. You cant even stream Idiocracy on any streaming service.
this is actually the best time to be ok with advertising because you're no longer monopolized. They have to entertain you and make it worth your time to buy into their product. Where before they used the limited ad space to control every source of media. I can spend my time watching a ton of content with very little branding or only branding their own stuff with no outside sources. They need to earn my watch time and thats amazing! I think culture is improving not getting worse with what is happening in the marketing space.
The content you are watching are the advertisements...and the plurality of commercials competing for your "attention" become more and more targeted to you because of the metadata that they collect or totally bland in order to appease a wider audience.
RU-vid is at least 80% product reviews and unboxings where they have ad breaks and sponsored ad reads. Basically ads within ads sandwiched between more ads. So yeah...
It's weird to think back to The Flintstones live action movie "controversy" when Millennials learned the term "product placement" for the first time over a single shot of a Coke can (as though The Flintstones cartoon wasn't created just to market breakfast cereal to begin with), and now we just have ads full-on masquerading as art. I kind of prefer product placement... It feels less deceitful.
I've been trying to teach my children this thing for years with a joke I heard a long time ago "A guy sees a stand next to a kebab shop saying 'Anything for 5.99€' and goes inside. After getting the meal the cashier says: That'll be 12.99€. The guy asks: isn't everything 5.99€. The cashier: That's just a commercial". My kids never really understood this even after I've shown them how everything works. It's a neverending loop where people find this out but it's too late for the next generation to understand it. Maybe i'll just stick to driving my BMW while eating Burger King meals, that shouldn't be bad for the world, should it?
@@tigerunicornpegases The shop owner doesn't regard the ad as truth, just a thing to get more customers. Just as you shouldn't regard a film as truth as it's just something to get you buy stuff.
I think ET was the first time I realized movies were getting invasive about product placement...Pizza Hut, Pepsi, Reeses Pieces, Speak and Spell and the list goes on. Even as a kid I thought it was way too obvious and since then it has only gotten worse.
The first time you realized... But no even remotely the first time. The one thing that really bugs me about a lot of this analysis is that it pretends things are new or somehow much different than before... A common advertising tactic.
@@travcollier For sure I have no doubt it was happening before that, just a lot less "in your face". We can thank Bernays for modern advertising and the increasingly aggressive tactics since he wrote the playbook they are still using today.
It's lazy to say the cookies were created to harvest data and track you across the web. It was created to bring statefullness to the websites, allowing you to log in and receive custom data from them. It was latched onto by the advertisers and has since been abused for tracking and data harvesting. The management of this for privacy should be built into the browser, and managed by users not built into popups or managed by every single website separately.
There is a very good radio show called “under the influence” by Terry O’Reilly. It breaks down the history of advertising in a very entertaining and insightful way.
Love the video and the subject matter, but I thought I'd make a usability recommendation. The quote text is hard to read when there is a zooming image behind it, and I don't even have vision impairments (it would be worse for those who do). I recommend using a dark background with white text, or white background with dark text and the image to the side, if needed. Hope this helps!
I think films based on a product can be subversive and outstanding. I think The Lego Movie was and I believe Barbie will be but nowadays unfortunately more and more blockbusters feel like 2 and a half hour commercials such as the new Transformers and Indiana Jones. Great video.
I used to be a marketing manager for a mid sized retail company and the consumer group nomenclatures for "rich old men and women" were "men who golf" and "ladies who lunch," respectively. Seemed like some 50's carryover.
Recently there have been a spat of cancer support ads on a channel I was watching. But I had to quit watching cause EVERY commercial break was about cancer and my husband is right on the edge of passing on due to cancer. That many reminders in one night was freaking tough. I hate that car company now.
The people who pay to produce something are in charge. If the "people" aren't people but a board of directors put in place by shareholders, the only purpose of production is to create products that harvest profit. When a company is openly traded, it becomes owned by people without a connection to the business. They buy any business and do whatever they can to harvest money from it and sell it when it no longer seems profitable (which often happens after the business model is altered for short-term gains, but long-term losses, the shareholders sell before the long-term losses come for the people working at the company).
I don't know what my ad category should be. But there's so much more to say about everything being ads now. Several years ago, Ford filed a patent for external cameras on their vehicles to read billboards to stream ad banners onto the infotainment system. CVS or one of those type chains had plans to replace all the glass drink cooler doors with "smart" type doors for seeing the contents of the cooler, but also to be used as ad space. It's way out of hand. Then again, so is corporate greed.
No mention of the 80’s, where every single child’s program was a thinly veiled toy commercial to the extent that Congress had to pass laws restricting ads targeting children? Also, the commercialism problem like that is a problem in specifically *American* media. You don’t see it nearly as much of nice you start looking at media from outside the US. Also also, just because something is made with specifically commercial interests driving it doesn’t make it soulless or bad. Again, look at the 80’s, but also, the MCU might be all about the commercial cash grabs, but there are also plenty of legitimately great films in their library.
I think art was consumed by commercialism a long time ago. There’s a book that stuck with me talking about BMW’s first major ad pushes in the 60’s, and how it started a trend of unattaching signifiers and signifieds; or removing items from their basic context and re-using it for something else in a specifically commercial text (I.e. “this is not a pie; it’s now a wheel”). Anything that exists is exploitable for capital, and anything capital exploits will never critique it.
You know, I wouldn't mind ads so much if they were honest in their ads, or had passion for their products, or weren't manipulative on a psychological level, or cared for the consumer, or weren't dominanted by household names, or didn't so commonly have shady bussiness practices, or wasn't infested with scams (in the case of the internet.) Any one of those would make it at least a little more tolerable. My advertising category is the skip button.
In Sweden very few films and tv shows have intended marketing of products. Hell, most Yugioh animes hasn’t been dubbed because of product placement not being allowed for children under the age of 12, meaning toy commercials are mostly from other countries. The same with tv commercials, Hellofresh is just a regular ad and pharmacy ads are just recommendations for what to buy for the current season.
In all fairness, I thought that the movie about Flaming Hot Cheetos was a documentary of the man who first created them. He went from a janitor to an executive because of this invention and has changed the food landscape forever. As for the main point, I got ad blockers so that I won't have to deal with any ads and I would mute my tv or my computer whenever a commercial comes up. However, I end up being guilt tripped into not using them for a website because apparently they need the revenue. I also just want to point out how there's an unfair double standard that movies get to advertise stuff a lot in their movies (Emoji Movie is a prime example) and if a RU-vidr even thinks about advertising a product, they had to let the viewers know ahead of time that this is a promotional product before the video gets taken down by the government. To put it mildly, movies and tv shows get away with product placement than RU-vidrs do.
Whenever advertisements make their way through my best efforts to ignore them, I try like hell to avoid buying what they are selling. This is all but impossible, but it's the attitude I've adopted.
I feel like there are some points that are with mentioning here that have not been mentioned in this video: 1. There is a lot of exchange of talent between Advertising Agencies, Production Houses, Brand Mnagement and even sometimes Journalism - You are bound to see some commanalities in their approaches of content and frameworks - it also that it works the best for the audience 2. As someone in advertising we are all hate what tools of distribution that we have available to use (A profmace marketer might have different views on this) - Hence, the integration with movies, TV shows, Music Videos, etc. - The reason behind this state is not just technology but also, there is no common place to reach out to people - people are no longer bound by their area codes and ages but interest and topics they chose to consume online - You can partly blame the US govt for not passing anti competitive laws which ban the studio owning the streaming platform like they did with cinema halls
What I really want to know is why, now, after many years of minimal 'bacco - why am I suddenly seeing characters smoking, *frequently,* in like _every_ movie of the past year or so? For over twenty years of mainstream American films, I distinctly remember how little smoking was shown to movie viewers. Largely due to standards that grew out of the enormous public backlash against the tobacco industry, reacting to decades of insidious tobacco advertising that saw tobacco and smoking to permeate almost every production in Hollywood - under the fully cognizant approval of the highest levels of movie industry power - the very _absence_ of on-screen smoking in the vast majority of Hollywood productions was so prevalent that it was even genuinely conspicuous, on occasion, most notably in contemporary period pieces depicting past eras, without any sign of the incessant smoking that, in the reality of those bygone times, was practically inescapable in its near ubiquity. All of a sudden, we swing a hard 180° - from a quarter century of predominantly _not_ showing cigarettes, even in situations where they'd have truthfully existed... to running back to near-constant smoking in streaming productions made after ~2021?!
I find the worst part about advertising is not in any individual advertisement but just in living in the whole ecosystem. A particular ad isn't likely in itself to make me spend money on that product, but it does remind me that I should be thinking about and spending money on products in general.
I watched tetris and blackberry, thought they were fun. How are they commercials? Everyone already knows and loves tetris, it's _never ever_ going away. It will be around in 10.000 years if humans still exist. And blackberry? The company is dead. They were huge and were brought to their knees. It's an interesting story. About a dead company.
I keep wondering why they still suck so much at showing me things I would be interested in. Almost all the ads I get are stuff I will never buy so they are just wasting money.
Speaking as a member of the film industry, branded content literally keeps the indie film business afloat. So many directors, producers, cinematographers and other creative personnel work on commercials and branded content in between personal projects. It's what puts food on the table so that you can go ahead and work on an indie feature for several years straight.
True, but it's also only this way because of the larger (capitalist) economic model we exist in. I'm not necessarily advocating for any particular replacement but it's a perspective worth keeping in mind.
That's the point. Monopolies and oligopolies raise the stakes specifically to curtail competition. When you spend billions of dollars, you are shaping the macroeconomic market. Eliminating competition in all its forms is how the game goes. Own everything, jack up the prices, now you're the only game in town and what you offer is funding in exchange for some ad revenue. Go back to the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. The market was less monopolized, creators didn't need to spend as much of their savings, so they didn't need to get foreign capital involved in production. Now, everything is monopolized, everyone is poor, so all you can do is borrow from the billionaires, give them a kickback for not hoarding wealth, and hope what you make will set you free. The two systems are very different. People love to justify a shifting landscape. They think they are justifying the economy of the 40s and 50s, when we have the highest level of monopolization in this countries entire history as a measurable statistical fact. People act like they "know" how market economics works, because they understand the simple concept of "if I don't benefit you can get bent". The truth is, our market economy is nothing to be proud of, resembles nothing of a truly competitive market place, has become a way to justify inheritance and labor towards the inheritance of others, the antithesis of a free market economy. If you labor for the inheritance of a family, you are recreating fuedalism and monarchy through the veneer of market economics. That's the original meaning of unearned income, not welfare to needy people. However, who doesn't want to "make it", or have a workforce that grants them early retirement and their future progeny financial stability? They convince small players in the game to engage in the same activity, which results in sincerely held beliefs that in turn result in a monopolized market economy once they vote for politicians to liberalize the market. With a liberal market, you have more degrees of freedom for extracting value for yourself from the labor of other people. Thus, small creators, producers, owners and landlords admire and desire a kind of exploitation that fundemntally is not about the "free market", it's about building a personal empire and having an estate with desperate people who manage the estate for you. It's not the kind of economics that causes wealth to boom across the population, it booms up a heiarchy.
I’ve really liked a lot of the Wisecrack videos I’ve watched, but wondering aloud why everything needs to be/include a commercial only for a BetterHelp commercial to immediately follow is just so funny.
I know many people probably say this, but heads don’t really have an effect on me. What does have an effect is when I see a character in a movie or TV show that I like drinking something or eating something, then immediately after I want that thing.
