Is it just me or has advertising lost the plot entirely?
If you know me you probably know I hate advertising with a passion. I have blocked ads on my computer but I have limited control on my TV and phone when it comes to YouTube advertisements. And the other day I got this incredibly bizarre ad.
I only speak the tiny amount of Spanish I have learned through osmosis, but the phrase they are using is essentially “we’ll eat at home.” The scenario is a familiar one; you’ve got a kid in the car out in town and they see a restaurant they want to go and they ask if they can stop to eat. The parent says no, we’ll eat at home, because there are a lot of reasons why it’s better for them. Home cooked meals are cheaper. They can be higher quality, both in terms of taste and nutrition. They might have food that will go bad soon and so they want to go and eat it first. They don’t want to normalize eating rich unhealthy foods for their kids.
But this isn’t an ad for groceries or processed food products. This is an ad for DoorDash. A food delivery app. Literally none of the reasons you would want to eat at home apply here. Actually, using DoorDash in this particular situation is dramatically worse, because you are paying more money to get food you could have just picked up on the way only to get a worse version of it because it is no longer freshly prepared and is likely cold.
I just can’t get over this because it’s so incredibly out of touch with reality. Many people have had to have signed off on this for me to see this ad. What were they thinking? Are they so out of touch with reality that they think this is something that people do? The fact that this is clearly targeting Hispanic Americans makes it even worse. I live in Southern California and about a third of the people I know are Hispanic and all of them would laugh at this. I can’t help but wonder if the teams working on them were full of privileged white guys who are saying “yeah, this is what Mexicans are really like” or if there are also rich Hispanics on board who thinks this is something that people really do.
But this is just the most egregious example of out of touch advertising. YouTube ads are supposed to be targeted right? But why do I get ads for CRM, ERP, and accounting products when I don’t own a business? Why do I get ads in languages I don’t speak? Why is it that I can report and tell Google that an advertiser is inappropriate or against their terms and still they will show me the ads again?
And beyond that I am astonished at how many ads I see that exist to mislead you. Almost every time you see something compared or tested there is somthing they aren’t telling you. The most obvious example is Scott toilet paper; they advertise that they have rolls that are significantly longer than their leading competition. But what they neglect to tell you is that their product is single-ply while their competitors are double- or triple-ply. They actually have a very comfortable amount of toilet paper on each roll. Weirdly, all toilet paper is misleading though; what is a “mega roll”, how does it differ from an “ultra roll”, and why is one roll of it somehow equivalent to six of some unspecified other type of roll? In the meanwhile Old Spice is trying to take advantage of balding men like me by telling me that their shampoo increases the volume of hair by however many percent while there is fine print at the bottom saying that it is compared to unwashed hair, meaning their shampoo probably doesn’t do anything the cheapest generic product at the dollar store won’t.
I know this is basically just a rant, but I can’t be the only one who notices this stuff, am I?
I'm a dedicated ad hater too but I think your rage is just blinding you here. The viewer is expecting home-cooked meal but twist! They're having fast food, but in the comfort of their home instead of stopping mid-journey. Yeah it's overlooking health and cost and such, but ads like these are usually aimed at least partially at the kids, who don't care about any of that. So now Mom tells her boy no, we're eating at home, and he switches over to "can we have mcdonalds at home". Now you can't end the discussion by putting the restaurant in the rear view mirror, so he'll keep asking aaaaall the way home and a while after. What percentage of parents need to crack for this ad to pay off? Who knows.
I understand what the ad is trying to do. The problem is that the ad is so unhinged from reality it’s actually offensive to me.
Let’s say you are right and it makes kids start begging their parents to order DoorDash. Then it just exists to make the world a worse place to live in.
Not for Doordash.. you assume doordash cares about making the world a better place (or at least not making it a worse place).
Though honestly I'm with you. Why would the parents not just drop off at McDonalds if they are going to cave to their kids and skip the doordash fees that will almost double the cost of the meal? they are already out, not that hard to stop at McD's. I doubt if they are willing to say no while they are passing McD's that they aren't stubbern enough to keep saying no at home especially when it costs so much more to order from DoorDash.
I mean if i were to advertise DoorDash I would be pushing the, "hey, look, you don't have to go out angle" or even just a you got home, you are tired, you don't want to go out again, and you realize you have nothing to eat(or don't want to eat anything you have). There's door dash! But i certainly would't be trying to push the you are already out and about and can easily pick it up yourselves, go home and pay more to skip the small inconvenience of stopping.
I have had coworkers who live paycheck to paycheck and still order DoorDash for lunch at work. I don’t understand it. I have never used DoorDash because I would much rather just get in my car and listen to my audiobook for a few minutes and pick it up. I think it’s possible that we tilderinos are out of touch with general society.
I would love to have my food brought to me but I cannot justify the cost. And it's not even like the drivers really get compensated enough. The hard truth is that paying some one to get you stuff should be expensive if the person is going to be compensated enough for the time and work on their car but Door Dash is trying to convince people that it's within their paycheck to afford that kind of thing.
If I do order delivery through one of these services I try to do the mental math of how much of someone's time I'm taking up, how much the service is likely paying them, and pay them enough so overall they're not getting screwed. Which is usually quite a bit of money for the amount of food. It helps that I'm in a dense area and if I order Taco Bell it's maybe .75 miles away, so I don't need to pay for too much time.
However it should be a legal requirement that these services ensure the workers get as much as they get when they deliver to me. Plenty of people don't tip at all and even if you go with the recommended tip amount they're still getting screwed much of the time. It's not a tip, it's a way for a random person to feel like someone's boss for 30 minutes. And if you find yourself paying the minimum you can get away with you have no right to complain if your boss does the same with you.
I think that those so out to lunch that they order door dash on debt might not be reflective of society at large, but like them, I agree that Tildoes are a small segment of a many small segmented society.
If car payments in the US being over $1000/month is any indicator, I can easily believe that many people are stupid enough to spend money that poorly. Financial literacy rates are very poor, and there are a ton of oft-repeated myths.
This is true!
Well, yeah. It exists to make money for a corporation, which at the very best of times is simply neutral to the goal of making the world a better place to live in.
And I'd say that the issue is that the corporations have a direct line to our eyes and ears now that they never had before.
Access to consumers is absolutely invasive now and it's atrocious that we're having to live in this not-optuonal surveillance capitalism world we've created for ourselves.
Is it much worse than historically? I'd argue streaming is way better for avoiding ads than television, and even before then the newspapers, plays, and radio broadcasts were covered in ads. I actually think now is one of the easiest times to avoid ads in personal entertainment if you pay for services.
I also live a mostly ad free life, but the alternative has also been easier. By getting a ton of services "for free" by paying with tracking and ads. However I think this creates a new form of inequality. Where those with resources can avoid most of it and make better financial decisions and purchases, whereas those who already have less means are being subjected to manipulation making them buy even more stuff they don't need. Broadly speaking of course, as I don't think anyone can completely escape influences of marketing.
Even with that caveat, there is another issue: we're assuming that the tacit agreement that the user has the option to either pay for a service or put up with ads is being followed. That agreement has been torn up a long time ago. We are familiar with this pattern by now: some service that was originally at a smaller scale gets popular, gets bought by a large company backed up by investor money, gets scaled up while introducing ads and a paid plan "to finance the infrastructure costs" (while the now "ad-supported" service gets steadily worse to make the paid plan seem more appealing), and when a service that was not initially designed to be profitable predictably still isn't by making it worse and the investor money starts drying up, the enshittification process ramps to full throttle... starting with ads showing up in the same plan that users were pushed to buy to avoid them in the first place.
In practice, the "offer" to see ads or paying for a service is not being made in good faith, it's just a step to the treadmill toward both. We often hear "if it's free, you're the product", but why would a company give their product/users the possibility of opting out of a way to make the company earn more money? The profits won't increase by themselves after all.
That is true. I haven't seen a service completely drop an adfree version yet, but they are definitely testing the limits with more tiers and higher prices.
Television packages in the US cost
hundredsthousands of dollars per year, and millions of consumerswereare willing to pay for a product that's stuffed with far more ads than streaming. I just don't buy that the vast majority of American households can't afford one or two ad-free streaming services. All the numbers and anecdotes I'm familiar with indicate some people are just willing to deal with ads to pay less money. I mean look at how many wealthy people watch hours of YouTube every week but would never dream of paying for YouTube premium.I wonder how many people are actually paying for live TV anymore? Clearly there is still a market but the last time I watched live TV many of the ads from the network didn’t say “watch our program at x time on our station”, it said “stream it on our app”. I was in a hotel room for two days a few weeks ago and Comedy Central doesn’t actually seem to have much programming these days because both days they seemed to be running marathons of old TV shows.
This says 68 million households in the US which is crazy considering cable packages average around $217/month.
I'd agree if we were talking about 10 years ago - before the advent of AdWords and Facebook's algorithm.
I see what you mean about the different tiers of service available to subscribers and how that certainly trump's blocks of commercials that TV viewers had to sit through in the 90s and oughts, but it's a little different than what I intended with my comment about surveillance capitalism.
Previously, viewer data and ad impact measurements came from homes with black boxes who opted into advertisers recording their viewing habits. Now, there are so many more ways to determine whether viewers are consuming or reacting to your ad content.
Second, I'd say that the targeting is so good that they don't have to rely solely on ad saturation in commercial blocks. They now have your swipes, your click history and everything else at your disposal.
You may not see or hear ads like you did in the past, but it's far more invasive, insidious and targeted now.
You just described pretty much every marketing executive for large companies. They have 0 ethics, morals, or qualms about deception and manipulation. They exist to push their brand on the public consciousness, nothing more.
David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs defines five key types of useless job. You're describing the second type: "Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so,"
They do things for which there is no public demand, but they go out in the world to create it by manipulation, coercion etc. (marketing, sales and so on) or the demand is created by the fear of them working for someone else (eg: corporate lawyer: if my competitor has one, I better have one just in case).
You are not alone in noticing these things. Advertising is harmful, and you're right to block it anywhere and everywhere you can.
However, it's not so much that advertising has lost the plot, as much as it's that advertising's purpose is to subvert the plot and rewrite a person's perception of reality. Advertising is, from a fundamental view, psychological manipulation. It exists to invent or reinforce a narrative in a person's mind, and society's mind at large.
Of course, you could apply this narrative of "psychological manipulation" to art, writing, and creativity as a whole, and in fact, I do!
Art and writing can share the purpose of inventing or reinforcing narratives in people and society, and they can be equally harmful as advertising. What differs advertising from its creative progenitor though, is that its purpose is specifically to manipulate. An advertisement's purpose is always to instill a narrative that is to the benefit (or rarely at the cost) of some entity. Art exists, advertising serves.
So I generally view advertising as a strayed path from art, twisted for uniquely harmful purposes. Advertising is the orc of creativity.
I’m stealing this!
Folks in Advertising (and Marketing) - at least the ones who still have a soul - know all too well how much damage it does. I had a few friends in it in the 90s and 00s who had the largest repertoire of existential and gallows humor. It was more than a little illuminating.
I’m very anti-ad too. Billboards are a blight. Cable and broadcast TV are intolerable.
When I am subjected to commercials, I use it as an opportunity to observe exactly who is spending the money on ad buys. It’s kind of telling. It seems like ads come from some interesting places… current lucrative grifts like gambling and insurance… or very often someone who has or is about to have a very bad PR issue. It can be useful for getting unintentional peeks behind the curtain.
That MyPillow jackass (sorry not sorry) was all over the elderly’s news network I have been forced to observe… and now he’s in the news for being in over his head with loan sharks. That kind of thing. Just ask “why are they advertising?” When you see a change. It can be interesting.
That said- there are good firms and good ways marketing can and should be done. Market research especially. The “click it or ticket” campaign is one of my favorite examples. Historically my home state would take out ad buys to promote wearing your seatbelt… and these were all about safely. Saving lives. One year they contracted a local marketing company who did a phone survey and found out nobody gives a crap about safety. So they switched to making it about money. The “Click it or Ticket” campaign was born. There was a huge improvement in seatbelt use. And in the following years I believe other states adopted it.
So, sometimes messaging is useful. I just think we are in a time where the worst money is the loudest and nobody is even trying to stem it because it’s one of the largest, if not THE largest industry in the US. Late stage capitalism.
You know, your idea about thinking about the money needed to pay for advertising is probably the best arguement against purchasing advertised products and services. If they have a huge budget for advertising, that means that a large percentage of whatever money you give them is going into it, which means you're overpaying for the product by sometimes drastic amounts.
Perhaps the best example is the auto industry. Their ads are everywhere; they don't really discriminate about where they advertise, they want the largest reach. But the crazy thing is that the average person is not in the car market, and even if they are they are more likely to be in the used car market. I wanted to get some more information on auto advertising and found this article from Statista; they are spending billions of dollars on advertising. I wonder how many ads come from a single car purchase? And in the meanwhile these companies are constantly doing everything they can to take from their laborers, leading to a number of union strikes in recent years. These people don't deserve our business.
There's actually a much worse example that people in the US should be painfully aware of, and that's pharmaceutical advertising. We are one of a vanishingly small number of countries that allow these things to be advertised the way they do (something incredibly irresponsible and damaging, but that's another can of worms for another time), and it gets done because drugs are often more expensive here by orders of magnitude.
Of course I don't mean to lump all advertising together; I'm not going to knock a local restaurateur from trying to get people to go to his shop with razor thin margins. But if a business is willing to spend billions of dollars trying to get you to buy their stuff, you probably shouldn't take their bait.
I appreciate your rant and I've felt the same for years. I don't think nonsensical ads are a new thing at all. Ads rarely engage your rational mind, because if there is something you need, you will go and get it without prompting.
When I was a little kid, I watched TV and there were a lot of ads for McDonald's. Very few of the ads mentioned the food at all. They would have Ronald McDonald interacting with kids. Or they would have weird costumed characters like Mayor McCheese or Grimace. I remember thinking then "wait, this is false advertising. If I go to McDonald's, I won't even be able to meet a clown or a guy in a fuzzy purple suit". The ads were just for brand recognition and to put the idea in your mind that the company exists.
With your Doordash example, maybe they are making an intentionally infuriating ad. It pisses you off in the moment, but maybe in a few months you'll want to get takeout and say to yourself "what was the name of that company with the stupid fucking ad? I think they can pick it up for me".
With respect to false advertising: Yeah it happens all the time. And not just for products. Witness the power of it on the recent presidential election in the US. Propaganda is basically the same as ads. And social media propaganda and ads are way more insidious than an infuriating commercial on Youtube. Way more subtle and insidious than product placement of iPhones in an Apple TV show. It is in control of the very videos that you are recommended, your social feed, the posts on reddit. It's everywhere and can be hard to spot.
I'll say up front one of my goals is to eliminate ads wherever possible. Usually this means paying for ad-free services, but I'm starting to be okay with piracy when ad-free options aren't available.
I agree, mainly they are trying to tap into emotions and tie them into the brand. Because that's what really affects people.
The emotions they tapped into (for me, as a parent are):
In my ideal world, I'd completely ban these kinds of 'mind virus' propaganda ads. Preferably, we'd have no ads at all. But I understand that new businesses need a way to spread awareness. So instead I propose that all ads must be black-and-white, text-only, verified factual statements. That way, you can announce a new product via ads, but you can't trick people into positive association or even just advertise sexy images and names often enough to get stuck in people's heads.
Naturally nobody else would get on board with this. But I honestly think ads are a complete net negative for society. They literally exist to trick you into wasting money on things you don't need or buying a certain brand because the ad was cool. And ads constantly make claims (or cleverly insinuate claims, like 'drive this car, get laid') that are simply not true. If I could snap my fingers and get rid of ads, the world would simply become better overnight. People would have to compare labels, ingredients, and supply chains. A whole infustry of trusted experts recommending decent items would pop up overnight.
The "mega rolls" marketing drives me nuts, too. When virtually every toilet paper company advertises this way, it just makes it harder to compare rolls count and length. I feel like I spend 5 minutes in the aisle trying to figure out the best value when I'd much rather be anywhere else.
Since you're a self-described ad hater, is it possible you've disabled ad customization in your Google account settings and forgotten about it? This setting applies to YouTube as well.
I assume this is the point
You’re probably right about me disabling their tracking but it still seems odd that I’m getting so many of these if I’m just a “general audience”.
You probably answered your own question right here:
Clearly you go to moderate lengths to avoid advertising — this necessarily entails limiting the underlying script embeds and other profiling tools that are scattered across the vast intelligence gathering operation that is Google AdWords. It should therefore be no surprise when they fail to effectively profile you.
There is something strange going on with big business owner targeted ads though. A local FM radio station (which can't possibly hyper-target anyone, just generalize over surrounding zip codes) constantly advertises ziprecruiter from the perspective of people trying to hire employees (and not the other way around).
I have heard many reads for ziprecruiter on my local NPR station as well. I think it they may he sponsoring the programs themselves.
I agree advertising has gotten worse in the last 10 years. However, I think it’s the quantity over quality approach that makes me feel they’ve lost the plot. Commercials used to market a brand alongside a product. Now it feels like the companies have realized “they can’t escape our ads, why waste money on higher effort marketing?” This started with the unboxing ads, which became influencer ads, and are now stylized either as quick cut TikToks or a single graphic with an AI voiceover. Maybe it’s because they’re trying to fit as much as possible in the 5 seconds before you can skip the ad.
I wish I could escape ads entirely. I’d like to setup a liberated home media server but I haven’t had the time to learn enough where I can trust I won’t create a gaping security hole.
My family knows that I'm privacy
paranoidconscious, so they're used to me advocating for adblocking and complaining about tracking and whatnot. My one privacy victory with them was getting everyone to use Signal for our family group chat, but even that wasn't because of privacy reasons. We are simply a mixed iOS/Android family and, at the time, years ago, messaging between those was so bad that Signal was the best way we could send each other pictures.I finally did get a few attaboys for it after the news of Salt Typhoon broke, by the way.
In talking with one family member about targeted advertising, she made a point that I'd never really considered. She said she actually loved targeted advertising and wanted the networks to learn more about her and target her even more. The more profiled she was, the better her ads, and the less decisions she had to make about what to buy and whatnot.
I know it sounds like she was simply being edgy or playing devil's advocate, but she genuinely meant it. To her, targeted advertising was essentially the same thing as a recommendation engine. Netflix shows her what she specifically likes to watch; Spotify plays her music that's aligned with her interests; and ads show her what she might want to buy.
One thing she said that stuck with me was that her ad environment was very efficient for her: she didn't have to waste time sifting through things and browsing around. Most things she simply wanted or needed were right there, either directly in her ad reel or in her consciousness from having played ads for her in the past.
I don't agree with her position, but I can see how someone would get there -- especially if they aren't starting from the basis, like many of us here are, that nearly all advertising and tracking is fundamentally bad.
But the efficiency thing resonates with me. I spend way too much time researching even small purchases, to the point that my time might be genuinely better served if I just put the trust for my decision-making in someone else's hands (i.e. advertisers). Saying that out loud genuinely makes me feel icky, but I can't deny that there's a root appeal to the idea of just going with "the algorithm."
To bring it back to Netflix: is it better for me to spend a long time searching for a movie I think I might love, or is it better to just watch the first one in my recommendations, knowing that it'll probably be at least decently interesting to me?
And, to take it a step further: is it better to fruitlessly browse Netflix for a while and then spend so much time doing so that I opt against watching any movie?
That's sort of how I live my life on a lot of fronts. I spend a lot of time analyzing different options rather than directly enjoying them. I think my family member saw advertising as a way of cutting through that noise -- a way of saving her time and energy.
She didn't change my opinion on ads (I personally still don't like them), but she changed my perspective on why other people might not share my disdain. I think most people are simply indifferent to them, but it really surprised me to learn that some people genuinely prefer the current ad environment that we live in.
A full aside: since this is a rant topic, can I say how much I hate that my husband and I pay for YouTube Premium to block ads only to have to sit through the people in my TV directly telling us about their new Mococoa drink? Yes, I'm aware of SponsorBlock, but my husband watches YouTube on our ShieldTV.
Also it's the principle of the issue. We're paying money to block ads, yet there's still an ad in every single video that we watch.
I cannot get my family off of Facebook messenger for similar android/iOS reasons, and it's annoying. I'm going to try a push to Signal again.
I'm closer to your family member about ads than I'd like to be. There are times the targeted advertising is really useful, I've genuinely found small businesses that do in fact sell random niche things that I could use or make good gifts for my friends with similar tastes.
It's more of a "if Google and Meta are going to know my entire life I might as well get ads for my cats instead of for wedding things or supplements" thing for me. I don't love them, but like, untargeted advertising is somehow worse as an experience.
I understand appreciating the recommendations algorithm - Netflix knows me very well by now and their tailored recommendations are part of the service. Being a closed platform there's already a baseline level of curation, and recommendations build on that to deliver what I want when I sit down to watch something: entertainment I will enjoy.
I don't understand feeling the same way about advertising from companies where there's no existing relationship and thus no reason to trust their claims. Though I do tend to the more anti-consumption side of the scale, so anything encouraging me to buy something, especially something new, is fighting an uphill battle to begin with.
It makes sense to prefer relevant ads to completely random. Though I guess it depends on your threshold for creepiness. It is one thing to get ads for restaurants in your area. It is something else to get ads for divorce lawyers and fatherhood tests once my kid turned 7, because apparently that is where these sort of services tend to be in demand.
While recommendations algorithms from the likes of Netflix and Spotify can be easy and frictionless, I would encourage trying to break free off them or at least be mindful of how they work. They will rarely challenge you or provoke, but mostly just provide something "not terrible".
With regards to targeted advertising, I believe that some of that is up to the advertiser right? I'm not big into advertising and I block much of it myself and I've never had a reason to run ads so I don't know first hand, but my understanding of the business model is that targeting is an upsell. You pay more to get more, in theory anyhow. Youtube or any other service surely has a lot of dynamics factoring into ad slots, I don't know if they always have targeted ads ready to serve up and then only fall back to general ads when they don't have any targeted ads. I mean presumably even in these scenarios Youtube wants the figures to work out that you are more likely to be interested in the ad, because advertisers demand would drop if it didn't, so there is an incentive for them to not just let advertisers throw their money away on advertising that doesn't hit the right audience, at least in terms of getting the right value out of what they paid to place the ads.
I find it kinda odd to think that only privileged white guys can be out of touch or for that to be the first stereotype imagined when something seems out of touch.
https://www.comparably.com/companies/doordash/executive-team
Not sure how accurate that site is, but looking at that and other sites, it appears DoorDash executive teams are anything but full of privileged white guys. Granted that doesn't mean all of those people have anything to do with what advertising they run, but even in that scenario it's likely indicative that their advertising team isn't full of privileged white guys either.
Sure, and the whole point of the meme is that it's disappointing for the kid. Because you'd rather eat out. Everyone, deep inside, empathizes with the disappointment of the kid (well, at least most normal people). So, then the twist of the ad is that - you still get to eat take out!
Woohoo!
So I went through a phase of being completely enraged by advertising the moment I started cutting it out of my life. This was mainly done for the sake of my kid not being as overexposed as I was growing up. This rage subsided after a couple years of ad minimalization but it is completely warranted. The thing is our ability to view content without being bombarded by mind-altering marketing material is such a new way of living. I think having the freedom from ads has made some of us realize how marketers got to us for all of those years, and that scorn and resentment can rear itself in ugly ways.
The phrase is actually "There's food in the house", or better translated "We have food at home", which is something parents all over the US have 100% said to their kids at some point.
The funny thing is my parents definitely said it not just because there was food at home, but because they (and 100% other parents) were implying money was already spent on groceries, and eating out was too expensive, and thus a waste. So it's kinda hilarious because Door Dash is (as you said) implying that ordering over priced food, and paying their absurd delivery fees is somehow a financially cheaper option than just letting the groceries you already bought go bad.
Point being it's a much worse ad than what you said in your rant when the Spanish phrase is properly translated.
If don’t advertising is not inherently bad, anymore than production and an economy are bad, but midern advertising is the pits. I need stuff to live, and I want the best stuff for me, and at some point a producer has to announce the stuff they made that might be the stuff I want, and that’s necessary advertising.
Of course, modern advertising goes so far beyond this. As another user put it, most midern advertising is attempting to motivate you to do something the advertisers want, regardless of your actual needs or wants, by altering your perception of reality. Sometimes this has disastrous results, see for example edvard bernays operations for united foods in Central America.
It’s especially horrific for young minds who are soaking everything in and accepting agressive messaging as true. And I’m old, but I’m pretty sure as adults media has become more sophisticated, the evil effect had magnified.
I wish to God I had a solution. It’s annoying at best, deadly at worst and ever on the rise.
I agree with you that advertising seems out of touch with reality. However I don't believe this is a mistake on the advertisers' part, but that it's by design. The very purpose of advertising is to convince you that you need a product regardless of whether that's true or not (and especially if it isn't, after all if it was you would probably already be a customer). The current state of advertising willfully violates basic principles of consent, privacy, and safety, and is completely unsalvageable. Were it up to me, every company responsible for keeping it afloat would be dismantled with extreme prejudice.
I (fortunately) do not have the kind of power to do that, but what I do have is an ad blocker. They obviously don't do much on their own (and it's not like ads only exist on the Internet) but the fact that Google/Alphabet, a spearhead of the advertising industry, is putting so much effort toward suppressing ad blockers is a good indicator that using one is in fact a threat to their interests... and is therefore an effective way to fight back against it. I've been promoting the use of (or dare I say, advertising) uBlock Origin and I encourage everyone to do the same... though given the same sentiment is resoundingly echoing throughout this thread, I suspect I'm preaching to the choir here :)
It's a lot less risky than smashing up billboards, at any rate.
EDIT: reworded opinion incorrectly stated as fact in the beginning
Can’t comment much on the actual topic, just that I’m just as sick of it as you are.
That said, a potentially relevant suggestion:
If you have control over your home network’s configuration, you could consider looking into Pi-Hole for network-wide adblocking? Will work for the TV and, at least at home, the phone too.
(And I’ll leave a link for maybe AdGuard for your phone/laptop/other non-home network needs, too, although I know little about their pricing these days. I still have a lifetime license for several devices from some years ago.)
The mistake is to look for any rationality or reality in advertising. It's purposefully designed to play on emotion and manipulate our psyches. In this case, they want to conflate "eating cheaply at home" with "eating takeout at home". And it will work because there are many people who will not give it much thought and just accept that DoorDash is a viable alternative to eating cheaply at home.
It preys on a different market to you, and it works. Ad companies hire some of the smartest people around, even though it doesn't look like it sometimes.
I hate most advertising with a passion too, although I do recognize that there is some very creative and clever advertising. A lot of it borders on evil, but some is harmless or even designed to do good (think some of the charitable campaigns).
Could be playing off that "we have X at home" meme, where X is usually a pale imitation of what was asked for. (The popularity of that meme suggests that home cooking is not always what it's cracked up to be, at least from the kid's perspective)
Well I do like the idea that DoorDash admits they are giving you a worse version of restaurant food…. 😉