The Ad Blocking Wars

A couple of years ago, here in the UK the Disney Junior channel started showing ads. My son was around 3 at the time.

Prior to that we let him watch that channel and the Cbeebies channel (no ads on that one either) but when the ads came on between the Disney Junior shows we stopped watching it. Now we record stuff from it and when we play it back, it starts from the beginning of the show.

I actually wrote to Disney in the UK about it (an actual, paper letter) and complained. The gist was that they had made several billion $ the year before and how much difference do they really think that these ads would make. I also quoted a few studies I found online at the time about the dangers too.

When I sent the letter, I said to my wife that I bet they reply with something along the lines of "carefully chosen advertisers that fit with their guidelines" or other bullshit... lo and behold that was what their reply was all about.

I emailed a reply to that letter with just a few words: "Cillit Bang? Really?". (yes, thats the kind of ads they are showing alongside the usual toys and stuff).

I hate advertising: I am definitely not an advertisers target audience because I hate being "sold to"... I can decide I want something on my own and then make an informed decision about it without ads telling me this this is awesome!

However, that isn't the main reason for my hatred towards them. The amount of psychology involved in ads now and the effect on children is the main reason.

There is a Ted talk by Simon Sinek[1] which I would encourage everyone to watch and partly centers around this phrase: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it".

Now the phrase seems innocuous enough but it means that a particular part of the brain is engaged when we see something and think "Man, I must have that"... but you probably can't actually rationalise it: You likely don't need it but you damn well want it!

I am no scientist but I reckon the ad agencies know this and know how to hit those parts of the brain for maximum effect but as an intelligent adult, I can filter it out! I am not led by the nose.

However, my fear is that children, with their sponge-like ability to absorb all kinds of stuff into their developing brains, can't, and don't know how to filter this out. Worse than that my fear is that their brain then adapts to that targetting becoming the norm, thereafter turning them into consumers to keep the wheel turning. I will not let that happen to my son.

It scares me to be honest but I am not one of these get-the-government-involved types as I have chosen to not let him see adverts and that is enough regulation imo.

That being said, he did see a few in the run up to Christmas and his reaction was as you would expect: It revolved around "I want that" to almost every ad (except girly ones of course :-).

In addition, I block all online ads. All of them! I refuse point-blank to be tracked by anyone (within reason of course, I have an Amazon account... as an aside, has anyone else noticed that Amazon's You-Might-Be-Interested-In-This recommendation engine shows you the same stuff you already bought?) so I use uBlock Origin and NoScript. I do pay for a couple sites that appeal to me but I will not have my web experience ruined with pages shuffling about as ad content loads, or have drive-by javascript injections thrust upon me...

[1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

Where exactly is the line between "manipulating" and "changing view"? There are many associations and causalities studied with regards to human mind, should I be guilty of manipulation if I create a promotional poster using colours which are associated with some particular emotional response? In the end this is another of the cases where intent is everything, and for better or worse intent cannot be measured.

However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed.

Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.

Of course, unless you are Google or Facebook, you have very little ability to lower the 'global' shittiness of ads, but you have a lot of ability to make your own ads more lucrative and targeted.