• Riskable@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    People are accepting of ads because ads are literally everywhere. A world without ads would be very strange indeed!

    Every logo that exists and every product that has its own name/brand printed on it is an ad. Every product name in a catalog or simple list is an ad.

    A world without ads would be like hundreds of years ago when you could buy soap that just looked like soap with no labels and no packaging at all. When the only food you purchased was bare produce/meat (or the whole animal). But even then any assembled/manufactured product would have some sort of “maker’s mark”.

    I mean, how long have humans been branding cattle? That’s the original use of that term!

    • Sergio@slrpnk.net
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      1 month ago

      That’s an excellent point. Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to recomment the product of a particularly skilled soapmaker or farmer, you’d say “Jo made that”, and maybe you could point to Jo’s logo on the product so your friends knew how to recognize it. So the signifier of quality (the brand) pointed to the signified of a quality product. But now the signifier has become disentangled from the signified: the advertisements and marketing campaigns promote brand loyalty even if the product becomes worse through inferior ingredients or shrinkflation. Because of this, the signifier is presented to us when we do not want to see it.

    • zea
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      1 month ago

      A logo’s very different from what I would consider an “ad”. I don’t mind logos existing, but anything pushed in my face is horrible and I hate it.