Advertising has lost its charm

[Zombiethederg]

Advertising over the years ive noticed has like. Lost its luster. We've gone from the Cheerios Mascot stopping an evil clone of himself from stealing all the honey, to every ad (and I do mean every ad. Including childrens toys) just being "oooh. Product good. Buy the product"

I almost see it like a lost art form. Do you all remember many advertisements that stuck out to you? I remember one from my childhood, being the Pillow Pets commercial, to give an example.

It'd play over and over and it made me BEG my parents to get me a ladybug one.... I lost it in a move :C

[Absentmind]

I think the "meta" has changed for advertisement as we've seen the power of it through the internet in our life time. I know that a lot of ads are made purely for shortform content which is why they are "product name, product good *user clicks skip ad*". It's also more swamped more with those weird mobile game ads that you see absolutely everywhere but you can still find some pretty fun and creative stuff if you poke around (which itself seems like a weird concept right? looking for advertisements?) .

Part of me wonders if the lowering in quality of toy ads is attributed to the rise of iPad kids? We're onto something here! 

As for an advertisement that is absolutely seared into my brain and I'll probably be shouting it when I'm old an senile, is the Crusha Ad.

Way ahead of it's time for its meme-ability and everyone knew it. I'm sure anyone from the UK & Ireland will recognise this

[Memory]

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[xXWebMasterXx_Gina]

Ads are a strange thing. If you asked me how I felt about the ads playing in the early 2000's when I was watching cartoons or something, I'd tell you I hated them! They replayed over and over again to the point of insanity  . But, of course now I'd tell you they were nostalgic and like you said, more interesting and well developed than they are now. In fact I can't even recall a modern commercial off the top of my head like I could with the ones in the 2000's!

But that's just TV. When you add the internet into the mix things get a little more interesting. Take for example how popular Billy Mays' infomercials, the Will It Blend? YouTube channel and the series of Japanese Ronald McDonald ads were! These were not just tolerated but liked!

Then there's things like banner ads which were ingrained into internet culture. You had websites like The Million Dollar Homepage which was just entirely composed of ads! And then there were interactive ads like J was saying. I remember how some flash websites would have these fake banner ads that told you to shoot enemies (i.e Bush Shootout) but when you clicked, it just redirected you to some scummy website XD.

But to that point, as charming as some Banner Ads have been, they were always kind of icky. They were primarily used to take up space on a website so every user was just one accidental click away to some kind of scam or virus site.

Ooh and then there were ads in the form of entire flashgames, and promotional websites! Even cross-promotions with established webgames such as Neopets and Gaia Online!

Jeez where am I going with all this? I guess at the end of the day I gotta agree with Zombie. Despite all the bad parts, ads certainly were more entertaining back then! 

[Zombiethederg]

those weird mobile game ads

Oh GOD dont get me started on those. When they first made their emergence around 2017-2018, I figured they'd eventually get booted off of youtube / tiktok for the fact that some of them borderlined on downright fetish material. But yet, years later, I still see lots of ads like that which ARE just straight up fetish material. I wont get too graphic, but it baffles me that something hasnt been done about this. I'd understand as well if the ads were advertising like, an actual game, but its always the same MMO Strategy game where you don't get to see the combat happening, or a crappy Match 3 game that no one could give less of a fuck about

Way ahead of it's time for its meme-ability and everyone knew it. I'm sure anyone from the UK & Ireland will recognise this

and YES I love the Crusha ad. Ive lived in America all my life so I never saw this personally on the TV, but I remember seeing it in weird videos / edits and just wondering what the hell it was meant to be. Such a good one though, and one of my favorites.

[arsenicCatnip]

id say thats just the allure of nostalgia speaking. adverts have always been cringe. when i was a kid, there were lots of stupid things on tv, same as there probably is today. there was an advert made sometime in the 80s for flake chocolate that was weirdly, WEIRDLY sensual, and id say its aged quite well. wouldnt be surprised if it aired today.

one relatively recent advert that i DO remember finding silly, however, was a 2014-ish?? advert for cravendale milk, featuring "barry the biscuit boy" who swims in milk and crumbles apart. but if youre surfing the web rather than watching tv, keep using an ad blocker and you'll be right as rain.

[xixxii]

yeah, it also sounds to me like you just aren't a little kid any more so ads don't work as well on you, haha! there have always been boring ads and "zany/wacky/silly" ads. that "pillow pets" ad doesn't strike me as especially interesting or charming or creative or like it's a super different style or tone from, say, this 2024 ad for rainbow high dolls:

if anything it seems to me that advertising is more charming and successful now than ever, since the rise of influencer marketing has turned basically everything online into an ad for something - the structure and expectations and forms of advertising have gotten a lot more innovative and diverse over the years. the art form of advertising is massive! the recent trend of brand movies has made multiple-hours-long ads into a respected & beloved subgenre of film, even! the barbie movie was nominated for a bunch of oscars, which is i think the least lost an art form can be! 

television ads specifically might be different (i don't watch tv any more), but that's probably a result of the way people watch tv (and the demographics of who watches tv) changing a lot over the years.

[glitchlynx]

I wonder if some of the reason ads don't seem as fun anymore is because they are more personalized. I can reference pillow pets in a conversation with someone because we were all seeing the same ads on television at the time - they were as much a part of pop culture as the shows themselves. This is less the case when everyone is seeing different ads targeted to them in a feed. You can't make jokes about a funny commercial when no one else has seen it.

I've been watching a lot of Tubi lately, which is one of those free with ads streaming services. There's a series of ads I keep seeing with the same character, and I've been thinking about it in relation to personalized ads and having so many entertainment options. These ads in particular are... well, I wouldn't go as far as to say I enjoy them, but they annoy me less than some of the others. But I can't reference this character in conversation because I'm pretty sure no one else has seen the ad. It would probably be more fun if I could.

(here's the commercial I'm talking about, if you were curious)

Obviously there are also different styles and marketing techniques now too, that always going to keep changing. I just wonder if some of the ads that are the most fun and memorable are the ones you can joke about later, and due to the way we receive advertisements now, there are less of those.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

I genuinely used to look forward to commercial breaks back in the '80s and '90s but around the mid '00s I noticed they got boring and sterile, and now ads I see on YT make me want to scream - so boring and long and pointless.

[soapfriendo]

i think advertising has always been deceptive in one way or another. maybe if it was exclusively used by smaller businesses and creators i wouldn't be against it, but when you have things like companies using jingles to get their product stuck in your head, or lying about their products or claiming that buying their stuff is "self care", or using older campaigns to nostalgia bait ppl, or the dystopian nature of personalization among other things, it can be incredibly annoying

.....that being said, i have an interest in consumer aesthetics and old company webpages. believe it or not, i'm pretty sure cari is where terms like "y2k aesthetic" and "frutiger aero" originated from, although i'm more into cassette futurism, rad dog, and pulp fantasy.

as for old company webpages, i was thinkin i cld just show off some pages i rly enjoy, these consist of entertainment companies, online shops, and bands that signed to big record labels

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[garystu]

hey is everyone in this thread ok?

all advertising sucks ass. obviously! fuck ads!

nostalgia is a powerful thing. I hate it! old ads aren't better! it's all a scam to sell you sugar and plastic, and always has been!

low budget web-native ads now are the modern equivalent of ads for local businesses back in the day. Awkward, unprofessional, scrappy, and not in an engaging or endearing way. yep, there were certainly a lot of those in the "good old days", to be forgotten by the curation of nostalgia.

Simpsons did it:

id say thats just the allure of nostalgia speaking. adverts have always been cringe. when i was a kid, there were lots of stupid things on tv, same as there probably is today. there was an advert made sometime in the 80s for flake chocolate that was weirdly, WEIRDLY sensual, and id say its aged quite well. wouldnt be surprised if it aired today.

one relatively recent advert that i DO remember finding silly, however, was a 2014-ish?? advert for cravendale milk, featuring "barry the biscuit boy" who swims in milk and crumbles apart. but if youre surfing the web rather than watching tv, keep using an ad blocker and you'll be right as rain.

I agree.

[xXWebMasterXx_Gina]

as for old company webpages, i was thinkin i cld just show off some pages i rly enjoy, these consist of entertainment companies, online shops, and bands that signed to big record labels

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Oooh! These are so cool!    I think this is what Zombie was getting at. These are well crafted website designs that are unique and interactive; they engage the viewer with something beyond just The Product(TM).

It's like when I mentioned ads in the form of flashgames; sure, they are trying to sell you something and have branding all over em, but it's still a game that can be played.

Nowadays, you're lucky if something has a webpage at all. Major video game and movie releases used to have these big websites where you could watch trailers, download wallpapers, read bits of lore, the works! Now marketing is reduced to social media links and a discord invite lol  .

hey is everyone in this thread ok?

all advertising sucks ass. obviously! fuck ads!

nostalgia is a powerful thing. I hate it! old ads aren't better! it's all a scam to sell you sugar and plastic, and always has been!

Don't you think that's a pretty large generalization? Sure an ads an ad, but it's still an artform at the end of the day. Are trailers, teasers, posters, etc., inherently bad?