Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

8mo ago

What are your best intrusive ads ideas?

If your job was to come up with greater enshittification for society, what would you do?

My ideas:

Rental apartments where every wall has a screen with ads 24/7. You can pay cheaper rent to live with ads in every wall or you can pay a monthly subscription to turn off the ads (you don't get to use the screens for anything else tho). After people get used to it we can start adding a little bit of ads even for the subscription users, just a little less.
Movie theaters. This one is obvious, why did anyone think it was ok to give people access to uninterrupted movies just because they paid a couple bucks? We should include some ads in the middle of movies in the cinema duh.
Water and electricity. Private utility providers should be able to require you to watch a certain amount of ads on their apps in order to deliver their services to you every month (you still also pay normally ofc).
Alarm clocks. Smartphones should delete the option to pick a custom sound for alarm and instead wake you up with loud ads. Installing any custom alarm app should require root and we should lobby government to ban devices with alarm clocks which are not smart.
Unified ad-watching score. Similar to credit score, you will gain points by not skipping ads, having the selfie camera turned on while watching an ad (to make sure you looking), having the microphone on to make sure it isn't muted, etc. Every platform contributes to your score. They can use your ad-watching score to give you benefits or punish you as they please.

103 comments

Please don't give them ideas. If they could figure out how to beam ads to our brains when sleeping they would.

Night sky ads.
Why have all that empty space when you can make it look like Times Square?
- You are right, we should be able to build a mega laser cluster capable of projecting ads on the surface of the moon.
  
  Not the moon, that’s thinking too small.
  It should be completely covering the night sky, making it bright as day with glorious capitalism!
  
  In Heinlein's story "The Man Who Sold The Moon", a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon ... in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo'd.
  
  I have to imagine that the only reason we haven't seen this happen yet is because the technology to do so hasn't been invented yet.
  But, assuming that somebody comes up with some sort of projector-like device that can actually do this... is there anything that would legally prevent it from happening? Like, are there any sort of international laws against advertising on celestial bodies?

Calm down, Satan.

Sitting on a plane and the screen in front of you plays ads the whole flight.
- I always take out those paper ads that are attached to the top of the seat if front and turn them around so I'm not staring at them for a 5 hour flight.
  
  I thought I was the only one. Fuck you Easyjet!
- I just had a few flight with Air China and after the security film they showed sponsors for it. Thanks Intel for making sure we survive an emergency.
- Abort abort abort abort abort abort abort
- Getting some real clockwork orange vibes here.

Nice try, Zuck

“This nuclear attack warning was brought to you in association with our partners at Squarespace.”

Nice try Evil Corp

Stop this thread, and burn it with fire.

Remember those mobile games where you can watch ads to get some gold and diamonds or simply pay for them with real money? Well, I can imagine a dystopian future where that logic has been applied to everything.
Wanna press an elevator button? Pay with shopping center diamonds or watch this quick ad.
Wanna try on this shirt before buying it? Ads. Is this made of cotton? Ads.
Take the escalator to the next floor? Ads.
Wanna check the info screen to figure out where you can find a restaurant in this shopping center? Ads.
Wanna unlock different parts of the menu? Ads. Wanna see the prices too? Ads. Allergens? Ads again.
Need to go to the toilet? Ads. Want some toilet paper? More ads.
If you encounter this literally every 30 seconds, spending some money on those shopping center diamonds suddenly becomes a very appealing idea.
On the outside of the mall you see a punk looking guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. You feel a sudden urge to join in whatever he is up to.
Anyway, if you want some more suffering and sadness, simply dump the first lines to GPT and ask it to take this dystopia to its logical conclusion. It could get pretty wild.
- Want to put gas in your car? Ads. That talk and there's no way to silence them.
  Oh, no, wait, that one is real. Are they everywhere yet? I haven't driven a car in several years. But I definitely remember that was real dystopian shit, similar to how I felt when I started getting ads in Windows.

Kill it all with fire

A typing game like Mario Teaches Typing or Typing of the Dead except all the sentences are ad slogans or brand names.
Emergency phone lines have ads at the beginning of the call to help pay for emergency services (because the government won't pay for them).
Revoke regulation that requires disclaimers on paid endorsements (in other words, you have no idea if someone is endorsing a product because they like it, or because they were paid to talk about it).
Digital piracy is now a felony on par with drug felonies.
Ad blocking is now digital piracy.
Copyright is now indefinite, applied retroactively. An agency is formed to pursue copyright infringement on behalf of deceased rights holders and defunct companies.
Criticism is no longer considered free speech if it leads to direct or indirect economic damage ("your rights end where mine begin!")
Referencing or speaking about a copy-protected work in-depth constitutes copyright infringement. However, enforcement is up to the rights holder except in the case of deceased individuals or defunct companies.
The last three may seem tangential, but together it means companies can take action against you for talking negatively about their advertisements and products, regardless of how old they are. Now companies like Disney can use copyright to permanently erase things like The Song of the South or Walt Disney's Nazi boner.
Advertising is allowed on voter ballots (the voting process can be expensive after all).
Politicians must publicly endorse companies which endorse them (it's only fair). Failing to do so is considered a form of ad blocking.
Public schools may include advertisements in their curriculum to augment teacher salaries. There are no restrictions on how many advertisements are presented, how they are presented, or the extent of their presentation. Choosing not to present an advertisement that is part of the curriculum is considered a form of ad blocking. "You have to pay teachers somehow, and I'll be damned if it comes out of my pocket".
I could probably come up with more, but this is making me depressed.

Ad-based apps on your phone.
It’s been done already, you say? Not like this: the front-facing camera is used to detect eye gaze. A counter on the screen starts at 30 seconds and only counts down while you are looking at the screen. If you look away, the counter, and the ad, pauses. The app doesn’t continue until you’ve watched the entire ad.
- Even better. The countdown resets if you look away
  
  Faaaaaak Please delete this before they see it!
- That's the next level of what turned me away from Spotify the very first time I used it years ago. Their ads would pause if you muted the audio or even lowered the volume too close to muted. Sure, I could take off my headphones, but it was a matter of principle at that point.

A MLM style whisper campaign app your friends can run where it actually listens in on the conversation and allows them to make money for dropping product mentions and recommendations to you and others during hang outs and in person conversations with the recording to tag and prove they actually mentioned it.
- Cool we can turn this into a new gig work app. The uber of ads. You open up the app and pay people small amounts to name drop something in a conversation. You could pay like 50 cents per person to 200 different people in your area to name drop your small business, that shit would slap. Then we could start using this to make people say anything for 50 cents each time they say it so we can spread fake news and gossip. I like this version of the future so much.

You have to watch an ad to crank your car.
Every time you bring your car to a full stop while it is running, an ad plays through your audio system and displays on your radio.
You have to watch an ad to make a phone call.
When your phone rings, it plays an ad jingle, call JG Wentworth 877 cash now.
When you send a text message or write a text post to an online system, an ad is injected with your text post so that readers in order to read what you wrote also have to read the ad.
If you have Smart lights or anything smart in your home, in order to use it you have to watch an ad.
In order to pay for something with a credit card you have to watch an ad on the credit card machine and click one of the choices that are offered to you.
Smart pillows that play hypnotic ads at you in your sleep.
Your electric toothbrush requires an ad to be played the whole time it is being used, and if you brush your teeth for less than the length of the ad, then they take a dollar from you.
Some guy comes to your house and screams logos and add quotes at you all of the time. If you try to get him to shut up he murders you and your entire family.
Replace the guy with a robot.

Two videos for you to watch:
Hyper-Reality, a PoV short film featuring an overqualified gig worker in a world of ubiquitous, ad-laden and heavily enshittified AR. https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
This Euro-News article which features a Murdoch-owned advertising agency trying to get train windows turned into bone-conducting acoustic transmitters so weary travellers are forced to listen to ads as they resr their heads. https://youtu.be/1KZATgg7bJo
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/YJg02ivYzSs
  https://piped.video/1KZATgg7bJo
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  Good bot.

The thing is. Any advert I hear is typically for a product I will never purchase. And TBH even if it was a category of thing I might purchase, the fact that I’m being assaulted by an advert means I am guaranteed not to purchase that thing.

Smart contact lenses and also smart built-in lenses that work like cataract surgery lenses.
These are given away free and basically make traditional optometry have to change to a lower volume higher cost model. We also outlaw lasik on the grounds that it is more dangerous than smart lense implants.
The smart lenses track you and interact with personalised location specific advertiser content at each surveillance point, allowing them to show ads directly to your retina.
- "We've noticed that your eyes track boobs a lot, so here are some ads for better bras to reduce back ache."
  
  Or worse, glancing at boobs results in "horny women in your area" pop ups even if you were just bra shopping.

Some 'innovator' writing all this down.
1 and 2 seem very possible. But 2 may lead to more piracy. So anti-policy lobbying may happen too.
The ones can be gradually introduced.

5 sounds fun to exploit. Could just record myself staring at the screen on a loop, then loop the audio back to input, leave it on 24/7 and reap whatever godawful "benefits" come from having a great ad watching score.

If technology wasn't an issue: Dream ads. Naked at school? Calvin Kleins got you covered.
- Futurama, eh?
  
  We all had commercials in our dreams but you don’t see us running off to buy brand name merchandise at low low prices.

A transparent ad centred on your mouse cursor.
- Noah, get the boat!

Brain implants that steal your thought patterns, which then get fed into some artificial intelligence that can create the perfect ad for your to see, which then gets directed straight into your brain with the same implant so you're pretty much forced to buy it. Maybe they can straight up alter your thoughts directly so you want to buy something, skipping the need for ads.
Oh wait... I'm probably just describing what Elon is up to in the long run.
- Don't be silly. Elon is going to anonymize the data extraction first, categorise you into one of five badly defined groups, and then beam that shitty group product back into your brain.

I for one, am severely disappointed that i do not have relevent and targeted ads to view, while i am filling out online applications for jobs. i also still don't see ads when i put the same information again on a paper application, as part of their company's interview process or when filling out the tax paperwork if i get hired and i haven't gotten ads yet when applying for food stamps due to the job not paying anything close to enough to survive off of and you know, come to think of it, i have not once seen an ad on any of my termination letters or paychecks either. actually, that's probably because i never get either of those, they just tell me to stop ringing the bell and hand them the bucket of cash or tell me to return the wendy's uniform within a week or i get a $35 fine deducted from my last paycheck and that i'm no longer allowed on the property after what happened behind the dumpster but that's another story, i digress.
they should have ads on cash too. just because some people only use plastic cards and NFC to pay for things, doesn't mean everyone does. poor people have a right to be bombarded with ads from their choice of currency, even if it is for things they cannot afford. it is a grave injustice of equal rights, that when i'm holding a cardboard sign on the freeway onramp begging for change, the pittance of coins i'm being pelted with aren't blaring slogans from tiny built in speakers. when i'm dancing at the topless bar, the greasy singles being crumpled up and thrown at me don't even play ads that sync up with the song i dance to and never, not one fucking time has my song and dance been interrupted for an important advertising announcement, it's only ever interrupted by the strip club staff telling me to leave and never come back and that guys can't dance to 'touch myself' by the divinyls no matter how flexible they are. i digress.
this is sarcasm mixed with weak attempts at humor. nothing should be considered truthful or accurate however some might be based on true events which have been altered or exagerrated for effect. This message was brought to by typing and no AI was harmed or used in the making of this comment.

I’m reminded of a classic greentext.
PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE

Motion activated cemetery headstones.
- Make money for your family, after you're gone! If you get 1 million visitors, you get 1000 dollars a month! Just need to train a bird to swoop by every few minutes, and you're living the life!
  
  Oh, sorry, your cost of plot rent is now $1500 per month.

this amber alert alert is brought to you by alerts-r-us!
...
this amber alert is brought to you by alerts-r-us!
- The vast majority of amber alerts in most areas are because of abuses of government child care services. The attorneys working for these places make a hefty commission based on the amount that can justify by any means they wish really. So in a round about way it is like an ad in a few ways.
  
  and it gets more fun if there's an alert for an impending amber alert

No one is allowed to wear "work clothes" anymore, like a suit & tie or any professional type of clothing like that. Instead you will be required to wear clothing covered with printed ads in ALL professions. The police, doctors, bus driver, newscaster, everyone everywhere while at work.
- If you go the NASCAR route, it'd make it way easier to find out who bought your politicians. And which pharma company bought lunch for your doctor last week.
  
  Exactly.

Open source housing units when?
- when houses become free, land/freeholds will be the new hustle. Cappies gotta cap.

Give a discount on food purchases so long as people agree to having every purchase tracked abd their data sold to marketing companies so they can figure out how to manipulate people into buying more shit they don't need.
People's food purchases are already scanned in before they buy them, so all that's needed is to get people to scan in some kind of card to connect their purchases to their identity. A small discount can be offered so people will fill out a form connecting their identity to the card and then every time they scan the card with their purchases we can track everything they buy forever.
Oh wait, that's actually already commonplace.,

Have groups of quadcopters/does fly down streets over cars stuck at stoplights and show ads and/or play ads at them.
You could wait for the light to go red, then form up in a wall over the crosswalk to show the drivers waiting down the street your ad. They're just going to be looking at the stoplight anyway, so that's free eyeball time, right?

If this is the path of society, I'll go live off nature completely off grid.

The medical field is ripe for some intrusive ads to boost revenues! Possibilities are endless:
Ad-supported hearing aids ("this conversation will resume after a quick message from our sponsors!")
Pacemakers - want to watch an ad for 100 more free heartbeats?
Surgery - this will leave a visible scar, but how about we make the cut look like the Amazon logo ?
Implants - click the nipple and watch an ad to re-inflate the left breast for 10 more days

It's disgusting how many things people can still do without being exposed to advertising.
Loudspeakers: Imagine how many speakers there are in the world, and how often they're not playing anything. All loudspeakers should always play ads if not utilized for anything else.
Edit: I went hiking last weekend, and while out there the silence was deafening. Out in the wild, where it's relatively quiet, we'd only need to place speakers every few hundred meters to efficiently broadcast ads to hikers and such.

You know ad-supported kindles? Expand that to phones, TVs computers. Anything that can show or play an ad while it is off or when you turn it on. It's free real estate!
- Isn't windows 11 doing that now? I only use it at work and I think only Home Editions are affected.

[off topic] "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth. In a polluted future where the wealthy ride in rickshaws, an advertising company is given the job of selling the human race on emigration to Venus.
It was written back in the 1950s, and it's funny to see how some of the things the writers thought of as satire became normal business practice.

I would auction shelf space at my mega chain grocery store to large brands. The highest bidder would have the opportunity to buy up all the shelf space in order to bury any potential competition. The bidder could create 100s of different labels of essentially the same goddamn product, in order to maintain the illusion of choice, maximize consumer confusion, and thus maximize the time a customer spends thinking about the shelf-dominant brand, for some otherwise dead-simple purchase, such as toothpaste.
- Ummm I think they already do this...

Replace the glass cooler doors in the drink section with huge screens that display ads abd obscure the contents, then use a sketchy motion sensor to trigger a delayed screen full of what's probably inside the cooler.
Oh wait nvm, they've already got that.
Mandatorily implanted lenses in your eyes that track your location and collect all the data off everything you see, trading it out over Wi-Fi while downloading ads for your surroundings in real time while simultaneously leaking your private information, telling the government everything, and ratting you out to your employer and insurance company.
But only if it's cheaper than a brain chip that does the same things.

Why do we need custom backgrounds for our phones and computers? That's free space that could be ads. Especially good if clicking/tapping on the background causes a full screen, unclosable, unskippable ad. Because a misclick is definitely showing interest in the product.
Browser load times. Slow that down a bit, and you've got enough time to pop an ad in between every page load.

Nice try EA, but you're not getting my golden ideas for free.

Having to interact with the ad for a set amount of time(opening the site promoted) to be able to continue using the app
Having to buy a minimum amount of promoted products would be extra evil

Every marketing executive: (taking notes)
- Are you kidding? OP is getting us to write their Master's thesis in Marketing right now!

Put ads for Twinkies on your can of Coke.

Escalator commercial break. Stops the escalator until the ad is done.
- "this escalator is temporarily stairs. You're welcome." -Mitch Hedberg
  The real one to worry about is stopping the elevator for an ad break. You're trapped now removed!
  
  One ad break between each floor or pay for direct lift that is a killer idea.
  
  If only I had paid for quick walking.

Quit crowdsourcing your goddamn school assignments.

If any of these become a reality I am fully prepared and willing to commit acts of-
[removed by moderator]

Ads etched into glasses. Maybe tiny screens if that's possible.

Michael Scott No no No. no NO dot meme

This guy ads

When people start to live in space, we can ration oxygen to the occupants, force them to view ads to live or pay for subscriptiom

Lol ads that can be engineered into DNA, so that they can be passed down for generations.
- We could end up engineering birth marks with arbitrary shapes like the Nike logo which may be passed on to offspring
- I bet someone will find a way to do that with CRISPR CAS-9...

Clothing with patches sewn into the interior in the shape of the brand you're trying to sell. Like braille ads, but for your clothes.

103 comments