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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

Teon ,
@Teon@kbin.social avatar

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.

AlligatorBlizzard ,

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.

Teon ,
@Teon@kbin.social avatar

Exactly.

azimir ,

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?

ActionHank , (edited )

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.

LemmyFeed ,

Ummm I think they already do this...

Dagwood222 ,

[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.

Etterra , (edited )

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.

Jaffa ,

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!

bassomitron ,

Isn't windows 11 doing that now? I only use it at work and I think only Home Editions are affected.

espentan , (edited )

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.

lazylion_ca ,

Put ads for Twinkies on your can of Coke.

RandomVideos ,

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

bstix ,

Escalator commercial break. Stops the escalator until the ad is done.

KittenBiscuits ,

"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 bitches!

bstix ,

If only I had paid for quick walking.

GreatDong3000 OP ,

One ad break between each floor or pay for direct lift that is a killer idea.

Mr_Fish ,

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.

AlexanderESmith ,
@AlexanderESmith@kbin.social avatar

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

Donebrach ,
@Donebrach@lemmy.world avatar

Quit crowdsourcing your goddamn school assignments.

dmegatool ,
@dmegatool@lemmy.ca avatar

This guy ads

crozilla ,

Every marketing executive:
(taking notes)

Railing5132 ,

Are you kidding? OP is getting us to write their Master's thesis in Marketing right now!

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