I’ve seen others recently, but the two I saw today are a Capital One commercial and a Progressive commercial.
In the first, the Capital One guy is talking to a couple of people. He is asked what he does for fun, and he does not know what to say. Then, they cut to him getting ready to sleep at the bank.
Another is the Progressive commercial where Flo talks with another woman about vacations. The other woman doesn’t seem to know what a vacation is. Flo begins describing what one is. In the end, she says she doesn’t really know, gives up, and says she’s never been on one either.
I was thinking about them while driving and came to the title thought.
The cold medicine commercials are big on going to work while ill. If you can’t sleep because you’re sick as fuck, please don’t come to work and pass it to the rest of us!
Then please give sick pay to EVERY job. My options while I’m sick? Go to work, or be homeless.
Over here in Germany there’s no sick pay when you’re self employed, but there is (by law) when you are an employee.
I had been self employed from my 20s to 50s and am an employee for 6 years now.
I was in hospital last week to get my back fixed and am on sick leave for 4-6 weeks now. It’s still fucking amazing to me, that I can heal up now and will still get my payment into my account end of the month.
Having things like that written into law is amazing.
Must be nice…
coughs up a bloody lung diseased with covid
'Scuse me while I go work my job assisting the elderly and disabled.
Ah fuck I hate that, when people go to work sick and infect everyone else. (Yes I understand you need to, and it’s not your fault. So I hate your boss.)
The history is interesting, we got health insurance and paid leave in the 1880s from Bismarck. He was trying to appease workers so they won’t flock to the socialist or social democrat parties which were booming at that time. At the same time Bismarck outlawed left wing parties. (It was a stick and carrot approach).
In 1969 we had a bipartisan left - right government (“great coalition”) and they put up to 6 weeks of paid sick leave into. law.
I’ll be sure to do that the next time i’m making these decisions.
My job offers time off. Its 1 bucket of time off. If you want more time off, you have to work more OT to “offset” it
But if the virus doesn’t spread the medicine company can’t continue to sell sell sell!
God in three persons, that’s bleak.
🎵 SOLDIER ON WITH CODRAL SOLDIER ON SOLDIER ON! 🎶
Legalize cocaine so I can free base some crack before work and I’ll be ready for anything (like getting fired).
Next time you’re out at a restaurant, keep in mind that American restaurants for the most part do not give their employees sick days at all. Bon appetit
If you can’t sleep because you’re sick as fuck, please don’t come to work and pass it to the rest of us!
Someone should tell my boss
I just saw a new one from the NyQuil company last night that they’re now making pain quill? So now they’ll sell you what I believe is just liquid ibuprofen and liquid cold meds so you can go to work even with that awful headache from being sick
There was one cellphone company advertising WFH, as work from highway. I vomited in my mouth a little to think that companies would absolutely try and make my commute more “productive” rather than let me work from home.
Me: Oh, I don’t have a personal driver. I need to focus on the road. I don’t even put the radio on. Do you have ANY idea how many idiots are out there on the road looking at their phones, driving into oncoming traffic? You know they did a study and found that drivers who text and drive are actually 3x more dangerous than drunk drivers? It makes sense though. A drunk driver sees the road, but reacts late. A distracted driver isn’t even looking. So I gotta watch the road at all times! I even carry a shotgun in the drivers seat just to shoot out their tires. Yeah! That wakes them the fuck up. Once you disable a tire, it’s stupidly easy to perform a pitt manuever. Then when they spin out, you pull the driver out of their car at gunpoint, hogtie them with zipties. Load them into the back of your van, and then tickle their feet until they agree to never drive distracted again. Really hammer home the point that is why this is happening to them. Some people use a horn, I use a feather. It’s so absurd that they never do it again.
Wait, I got off track. What were we talking about? Oh, right. You want me to start being a distracted driver on my way to work! You wait right here, I’ll be right back with a shotgun, a few dozen zip ties, and a feather. Be right back!
Cue the helicopter mom turning right in her SUV, not noticing the crosswalk while furiously texting.
At least her own kids are safe in that tank.
A Brad Pitt maneuver?
There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.
It’s astonishing, really.
They got so close…
We’ll work towards that, I promise but let’s start with them paying for my commute and we’ll go from there.
No way would they want to compensate people for their commute. Externalize costs, internalize profits.
The propaganda goes deep. Listen to country song lyrics, and what they are actually saying, convincing working class people to keep working, and buy alcohol, and not question reality.
Somehow I’m not surprised that the music genre attributable to poor rural white folk is heavy on boot licking, especially considering how many voted for Trump.
It’s striking how much better country was when they had class consciousness
Edit: no pun intended
Well you had songs like Sixteen Tons, what else am I missing?
Oh, so many! Check out Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Sixteen tons was written by Merle Travis, who’s got a bunch of other great music as well.
were those country (was that even a genre back then idk) or “folk”? I mean i think of the Guthries as folk musicians now, but i missed their heyday.
Tbh, I think they started early enough that it all still fell under the same umbrella, but folk, bluegrass and country gradually diverged between the 40-60s
i should ask my brother he plays “americana not country” whatever that means.
Tyler Childers gets it. You just gotta stay away from the shit that airs on the radio.
Country music is just as commercial as any other music these days. Nashville is a machine that pumps out corporate friendly garbage.
I don’t think it’s propaganda. The music and the ads too are just trying to do a “fellow kids” move, and that’s what they’re seeing. Because that’s what we’ve become.
It’s like seeing a mirror and getting spooked by how disheveled the person in it looks.
It’s like seeing a mirror and getting spooked by how disheveled the person in it looks.
Don’t judge me! I turned the camera app on, and didn’t realize it was going to start with the front facing camera! I got spooked!
And drive their trucks on the highway
As recently as the 90s you had mainstream country acts releasing songs like “Pass it on Down” and “We Shall Be Free”
And they got a ton of play on the radio. The former hit number 3 on the billboard country charts. The latter hit number 12 on the country charts.
Then again, the lackluster performance of “We Shall Be Free,” particularly considering the megastardom of Garth Brooks at the time, was due to some stations boycotting it for the line “when we’re free to love anyone we choose.”
But even then, there wasn’t a massive company that owned most of the radio dial back then, so boycotts had limited influence.
as an amateur musician, #12 does not feel lackluster. #100 feels like a life goal.
It’s low for Garth Brooks in the 90’s, but I get what you’re saying.
the height of my musical career was either getting paid in tacos instead of money or getting paid in spaghetti instead of money.
i’m not complaining, i fucking love tacos. and spaghetti (though i’m more partial to cavatappi) i’m just trying to give a sense of what skill level amateur musician i am.
How depressing.
They heard that Millennials and Gen Z like fatalistic humor and decided to try and cash in on it. But, like… it’s not fun when it’s a corporation saying “Ha ha, you’ll never retire.”
“Ha ha, you will never retire because we know we don’t pay you enough to!” - The majority of corporations in America
Yeah, that is hilarious.
I was relieved during the early stages of the pandemic when I stopped seeing the sick? Take drugs and go to work! advertisements around, but we’re back there now
What!?! Where was that a thing? Who would pay for that? Who would even want to be associated with that message?
Probably the company making the drugs lol
“Got the flu? Pissing out your ass? Take some fucking DayQuil™ you lazy whore, get back to work.”
Forget commmercials. Most people I know/met lately seem to think anyone who isn’t working 60-80 hour weeks is a ‘loser’.
working 30-40 hours now is considered ‘lazy’.
Met a vet doc that disparaged a vet that leaves at 5: “8-5 and then she’s gone. Nobody wants to work any more”
Who the fuck ever wanted to work in the first place. Bitch, we have to work.
Infuriating. The point of advancing society and dividing labor into specialties is so that we can create more for our world than if each of us tried to a little bit of everything (farming, crafting, medicine, etc.) beyond the small amounts we choose for joy or satisfaction. And then with that, we get to have more free time, because we actually only need so much to make our society work and improve at a reasonable pace.
The people who think we all need to bust our asses got hoodwinked by the ownership class into producing even more for their overlords.
Not by me! I work my 40 and the rest goes my family. I’m lucky I can get by with 40.
Their breath smells of boot
I think it’s fine to work 60-80 hours a week if you’re in a place in your life where you don’t have anyone to go home to and you can actually make more money off it (either as a contractor with an hourly rate, or a business owner). Not for long though, because it gets lonely.
Most people shouldn’t work more than 40 though. Definitely if you have a family, go home and spend time with them. There’s a saying in my language that translates to “work doesn’t run away from you”, as in, there will always be more work to do, but your toddler won’t always be a toddler.
You probably can’t change their mind, but you can remember that their opinion doesn’t define you. And also you have just as much power over them (that which they grant you), which you can use to try to instill in them a sense of living their own life instead of working for the glory of the Corpos.
I don’t even wanna do 30 a week. That’s over a full day of time i could use for myself if i didn’t need fucking money so badly. Those 60-80 willingly people are fucking nutso
I had the exact same thought. I get the intent, it’s a “hello fellow kids, we understand you!” but the fact that there are so many people in that situation to make it relatable is already depressing enough without making it sound like it’s the normal everyone should just accept.
That isn’t even the message, the message is “our workers don’t have lives because they are so dedicated”.
Its not something to accept, but aspire to.
I notice more and more ads just try to be my friend.
They don’t advertise anything about their product, I have nfi what they do. They’re just trying to align with me in the weirdest generic way.
“This is Sam. Sam works hard every day. Sam likes their family. Sam laughs with their friends. Sam enjoys a movie on the couch with their partner. Sam uses Product1234.”
I first noticed this tactic specifically aiming at women. They just show footage of girls doing girl things and the product is there. What does the product do? Why is it worth my money? What makes it better than other ones? Who the fuck knows?
But now that seems to be the same targeting for men just as much, if not more.
Like, this shit is happening and apparently working when it should be making people feel massively patronised and insulted.
Old news.
🎵 You know we have more prescription drugs now
Every commercial that comes on TV is a prescription drug ad
I can’t watch TV for four minutes without thinking I have five serious diseases
Like: “Do you ever wake up tired in the mornings?”
Oh my god, I have this! Write this down. Whatever it is, I have it
Half the time I don’t even know what the commercial is:
There’s people running in fields or flying kites or swimming in the ocean
Like: "That is the greatest disease ever. How do you get that?
That disease comes with a hot chick and a puppy." 🎶
We don’t really get drug and insurance stuff in my country like the US. Product1234, if it can actually be determined, is often some sort of web service that helps by doing something “all in the one place” or some shit.
But as I said, often literally nfi. Like maybe their plan is to have their isolating commercial cause me to go to the effort of Googling them.
I do find US ads funny, though. Its like they’re made by non-humans trying to do humans. Fake children laughter, soft voices, lots of smiles and well-ironed light clothes. Often ends with a slightly slow-mo shot of someone turning to camera and smiling, like that person has anything to do with anything and I know them, a voiceover trying to me like, “Because we’re in this together” or some weird shit.
Like, “Wow. I didn’t know Super United Allied Mega Insurance cared.” sniffle
i miss interesting commercials. modern commercials, not so much.
OMFG that’s great! We never got cool ads like that in America. Too racy.
Ads don’t need to make you explicitly go out to buy the product to be effective. All they need to do is make you feel more familiar with the brand next time they and a competitor are next to each other in the store, and you need to decide which one to pick.
TL;DR: For stuff you’ll need to buy anyway, brand awareness is all the ad needs to do.
A lot of people claiming advertising doesn’t work on them don’t grasp this. I realized how hard it is to get around this when I first went to buy car insurance.
I would love to ditch my car insurance company, but my discount from being with them so long makes their quotes the lowest. I’ve looked several times over my life.
it makes you laugh at salad.
The dressing has THC in it
I think because ads just want to be that product you remember when you see it. You dont have to know why you remember it, but if you remember seeing it, you may pick it in front of competing products because you have seen it before.
When I go the shop, I do buy the same brands i ate when I grew up over 30 years ago. So I guess it works…
Ask me why I buy those brands? Because I like them. Could be competing brands i like also but that means I have to take a chance to try them out. The incentive to do that is often not so big if you already have a product you like right in front of you.
I guess thats why they bombard us with dumb ads. Just seeing it means we may pick it later. And if we like it, we will probably keep buying it for decades.
“Oh hey, its that product that interrupted what i was watching. FUCK THAT PRODUCT!”
Advertising is insidious. Whatever you do don’t think about Charmin, soft for your bottom!
Thats the correct reaction :)
But now that seems to be the same targeting for men just as much, if not more.
sigh
Advertising to men is super easy, barely an inconvenience! Just show a big tittied blond bimbo saying “Hehehehe, guys who drink this disgusting product will get their dick sucked by girls like me!!!”
Sales SKYROCKET!!! Just throw some fine print that guys won’t actually get their dick sucked. Their eyes won’t be at the bottom of the screen. They’ll be in the middle. Watching big boobs in a bikini.
if there’s too much boobage they might miss the product. it’s a fine line to toe
Youre right about the toe thing. Some guys are in the foot clan.
Which product were you talking about? I dont think you mentioned it.
Remember the Bill Gates / Seinfeld ad campaign? I’ve always known that came too soon. Keep people entertained and emotionally satisfied, while stuffing your brand in their face, and they will buy your brand.
This describes popular politics pretty well too.
I think the future will be AI-generated show-vertisements on our parlor walls. Our Family will know what’s best for us and tells us what’s best.
Did you see those LinkedIn commercials from a couple years ago that were about children looking for jobs on the site, talking about “getting a headstart” or some shit?
I think that the repeated use in marketing and advertising of people telling you to make others experience envy for something they are selling is really depressing. Envy is one of the worst human emotions. And to do things to create it is not for the good.
The first one at least seems to think people want the people who do work for them to not have a life. Indicates they think their customers have no empathy or class solidarity; which is probably mostly true. We use a lot of products that involve slave labor or something close to it.
most upper middle class professionals I have met in my life do not have lives other than work. they take their 2-3 weeks off on expensive international vacations, but have no hobbies and their social life is just drinks with co-workers. Work is their religion, their family, and their entire identity. Your job is who you are and there can be no separation from it.
even if they do have a hobby it’s only viewed as valuable in terms of productivity. like working out for more energy/health so you can be a more productive worker. or reading non-fiction to improve your work productivity/knowledge, etc.
they ‘have it all’ but yet they are deeply unfulfilled and unsatisfied with their lives and think more work and promotions is what is going to fill the hole.
i just went out with a woman this weekend who is a head pharma research scientist. asked her what she does in free time/hobbies and her response was “i don’t have time for enjoying life.” and she was really proud of this and started condescending to me because I actually enjoy life.
yea i noticed that too, i was in JD recently and most of the potential jurors, were programmers, engineers. they mostly had very motonous lives, yes they were all sorta of forced to explain thier lives to seek out potential biases or if your making up a bias to get of JD(we spent several days listening to thier lives and bias), oh i this and this but i do. you know these People have shit ton of free time, because alot of them were chosen to be on the jurors, most of them are probably working from home anyways. and was reaffirmed on a jurty duty forum.
i had like 2 brothers in tech, and they are practically this, at least before the layoffs, had thier hours spent on the jobs, then randomly go an international vacation, but no other hobbies, and they do workout and listening to roegan. and he thinks his free time is chastising the rest of the family for whatever problems, inadequecies they have.
i assume she earns more than you? its almost always comparing incomes to you or oanother person, and then make judgemental comments how come you are so much poorer, you can go do this and this to get rich.
or its a wierd ego thing, about im a PHD/MD, and you dont have a degree.
Not just commercials, TV shows, too.
Last season, The Rookie had an episode where a rookie trainee cop, who was living in his car, got an offer from his best friend in college, a successful NFL quarterback, to be his head of security. He’d live in the guys mansion, and get paid about 4x what he was making as a cop.
All of his cop friends talked him out of it because " you wouldn’t be living your life, you’d be living his."
Yeah, what’s wrong with that? Your life sucks, you’re working full time at a dangerous job, and you can’t afford to live anywhere but your car. Why wouldn’t you rather live your friend’s life?
Of course, he gets talked into staying a cop and living in his car, because that was the more honorable choice, somehow.
But if he stays in his current career, he’ll eventually be able to afford a second car, maybe. To dry his laundry in for example.
"Trinity honey, can you please get Daddy’s clearing stick?’
We’ve reached a point in American society where living in your car is not only a viable living option, but a better one than many, since so many people can’t even afford a car.
Now that Larry Ellison, the world’s 2nd richest Psychopathic Oligarch owns Paramount and CBS, we can expect to see a lot more MAGA propaganda about how poor people get all the breaks, and ruthlessly exploit the hapless wealthy, just so they can waste it on luxuries like food, homes, and health care. It just isn’t fair!
The rookie is just… so fucking bad.
I like Nathan Fillion but it’s so. So. Bad. Everything about it is bad. The acting, the story, the characters. It’s just crap.
It started okay, but it’s become a cartoon, and not even a good one.
Commercials exist solely to convince you to spend money. Turning to commercials for life advice is gonna give you a bad life
This isn’t really what “normalizing” means… no one is “turning to commercials for life advice”. OP is talking about commercials projecting an unhealthy impression of what normal looks like.
Commercials have always done that, though. They exist to lie to you
Their agenda is to make you spend money on their products. Might not be the best product for you, might not even be a decent product to begin with. Who cares, as long as quarterly profits grow and stock holders are satisfied.
Companies will say anything to make that happen. Well, it has to be legal to say that, but borderline legal and grey area claims work too.
deleted by creator
They’re pushing for more and more. All the recent talk about increasing the retirement age. The idea that being a stay-at-home mother is somehow oppressive and bad, and the solution is two parents working is actually better.
The idea that being a stay-at-home mother is somehow oppressive and bad
Orthodox Conservatives can’t seem to square that circle. You’re supposed to be a hustler, bringing in those bags, living the ultra-shiekh lifestyle with the 2.3 kids and the Mega-McMansion and the expensive cars and clothes and whatever the fuck else. But then you’re also supposed to be this very humble, folk-of-the-earth religious traditionalists with a one-income household and a giant quiver-full of kids and a military career and also I guess you’re supposed to grow your own corn or some shit?
Everything’s just optics. Nothing is real. When push comes to shove, you aren’t supposed to exist at all. Other people are supposed to stare at an AI facsimile if you and be jealous of how well it is doing at everything.
