I cannot wrap my head around the economics of the ad industry. They work to make your life worse in the most obnoxious and disgusting ways possible, and they - and any brand that works with then by association - are hated and reviled by that. Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it, even if you seriously piss off your potential clients doing that (BMW’s Spiderman ads, for example).
I don’t get it.
EDIT: just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a special snowflake immune to ads ffs. I’m talking about the ads in the enshittification spectrum, like the ones that blare inside the media center of your brand new car, the ones that makes sites unreadable, the ones shoved every minute in your 10 minute videos, things like that. But I understand that I may be inside my own ad hate bubble, I really dislike ads in general and I try to avoid them them best I can.
Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.
Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.