Ads have changed, but those ads telling you that your body is ugly and that you need $product to change it are old and have been around since the 19th century and the beginnings of modern advertisements. It is also quite interesting how old some of the usual scams are. There are currently people on TikTok scamming people with some method invented in the 1800s
Yeah good points there, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply ads were historically better on the whole. Ads from a a century ago also featured a significantly greater amount of flat out lying about their products, especially when it came to medicines and “tonics”.
But even if we accept that their honesty has improved (dubious) I do think advertising today has become more intrusive, and the function of advertising is today is more about disrupting our focus than it ever has been.
There is this little community here on Lemmy focussing on vintage german ads:
/c/die_reklame@feddit.org
Ads have changed, but those ads telling you that your body is ugly and that you need $product to change it are old and have been around since the 19th century and the beginnings of modern advertisements. It is also quite interesting how old some of the usual scams are. There are currently people on TikTok scamming people with some method invented in the 1800s
Yeah good points there, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply ads were historically better on the whole. Ads from a a century ago also featured a significantly greater amount of flat out lying about their products, especially when it came to medicines and “tonics”.
But even if we accept that their honesty has improved (dubious) I do think advertising today has become more intrusive, and the function of advertising is today is more about disrupting our focus than it ever has been.