Things you see subtly advertised on social media

[boywifefailure]

A bit of explanation: I'm admittedly a bit of a normie, and I spend a frankly stupid amount of time melting my brain on Tiktok. A lot of my tiktok feed is cooking videos, and I've noticed recently that a lot of the cooking accounts I follow have begun using a specific brand of salt in a really recognizable jar with a noticeable label. This brand is never mentioned by name, and sometimes it barely shows up for more than a second (if at all), but its obvious these accounts are sponsored and being paid to use this specific brand of salt. Its a really subtle way of advertising, like some kind of subliminal messaging. In a way, I think this is probably done to bypass the fact you have to tag videos as ads on social media nowadays. If it's subtle enough, it can reasonably be claimed that it isn't an intentional ad, just some using a product they like. It seems really effective too. Google trends showed that this brand of salt has been getting searched way more frequently in the past month than before.

Anyways, what products do you notice being used really frequently by a lot of people in a way that's too often to not be a coincidence, even if not being directly advertised? I can't be the only one to notice this sort of phenomenon.

 

[SomaSpice]

I would like to corroborate, but I don't really use social media except this place. Whenever someone shows me a tiktok as evidence for something, which can be worringly often, I almost always hit them with "Do you think this is real or do you think this is made to get a reaction out of people" or "Don't you get the feeling that this was made just to get peoples attention?"

 

[RisingThumb]

A bit of explanation: I'm admittedly a bit of a normie, and I spend a frankly stupid amount of time melting my brain on Tiktok. A lot of my tiktok feed is cooking videos, and I've noticed recently that a lot of the cooking accounts I follow have begun using a specific brand of salt in a really recognizable jar with a noticeable label. This brand is never mentioned by name, and sometimes it barely shows up for more than a second (if at all), but its obvious these accounts are sponsored and being paid to use this specific brand of salt. Its a really subtle way of advertising, like some kind of subliminal messaging. In a way, I think this is probably done to bypass the fact you have to tag videos as ads on social media nowadays. If it's subtle enough, it can reasonably be claimed that it isn't an intentional ad, just some using a product they like. It seems really effective too. Google trends showed that this brand of salt has been getting searched way more frequently in the past month than before.

Anyways, what products do you notice being used really frequently by a lot of people in a way that's too often to not be a coincidence, even if not being directly advertised? I can't be the only one to notice this sort of phenomenon.

Just in case you don't know the name of this kind of advertising, it's called Product Placement. I wasn't aware it was done in the social media space yet, but it has been widely known that it's done in movies and TV Shows for a long while now(Over 40 years at least).

In its defence, it can make sense if you want a Sci-Fi world, some 50-100 years in the future tethered to our world now, like how Bladerunner used product placement for Coca Cola, but it rarely serves a purpose more than to get more money. At the very least, even if it's subliminal messaging in a way, at least it can't track you(I think?).

This message has not been sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends

 

[shinobu]

I don't use much social media but stuff always finds you (unless you're a hermit living in a cave without internet). I've seen morbius and related morbposting spread all over the place, and it almost seems too artificial to say it's a natural meme. Maybe I distrust big corpos too much or it's easy to jump to conspiracies but it's spreading too well. Maybe it's a good movie and everyone morbs normally, but I don't know man.

 

[№56]

I've seen morbius and related morbposting spread all over the place, and it almost seems too artificial to say it's a natural meme.

It's 100% artificial. The movie bombed, and now they're trying to salvage it by appealing to the terminally online demographic. Expect to see more of this bullshit in the future. "Watch our terrible movie for the ironic memes" is going to be the next "watch our terrible movie because [designated internet bad guy] is FURIOUS about it."

 

[SomaSpice]

I don't use much social media but stuff always finds you (unless you're a hermit living in a cave without internet). I've seen morbius and related morbposting spread all over the place, and it almost seems too artificial to say it's a natural meme. Maybe I distrust big corpos too much or it's easy to jump to conspiracies but it's spreading too well. Maybe it's a good movie and everyone morbs normally, but I don't know man.

At first I thought they we're just memeing a bad movie (I haven't seen it), but then I realized the memes reek just like those fast and furious "family" ones.

 

[boywifefailure]

Just in case you don't know the name of this kind of advertising, it's called Product Placement. I wasn't aware it was done in the social media space yet, but it has been widely known that it's done in movies and TV Shows for a long while now(Over 40 years at least).

In its defence, it can make sense if you want a Sci-Fi world, some 50-100 years in the future tethered to our world now, like how Bladerunner used product placement for Coca Cola, but it rarely serves a purpose more than to get more money. At the very least, even if it's subliminal messaging in a way, at least it can't track you(I think?).

This message has not been sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends

Very true, I did forget the name of the practice. Product Placement is definitely what it is. I suppose I just got used to it in TV/movies since its so common and has been a thing for so long, and it feels different seeing it in media that is meant to be "real" (since tiktok thrives on making you feel like you're actually connecting with the content creator and parasocial relationships). It's definitely an effective method of advertising if nothing else.

 

[MonkeyDude]

hmmm...

 

[Deleted member 1930]

(unless you're a hermit living in a cave without internet

please, i can only get so erect

 

[Some_porcupine]

it is not brand, but rather "capture". (this is just my theory, some, or, like all, points can be wrong)

1. some shit happens
2. movement starts to form
3. decentralization > centralization
4. first wave
5. second wave
6. third wave
7. too big to stand on its own
8. ^; movement being desperate - taking anyone / (10. - capture by big-gov and "so quirky" teens...)
9. ^^; integrity being crumbled - "newfags", OPs and general populace "with their dog" starts to argue about principles and themes; semantics helps to downfall
10. big-gov abuses "good intendation" - rumors start to spread; bots, algos and "teens who want to be hip" sunks "the ship" >> "it is popular, now it sucks"

then, there is this (or isnt?) phenomena:

baaaasically, take this *capture*...
big-gov take some movement and topple it upside down. that is(?) how you get different versions of whatever "liberal" is (gov-loving? gov-hating?...), or "conspiracy theory" (schema of elites) vs (crooks circlejerking about anything they dont like), or "UFO" - among few (anything that flies and behaves weirdly) vs (wanna clap alien cheeks)...

*which is basically, lol, https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.p...ection-and-control-of-an-internet-forum.4030/

 

[№56]

It's 100% artificial. The movie bombed, and now they're trying to salvage it by appealing to the terminally online demographic. Expect to see more of this bullshit in the future. "Watch our terrible movie for the ironic memes" is going to be the next "watch our terrible movie because [designated internet bad guy] is FURIOUS about it."

Something similar seems to be going on right now with the Barbie movie, which has a very overt feminist message but is being shilled on 4chan as secretly anti-feminist because of Ryan Gosling's character (if they planned this in advance based on him being le driver it's an impressive 4D chess move). I don't think it's going to be successful but it is a sign that Hollywood marketers are developing a better understanding of how the internet works and how you can play both sides of the culture war in order to get the maximum number of butts into theater seats. Mattel gets twitter and tumblr to watch a movie about toys by making it a shallow deconstruction of gender roles, and then turns around and does the same to 4chan by deconstructing the deconstruction.
I haven't seen the movie though, so I could be wrong.

 

[alCannium27]

I'm pretty sure this has been going on for a very long time, almost a decade ago when I was still in uni, I was a normie on reddit. Things slowly started to change, you see people praising and defending games, shows, books etc. with unusual determination. Usually I'd just chuck it up to people on the internet being stubborn, but sometimes, the arguments are, how do I put this, utterly retarded, yet, it receives huge amount of upvotes so that praises and only praises are top comments of a thread.

Like, it's usually about 1K upvotes, 1 thousand more people agreed with said post than those who disagreed, with a retarded argument. As little faith as I have for society as a whole, I cannot see that. Not even on (a now obvious hellhole) reddit.

I believe in a youtube video about Driv3r, it is said that the devs did something like this, hiring companies to post on social media to promote the game. Yet isn't this insidious? Those with the money can just control the narrative, creating an illusion of a popular product, gaslighting them into purchasing it. Then Driv3r turned out to be a buggy unplayable mess. We are seeing this shit repeating over and over and over game today. Everyone is for sale, every opinion is paid for. What if all dissenting voices can be silenced on social media platforms? Everybody praised Diablo IV before and after it came out, until they didn't, until they do the customary 180 turn and piss on the game's predatory lootboxes. Money in the pocket when they praised it, views for their channels when they attack it, and nobody bats an eye.

This is insidious, moreso than other advertisement methods, because it's gaslighting whole populations to accept this hyper-consumerism, this broken system in which the consumers never benefits.

 

[InsufferableCynic]

It makes sense that we're seeing more and more insidious forms of advertising, this is just the final frontier in the war on advertising.

It started with overt TV/newspaper/billboard etc ads. Those were effective for a time, but then millenials and zoomers grew up in a world FULL of advertising, so it lots its power and we learned to ignore it.
Worse (for them), adblockers started to become standard among the ""computer literate"" (I use the term loosely) kids, which further took our attention away from advertisements. This was at a time when internet ads were at their most egregious (popups, javascript loading javascript in long chains, horrible tracking, etc) so I don't blame people for doing this.

But it left the advertisers in a bind, because they can't advertise anymore without it being ineffective. So they instead just started buying up the "real" content (again, I use that term loosely) - influencers, streamers, youtubers, etc etc.

Now we're at a point where pretty much everything you see online is an ad of some sort.

The only solution is to stop using the internet, or use parts of the internet that haven't been infected by the plague of advertisers.

 

[nakadashi]

A bit of explanation: I'm admittedly a bit of a normie, and I spend a frankly stupid amount of time melting my brain on Tiktok. A lot of my tiktok feed is cooking videos, and I've noticed recently that a lot of the cooking accounts I follow have begun using a specific brand of salt in a really recognizable jar with a noticeable label. This brand is never mentioned by name, and sometimes it barely shows up for more than a second (if at all), but its obvious these accounts are sponsored and being paid to use this specific brand of salt. Its a really subtle way of advertising, like some kind of subliminal messaging. In a way, I think this is probably done to bypass the fact you have to tag videos as ads on social media nowadays. If it's subtle enough, it can reasonably be claimed that it isn't an intentional ad, just some using a product they like. It seems really effective too. Google trends showed that this brand of salt has been getting searched way more frequently in the past month than before.

Anyways, what products do you notice being used really frequently by a lot of people in a way that's too often to not be a coincidence, even if not being directly advertised? I can't be the only one to notice this sort of phenomenon.

Jesus Christ, the Internet circled back all the way down to television ads all over again.

 

[outervoid]

use parts of the internet that haven't been infected by the plague of advertisers

this is easier to define than it is to discover: find any place in which advertisers 1) will not advertise at due to potential negative brand association; 2) will not see any ROI from advertising in, 3) do not have formats in which attention is easy to divert or force into advertising.

the point of advertising is to sell product and cost as little as possible to move product. any situation in which the probable cost is greater than the sold product will likely be relatively ad-free.