hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4032.txt

Episode: 4032
Title: HPR4032: Drive Casting: an opinion on advertising
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4032/hpr4032.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:52:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4132 for Tuesday the 16th of January 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Drive Casting and Opinion on Advertising.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Scotty gives his opinion on advertising while driving.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
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Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, some guy on the internet.
I'm doing a driving show.
I'm going to be recording a quick episode while riding down the road here in a great state of Virginia.
Today I want to quickly talk about marketing.
I don't work in marketing or advertisement, whatever you want to call it.
I'm just a consumer with an opinion.
I remember marketing or advertisement.
I blend the two together.
When I say one, I actually, I could be off.
They could mean two totally different things.
But I'm the consumer.
I'm allowed to be incorrect.
Marketing used to be, I'll show you something that may interest you.
Will you learn your customer and then you show them something that they want to buy?
Even if they don't necessarily need it, if you've got disposable income and you want to purchase it,
well, we're going to make sure that you understand what your purchase is.
So that guy who's itching to buy a new PC,
we're going to make sure we talk about all the things he might use the PC for.
Your gaming experience is going to be like no other.
No lag time, you're just going to boot instantly,
hop right into your favorite games and it's going to be perfect.
That's what it used to be.
Today, we've added all sorts of new things into it.
Well, I wouldn't call it new. It's been happening for a while.
I just decided to talk about it today.
Instead of just showing you the things that you may be interested in separating from your money with,
because the consumer has become the product in many ways.
Remember advertisers are paying a lot of money to get their ads in front of consumers.
So the business has changed a lot.
It's not just get the consumer to make a purchase.
A lot of the times, we don't care if you make a purchase or not, just put it in front of you.
Therefore, you're now a product.
You're no longer just a consumer.
You're also the product because the consumer is also those spending money
to have their ads shown.
So that's why I targeted marketing versus just advertising.
The market itself, it's a little more complex.
I'd like to also point out, in many situations, especially when it comes to entertainment,
movies and television shows, that kind of entertainment media.
What I've noticed, especially when it's something that it wants to be pushed,
however, no one wants to consume it, if you get what I mean,
you'll find all sorts of dodgy BS happening.
Where the people marketing the stuff, the content, will put it in front of you.
They will force it on you.
You will go to your favorite website and there will be some sort of ad that just auto plays.
Right?
You go on the site and it just plays automatically without your permission.
And there's absolutely no warning or anything.
It all depends on what browser you're using in the settings you have.
So if you're like me, this currently is not happening to you.
But I'm just pointing out for those of you that don't configure your browsers
and you don't have a freedom respecting browser.
This is an experience you're still having.
What I said, the content will be forced onto you, which is auto play.
You will then be counted as having consumed said content, no matter how you feel about the content.
Because in most of those situations, you are not going to click around and find the little icon
that says send feedback on said content.
And then take the time to send your feedback with OMG.
I seriously dislike this content.
They know you're not going to do that.
So they'll just check the box as another person has consumed content.
Therefore, for the advertisers, the people paying the money to have their ads put in front of consumers.
I mean, as far as they know, millions are consuming content where the breakdown happens,
where the surprise happens is when you view a site like say Rotten Tomatoes or something like that,
where people actively go to in order to express how they feel about the content,
that's where the breakdown happens at.
Because now you've got consumers who actively show up and tell you exactly what they think.
And the marketers and the advertisers don't like that, right?
They don't like it when consumers aren't presented with a canned message.
You know what I mean?
Select one through five.
One being maybe I'll watch some more.
And five being I want to watch it all day every day.
You know what I mean?
They don't like it when you don't have the canned message.
You get to go in and type your own message in with who in their right minds got hired for this POS,
fire them immediately and then burn down the data center, right?
They don't want you to be able to put that in there.
That expresses that you use seriously dislike content.
And when it's content that they want users to have in front of them for whatever reason, right?
Could be an agenda or anything else who knows,
but they want that content in front of consumers.
Now when they put that content in front of you,
they don't want you to share your true opinion.
They'd much rather you just close the screen.
You know, click a little button, the X that makes it go away.
And make sure that the X is nice and available.
It needs to be in a spot where you expect it to be.
Because the last thing they need you to do is figure out where that other icon is.
The one that allows you to leave your true unfiltered opinion and even worse head on over to an actual platform
like rotten tomatoes or wherever else where you can just,
you know,
shudder at the thought that consumers would go there and then leave unfiltered comments about content.
That's terrible unless they like it.
And even then it's still rather you have the canned message, you know,
one through five, whether you like it or not, right?
One through five.
Do you like it or do you love it?
So that's where we are with content today.
And there's all these excuses for why they're the market is attempting to shape it this way, right?
And this goes from movies, you know,
your usual consumer content to,
I don't know, YouTube videos to video games to music podcast,
anything that consumers consume regularly.
They don't want you to have your original say any more certainly.
Here's here's one of the other major things that I realized.
They really don't want you going to a reviewer other than the ones that they approve of.
If there's a reviewer out there that has not been bought and paid for, you know what I mean?
And in the different platforms will have many reviewers on there,
but the ones that are bought and paid for are usually at the top, right?
You're going to, they're going to make sure they put that reviewer in front of as many eyes as possible.
So if you're looking for movie reviews, game reviews,
it's good chance you'll see the ING reviewer or things of that nature because those guys
they get paid enough money to where they understand.
Nothing leaves the shop unless it's seven and above, right?
Every single game they ever reviewed,
the lowest score they're allowed to give it as a seven.
And outside of that, you know, most other things are going to get a 10 out of 10, you know.
So those reviews at the end of the day mean absolutely nothing.
But you're going to have other reviewers out there that don't get that front page access.
But you can, you can look for them and actually filter through to find them.
And when you find them, you're going to realize these guys are pretty raw.
They may not have all the fancy edits.
They may not have all of that early access where you get the review.
I don't know five, you know, five days to two weeks before the game actually gets released.
Anything like that, you may not get any of that.
But what you're going to get is somebody who spent the full dime on the product, played the product,
you know, consumed the product, the content.
And then either they were able to fully articulate their displeasure with the content or not.
That's what you're going to get.
And it's up to you rather not that's valuable to you or not.
Do you want the people who are basically getting paid for to release seven out of tens as a minimum?
Or do you want to consume content from somebody that's going to just, I mean, look at me wrong.
The seven out of 10 people, they're not going to drop a bunch of f bombs and other things like that in the video.
So there's that, especially if you have young children that play these games, you know,
you want them to also see the reviews because that helps you save money.
The movie, the video, the content, whatever it is, if it's not very good,
and you find a reviewer that has similar tastes or what if they don't have the same taste as you,
but they just know their stuff, you understand?
Maybe you like comedies, they don't necessarily like comedies,
but they know how to give you all the best points of a comedy, right?
They know how to review a comedy and they can give you all of those points that maybe you like about it.
But, you know, maybe they wouldn't pay to see it again,
but what their review provides to you is that, yes, you should pay to go see this in a movie theater.
Or you should pay to purchase this DVD, which I'm sure a few and fewer people are doing.
You probably just rent in the download stream or whatever.
So they're giving you lots of information that can be used to make a purchase.
I got to turn the AC on now. They're starting to get a little hot in here.
My throat's super dry.
But these are some of the things that I think about.
And even software that interferes with the content,
and I'm talking specifically ad blockers,
a lot of marketers don't like the fact that you can still buy a DVD,
because then you can consume content over and over again offline.
There's no counter going off saying how many times that you've consumed content.
Not only that, you can share content, right? Like say, for instance, you have a roommate.
You can let your roommate use your DVD.
Or if it's like in an open space where you and your roommate shared that space.
So maybe you're not watching it, but your roommate is watching it today.
And then your roommate may bring over their significant other or whatever.
They're their friend and the roommate and the friend watches it that day, right?
There's no counter that tracks all of this information in detail.
It's just content being consumed in no record of it.
You know, being kept, they really don't like that.
So the fact that you can share a DVD or you can share a book,
even worse with books, right? Books have knowledge.
You can hand someone a book and they can read it and think about it.
They still have it fully figured out how to put advertisements in books yet, right?
Stop and think about that.
In audio books, podcasts, everything else, they've got advertisements in those
because they can slip them in and with enough leverage, right?
Meaning you can still skip past advertisements in the podcast.
But if you were driving and you didn't want and you were responsible and did not want to interact with your device,
you would just let the advertisements play because you're operating a motor vehicle
and therefore you would still consume the ad.
But with an actual book, a physical book, can you imagine if you were reading a book?
And it's like, I don't know, some wizard in a school and they're learning to be wizards
and they're using magic and then the bad guy shows up.
And just as he's about to use the big spell that they were all taught never to use,
you ended up reading about the newest Honda Civic.
That would be terrible, wouldn't it?
That would be his thing.
People who read would most certainly head directly to wherever they purchased that book
and request refunds or if they couldn't get a refund, the reviews would sting so bad.
Any author that allowed that to happen would be pushed off the platform immediately.
Like, look, we just cannot allow any more of this.
You do you elsewhere, but we can't allow it on the platform.
Not to mention the advertiser, you know, suddenly now the, you know, whoever it is,
they put their ad in a book like that is, they're going to catch all kinds of heat.
So they can't do it with a book, but what they can do with the book,
they can make sure like if it's an ebook, they can make sure that you only have access
to the content, which is the book through an app.
And the app will then advertise to you before you get to the book or after you get out of the book.
And if you're using something like an ebook device, like a Kindle or a nook or whatever,
you know, they have tons of these things on the lock screen, if you will,
they'll have advertisements on the lock screen.
One way or another, they'll still market to you, but it's much harder to do with the book.
Alright, that's all I got time for today.
I just wanted to make a quick episode on all this.
I'll edit this up later on.
Catch you later.
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