The Internet Is Drowning in Secret Ads

I keep a mental list of some of my favorites of these: I remember seeing a popular post on Reddit like "My girlfriend's sweater matched her cup" with a cropped figure of a woman holding a cup that looked like her sweater and behind her there was a pack of Oreos on the counter. I also wonder about the initial Sonic design leading up to the movie release. There was a huge wave of "bad" press over the terrible design, then another wave of "good" press when they fixed it. You kind of never know but these are definitely the sorts of things I'd want to be thinking up if I worked in marketing. Trust Me I'm Lying is a great book on the topic and it's probably a quintessential book of our time along with enshitification.

I was talking to a friend recently about those Tupperware parties (she did a different brand). I think maybe those were better for society than modern ads. People had to get out of their comfort zones and talk face to face. It was all so personal, compared to what we have now.

This influencer nonsense described here is gross and fake compared to that. What would a genuine, face-to-face advertising campaign look like nowadays?

This is bad, given that advertisers end up corrupting every ad-supported media. Look at what newspapers, TV and radio became - thinly veiled puppets of the advertisers, willing to kill stories at their behest.