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twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

Amazon Prime Day hasn't been interesting or novel since 2005 or so, but that's not going to stop anybody from pretending otherwise so they can get their blogspam affiliate kickbacks

in recent years there's been this new attempt to portray being a soulless blogspam affiliate hack as something that requires serious effort and research in order to "find the best deals" (a ton of these are usually AI)

I could maybe tolerate this slightly better if I'd seen the people in charge of U.S. media make literally ANY serious effort in the last two decades to creatively fund meaningful journalism or hadn't watched countless editor and journalist friends get shitcanned by trust fund brunchlord failsons

every so often I get some drive by defensive hack who insists that turning journalistic brands into badly automated blogspam cack is WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS as if there was no other choice but to sell out the entirety of your brand credibility for modest affiliate kickbacks

If you don't deepthroat this firehose of bullshit YOU HATE JOURNALISM AND WANT AMERICA TO DIE!

I like sharing this old post from someone I don’t know:

I always enjoyed the title of this book

Has anyone written about targeted advertising being bullshit? It feels much like AI in that businesses don't understand it but fall for the sales job and everyone's doing it so it must work, etc. But I have no expertise in this topic.

Oh I feel like I could do a pretty serious essay on the topic. I’ve worked in digital marketing for about a decade now and it was a lot better pre 2017, but the whole thing with Facebook and political ad targeting basically shot it down and then introduced a vague algorithm based targeting.