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The latest stupid culture war news: The notorious Good Good golf advertisement. Featuring a country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society) having a manic episode, so excited to try overpriced "luxury" slop, he shoves a lady to the ground. Instead of calling the police, the other players just look on; maybe he's the owner, you know the type, with so much money and so little financial or social awareness that he'd even waste it on, random example, a "Quantum Triple Diamond Driver".
I don't fault lefties for boycotting Good Good, coercing them to retract the ad and apologize. Because they should do it to every commercial: I want every non-monopoly with aggressive advertising to be given this (or the Bud Light post trans ad) treatment, until public and online spaces look even better than São Paulo, Lancy Geneva, and Maine (where billboards are outlawed). At least this ad tries to not be boring and obnoxious; I actually think it's somewhere in the top 1% I see and hear (although not a compliment), thankfully rarely anymore thanks to uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, and generally avoiding software whose primary function is ad delivery.
And this includes invasive tracking. Recently Twitter sent C&Ds to Nitter and XCancel. This follows Reddit tightening old.reddit and Facebook/Instagram have always been locked down. Thankfully there are always alternatives, right now https://twitterwebviewer.com for Twitter, https://redlib.catsarch.com for Reddit, and https://inviziogram.com/ for Instagram - but it's annoying and contributes to link rot. This is your regularly-scheduled reminder to quit Twitter and the other brainrot social media, and replace them with more productive activities, like maybe, partaking in these "sophisticated" forum discussions on theMotte.
I have little to contribute other than simple confusion? Did he have like a Joker face at some point?
How is this boycott worthy, its the most boring, mediocre, thing I've seen since I glimpsed a few seconds of the Super Bowl half time show while refilling my chips and dip.
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I finally saw it and uhhh, it's kinda of a bad ad. Like why is it so creepy? I feel like I don't want buy that driver. Isn't there a quote like "good marketing is selling the product, great marketing is selling how it feels to have the product". I think the general feeling for owning sporting goods should be badass, cool, exhilarating, inspiring, motivating, maybe even competitive etc. Not whatever that was. I then did an exercise of how I would feel if it was a man that was shoved, also kinda creepy and machismo violence. It wasn't a warning out of friendliness or protectiveness, but just feels threatening. Either way, I don't think that was a good ad.
I went and find the bud light trans ad. It's just kinda cringe? Reminds me of the celebrities in Covid doing the Imagine song.
Maybe the woke can successfully bring back wife beating like they did racism.
I was wrongly remember a Nixons tape quote where he said the Irish drink and beat their wives, but I guess the official version was they can’t drink and get mean.
Now I think we’ve stamped out completely domestic violence within the wokes in-group and it’s only in minority groups.
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It's a stark reminder that cancel culture is not dead. Your post doesn't walk through all of the fallout from this ad which was posted briefly and deleted quickly. But every new day is bringing more fallout to the brand from various partnerships:
So much for the "Woke 1.0 was stupid we went too far" conventional wisdom, it seems it never left. All the more surprising the hysteria exploded within golf, a right-coded subculture.
The hysterical reaction to that ad shows why gender equality is impossible. Good Good was obviously not trying to portray domestic violence but the opposite: Alexis the girl hanging out with a group of guys as one of them- a friend and a colleague, participating in a dumb skit to promote a driver. The mob interpretation that this ad promotes "domestic violence" implies an inherent, sexually submissive role of Alexis in a polyandric circle or something. She can't roughhouse with the boys because she's a woman, it would be inherently sexually suggestive for her to do so. Whereas someone who truly believed in equality would not anticipate a problem with Alexis playing this part in the script.
There's another layer to this though, which is that much of the hate mob appears motivated by hatred for Good Good itself, a hatred that is in turn downstream from ressentiment towards the "country club" social organization, a resentment which also comes through directly in OP's post mockingly describing Garret as a "country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society)".
Ressentiment towards the Country Club Gentleman has also long been promoted in popular culture, producing endless films where the Country Club Gentleman is the villain, meant to be humiliated by the outsider protagonist who has no respect for the cultural tradition or decorum expected by these social institutions.
The primary driver of this backlash is ressentiment towards Good Good itself, for the crime of being White young-adults making money from filming golf YouTube videos.
Wait for it... wait for it....
Ah, there it is.
Do you agree popular culture and Hollywood has engaged in consistent criticism of the WASP Country Club? Are you just going to point and sputter or participate in the conversation?
Point and sputter? Heh. Dude, you'd be more sufferable if you had some self-awareness and a sense of humor about it. If you can't put hands on keyboard without making it about Jews, just own it.
Making fun of WASP Country Club has been a thing for as long as there have been WASP Country Clubs (i.e., pretentious rich people to make fun of). Dickens did it. Austen did it. Freaking Tolstoy (one of the few people with less of a sense of humor than you who comes to mind) did it. Wodehouse definitely did it. It was not invented by Jews.
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Advertising at least has a use. I'd prefer banning Good Good, as they have no use. It's the golf version of bad YouTube clickbait, with videos along the lines of "Can I Break 100 Using Only a Pool Cue?" and "Can I Beat Lee Westwood If His Feet Are Encased in Concrete?"
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I don't get why it's a big deal. It's a play on the horror movie trope where people are drawn to evil objects that possess them and stuff. I guess if he was pushing a man nobody would care, reddit will be reddit.
But you actually got the characters mixed up. The owner of the driver pushes the woman away, telling her not to touch it. Then another different man tries to touch the driver, the owner tries to stop him as well but is unable to, and it's shown that the second man is possessed by the item. It's kind of a humorous reversal, the first man is made to just be an overprotective asshole at the beginning, but then it's revealed that touching the driver is dangerous, and he was partly doing it to protect her from its effects.
The only continuity gap is how the owner manages to retain his sanity while the driver causes issues for everyone else who touches it.
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Online, I'm with you, but in public physical spaces, I disagree so much. As a Red Sox fan, I remember when the Green Monster at Fenway Park didn't have ads in the 90s and early 00s (in contrast to sometime before that and before my era, when it was plastered with ads), until the new owners decided to plaster it with ads yet again. A high proportion of fans were against it on the basis that it would uglify this holy site, but almost immediately after it happened, I absolutely loved the results and thought it looked far more natural with all the ads (aside: same for the Monster seats; before that, the Green Monster only had netting above the wall). Since then, I've come to appreciate the beauty that is added to things by advertisements that were motivated purely for commercial desires, and often - not always, but often - I feel like there's a real resource being wasted when I see some highly-visible wall or structure of some commercial or industrial building not being decorated with advertisement that could be generating revenue and having a 50/50 chance of helping out the company that's advertising.
I also learned recently that many Torii gates in Japan are sponsored by businesses and the Japanese characters written on their pillars are advertisements for those businesses, so they're roughly the equivalent of a "WALMART" or "DICK'S SPORTING GOODS" stamped on the gate, and learning this made me like these gates even more.
Sumos also get personal sponsorships and come out with garish but kinda contextually appropriate banners before their matches
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Yeah a lot of in irl ads become iconic, for example the running man billboard in japan or just like times square. Though the majority of roadside billboards are just an eyesore.
I remember seeing a picture of some clueless tourist posing in front of toori gates in Japan and they were all sponsored by brothels and other unsavory businesses.
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At least in principle, I feel exactly the opposite way!
Consider a billboard: it's basically taking up part my view of the sky, and potentially distracting me while I'm driving, for no benefit to me in most cases! (the exceptions being any case where it's not informing me about some product that I wouldn't otherwise hear about and would genuinely prefer to my other options) But an online banner, no matter how obnoxious or pointless to me personally, is at least paying some fraction of a cent towards the maintenance of a website that I chose to visit and probably want to keep running.
In practice, though, I'd count your Fenway Park example as a private physical space, not a public one. And just like online, there the people who are providing us with something we want are getting paid for the ads they're showing us. I might have preferred a higher ticket price for a more ad-free experience, personally, but if they're not just giving me a plain green wall plus a higher ticket price to compensate then I'm probably outnumbered on that and it's overall good that they're catering to the majority instead of me.
There's one more benefit the road trip benefit of a whole new source of letters when youre playing the alphabet game to pass the time. Flying J, QuikTrip and Zips are aways appreciated signs even it I never darken their door.
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Static advertisements aren’t the worst (unlike animated) and may be better than nothing. But better than advertisements are murals commissioned to real artists whose goal isn’t to sell something to the lowest common denominator. I prefer those on walls and structures and imagine Fenway Park would look better with them too.
If the adverts were truly non-invasive and didn’t try hijacking my attention (or indeed the damn computer itself), I wouldn’t bother with an as blocker at all. I believe in content creators and businesses collecting the revenue for my use of their services to perpetuate themselves, but the industry as a whole hasn’t progressed much relative to the speed to technological advancement.
Modern technology is about custom answers to individuals, not about “macro efficiency” in the old economic sense. Compare the differences between the subscription model for television and the advertising model. If you’re using television to advertise (which is the old model), you want the least common denominator program. You want the show that everybody watches so you can stick in the ad and show it to the largest amount of people. Today, you’re looking to get the next subscriber. You now want the show that “somebody” wants to watch, but it’s someone who doesn’t watch the shows you’ve already sold them. This is what gets you niche programming. Thats why streaming platforms constantly struggle to find “the next 12 people” who want “that next weird show.” Because it they show it to someone who’s already been captured by your advertising efforts, that’s 0 profit. From a productivity standpoint in economic statistics, that’s a complete disaster; because you’re putting large amounts of resources into the smallest audiences possible; not the largest audience possible. That just looks bad in stats.
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What do you think about early 20th century ads painted on the sides of buildings? There’s been a concerted effort in my neck of the woods to restore these “ghost signs” and bring them back to their former glory. In one sense, it’s kind of stupid, since the businesses being advertised have mostly long since closed their doors. On the other hand, the hand-painted lettering is usually not unattractive.
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I think there are certainly contexts where this is true. I'm skeptical about Fenway Park specifically; a mural that exists purely for beauty isn't out of the question in an MLB stadium, which are known to have similar things like fountains or statues or even aquariums which serve similar functions. But I think there's something especially beautiful about the way a stadium reflects its purpose - i.e. to generate profit for the owners via providing a space that people are willing to pay money to watch their local professional team play - that is missing in a mural that isn't in an advertisement. The mural could beautify the stadium and provide a more positive experience to the fan which compels them to be willing to pay more or to come more often, but a pretty piece of 2D art on a wall isn't generally something that baseball (or any sportsball) fans find that appealing about going to a baseball game, and so if it's there, it's almost definitely mostly motivated by some desire to make the park more beautiful to look at and experience, rather than the desire to get more people to be more willing to pay more money to come into the park. And, again, there's something beautiful to the park's visuals reflecting its purpose rather than reflecting some desire to show people a beautiful wall.
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It does work out nicely for all involved. I think that's partly because it's more tasteful that usual advertising, though. Just the name of the sponsor carved in a neat serif font. It's more like having "R. D. Williams Esq." carved on the wall than "Coca Cola: this is my flavour".
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