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It's such a memorable ad. It's like the dream of a child actually brought to life.

I've seen this story discussed around the internet over the last few days and found it interesting how younger generations seemed to only view it negatively (pollution, excess, etc). It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.




Advertising is a cancer on society, just 'cause it's sometimes nice to look at doesn't really change that. IMHO of course.


I'm quite certain a fun video for a Sony Bravia TV from 20 years ago is not comparable to cancer in any way. It's ok to be happy from time to time :)


It encourages consumerism for the sake of consumerism and enables excessive e-waste. Sony has put forth plenty of effort since then to convince you that you've needed yet another new and shiny TV to replace the Bravia, and will continue to do the same.

I truly don't understand the idea of praising a commercial that exists solely to sell you something we could probably, reasonably, be making and selling a lot less of. We only keep going "because growth". When's enough? This is gross.

Edit: And after watching the video, it's extra jarring to me to feel the warm fuzzies it gives you, and then realize, "It's not asking me to be a good person or do something that's gonna match the feeling this commercial is giving me, it just wants me to buy something it's gonna want me to replace eventually". Ick. Get the fuck out of my emotions like that.


I feel like this is a very myopic perspective. It can be both art and a commercial at the same time and appreciable for either or both. As time progresses, it becomes more art than commercial because the commercial utility has expired.

Commercials are interesting as they are a way to support artists financially. Many artists make a living in commercials while also getting a chance to exercise a creative profession.

Conceptually it isn't that much different than church commissions during the Renaissance.


Or 19th century poster art. Many people collect reproductions (or originals if they can afford it) of advertising posters by people like Firmin Bouisset. Yes, they are ads, but they are also beautiful long after the products they were advertising are no longer available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmin_Bouisset


I visited the Mucha museum in Prague and was surprised by how many of his works were advertising posters. On one hand, I don't care for advertising: on the other hand, it brought us these wonderful works that we admire a century on, divorced from their original context, so I can't really deny their artistic potential.


As an artist, with a ton of artist friends, I wrestle with this idea very frequently. I understand the necessity for those who take that path, and I don't judge them for it (huge Jose Gonzalez fan, btw). Yet the ick remains.


I would confirm the ick with my euro perspective.

It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with Americans, this bundling up art with the capitalism. Commercial/Ad work can be a lot of fun and a good living for any artist, but it’s just not fucking art. It’s such a cringey pattern - that somehow makes commercial work into chivalrous patronage.

That being said - cool ad! Fun to make and probably good money! Would love to work on something like that! But. Not. Art.


So you are going with the "No True Scotsman" argument against commercial art?


I don’t think I believe in the term “commercial art” - it’s “commercial artwork”.

My spouse is doing artwork for a beer company right now and she would throw the chair at me like in that Orange Country TV Show meme if I tried to insinuate that this is her “art”. It’s not art it’s artwork, it’s labor, it’s a job, it’s for a boss.

This is where the ick is from - nice artwork can be commissioned, can be labor intensive and require talent. But it’s not truly the distillation of the artists process that art is.


Commercial art? No, can't be art. Illustrations? Only if unpublished during the artist's lifetime. Commissions? Certainly not. Political art? No, just no. Religious art? Are you kidding me?!

Any arbiter of the arts will find that these handy guidelines readily facilitate the elimination and/or downsizing of unnecessary galleries and other non-art collections.


Boo - All I did was confirm the ick while acknowledging that we can, in fact, enjoy a cool thing for what it is - an ad.

See, that’s the thing about this POV that the term “art” is placed on some sort of pedestal and then all the other forms are then compared against it. “How dare you say [other thing requiring effort] is not art!”

Art !== artwork

An element of art is that it functions for its own relationship between artist-work and maybe somewhat the viewer or participant. It’s neither better or worse, it’s just something separate from all of those ideologies. It just is, they just make it. They place it in museums so we don’t have to bump into each others’ egos.

I will reiterate my belief: it’s foolish to wrap up art with corporate, religious or institutional patronage.


I think you've explained your belief. But a definition of art that dismisses Michelangelo, Da Vinci, et al. seems unlikely to resonate with many artists, art historians, or art galleries/museums.

On the music side, we'd have to dismiss The Beatles, Bach, Mozart, and probably most of the greatest composers and musicians of all time.


Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy. I don't think it has to be that deep.

They are doing marketing to get me to buy things. You are doing marketing to get me to NOT buy something.

The iPhone enabled everyone to see consumer buying cycles in that most people don't go buy the 11-12-13-14-15-16, they go 11-16 and 13-17 and the like. It's the same with all products. Most people don't buy every single new model, unless they are an enthusiast, in which case who are you to say what someone's hobbies are?


> Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy.

If that were all it is, there wouldn't be much problem.

Marketing is also creating a demand where there wasn't one before and exploiting psychological weaknesses to prompt actions not necessarily in a person's best interest.


"creating a demand where there wasn't one before" Yes, 100% if it's a new product, there was no demand for it.

"exploiting psychological weaknesses to prompt actions not necessarily in a person's best interest" This is any sort of communication with malintent.


See I don't get that at all. I don't find it selling me something - it's from TWENTY YEARS AGO. It's just a video of 250,000 bouncy balls flying down a hill at 100mph. It's a cool sight. It's something that, if I was 10 and had access to that many bouncy balls, I'd be plotting myself.


Where do you draw the line on consumerism for physical to digital experiences? Is it worthwhile to experience the web given the high cost to build, maintain, and access it?


I've bought one TV in my life (I'm pushing 43) and it's a Bravia. Ten years old, too, and I have no intention of replacing it while it works. Sony makes nice stuff. Expensive, but nice. I still remember the ad fondly.


Yeesh


OP is not talking about this ad in particular being cancer.

He's talking about a couple million roadside billboards, ads on busses, ads in TV services you pay for, drug companies spending more on advertising than R&D, political machines driven by 24 hours news cycles that are funded from ragebait, social media companies that have us literally addicted to our screens due to their advertising-based revenue models. It goes on... ad infinitum indeed.

It's a fucking cancer and it truly is the root of so many of our problems and we are running out of time to start thinking clearly about the damage the industrial advertising complex causes.


As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.

I hate to say "go touch grass" because it sounds condescending. But please, go outside and have some fun! The dumb billboard isn't stopping that.


Can you please publish the list so we know what's ok to complain about?


> As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.

See, I'd contend that the business models and businesses enabled by advertising, and the combined social impact of ads plus those business models very much are one of the world's top problems.


What is the point here? Don't complain about the ramifications of the advertising industry because wars exist?

I'd be curious to see this Top 100 list.


The point is: Have some perspective. Advertising is not destroying the world and we're not "running out of time".


Not sure if I'd call the relentless assault on my attention to convince me to purchase things "happy", but to each their own.


Well, this is a TV add, so no one is forcing you to watch it.

Billboards, on the other hand, are awful as your eyes are drawn to it as you drive down the freeway.


what is your preferred (ideal) way of being informed about possible beneficial proposals?

ps i also hate ads and attention economy.


Taking your question at face value, I would much prefer information be "pulled" rather than "pushed". In other words, I don't want to be informed - I want to search when I decide to search, get reviews when I decide to get reviews, etc. I don't want someone else deciding how my attention is diverted or what they would recommend for me. A notable exception is that I am happy to take unsolicited recommendations from friends and family, but that's because there is a critical distinction: they want to inform me of something for me, rather than for the product manufacturers.


This argument for the theoretical benefit of advertising (being informed about products/services) was probably true at the point in time when advertising genuinely consisted of a dispassionate listing of the features of a product, and maybe a picture of it. Take the commercial being highlighted here for example. It's 2.5 minutes of a very cool visual image of the toy balls bouncing en masse. But how does a zillion balls bouncing down a hill convey anything meaningful about the television model it's an ad for? How do sexy models in a commercial for beer, perfume, etc inform the consumer about the product in any actual sense?


It might benefit you to take some marketing courses to understand why these sort of ads are effective and useful. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's no rational explanation for it.

(In general, it's a good rule of thumb to assume that the widespread existence of something suggests there's a reason for it, and to be inquisitive as to what that reason might be.)


He didn't ask how these sorts of ads are effective or useful. He asked how they inform consumers, which was the point someone else previously brought up as a defense.


Effective and useful for Sony. They are detrimental to society as they increase consumption, waste, pollution etc.


At this point in my life, I've realized that anything they advertise that is actually a new thing (not a TV or a toaster with slightly better features) is just going to be some consumable or gadget that I don't want or need. Most advertising I see is just for some soda or electronics brand which I already know about and do not want to buy. I don't think I could name a single ad that I've seen that is for a genuinely new product or service that was useful enough to me that I thought, "thank god they showed me this ad!"


I've actually seen multiple such ads in the past year on Youtube. I found myself surprised to actually want to see it to the end while hovering over the Skip button. One was a bed Heater/Cooler gadget, another an ultrasonic cutter. There were also some doozies, like these "model v8 engines" that work very hard to hide the fact that they are powered by electric motors. We'll see how this year goes.


And for literal centuries, you could flip through magazines to look for those neat gadgets when you want to look for them, where they usually had a fairly simple ad that wasn't trying to trick you or play with your emotions or anything. Usually a spec sheet.

When I want to know what kind of neat electronics I can play with my raspberry Pi, I don't sit around and wait for Youtube to show me ads, I browse the fucking store.

When my dad wanted to start a pressure washing business in the early 2000s, he didn't wait for an ad on the radio, or see a billboard, he ordered a catalog from some pressure washing companies and browsed their offerings at his leisure

In the 60s, if you ran a electronics lab, and you needed a new instrument to calibrate your new atomic clock, you would order an HP catalog and flip through their offerings, which included a basic description, a picture sometimes, and some specs.

Notably, the old way primarily required you to start from a point of dissatisfaction, intentionally seek out information, and purchase a solution to an actual problem you have.

The current days, advertising is all about convincing us with evolutionary brain tricks that we actually have so many problems. I'm tired of it.


I would opt in.

If adverts were for my benefit I would be able to choose them, rather than have to block them.


I like informative ads. Like old newspaper or magazine ads that are just a picture of the item and a few bullet points about what it offers. Ads like this post are manipulative and they weaponize psychology to make people buy things they wouldn’t want otherwise


Yes. Then again, there’s Banksy’s take:

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. (…)

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...


>It's ok to be happy from time to time :)

I'm perfectly fine doing that without 2005 Sony Bravia advertisement tyvm.


There no way to find out about anything if people don't advertise. Make a website? Advertising. Wear a band T-Shirt? Advertising. Make a website called Hacker News as VC firm? Advertising.


If you want to broaden the word "advertising" in such a dramatic way then I suppose it is your right as a human being to make up your own idiosyncratic dialect, but I think most of us see a pretty clear difference between advertising which is pushed on you whether you want it or not, and information which you go seek out when you want to know about it.


I guess my point is that "pushed on you whether you like it or not" is just a fact of if you re interested in said topic.

Is it that you don't want an interruption? Because for the information to be out there, someone had to pay for it and at some point, it was pushed on someone who didn't care.

I don't think I understand how any sort of commerce or awareness happens without advertising.


If I want something, I will go look for information about how to get it. If you want to call the information I have sought out "advertising", I suppose you can do that, though I would call it "reviews" or "datasheets", or perhaps at the most extreme "marketing materials".

What I object to is the practice of tricking people into wanting things they otherwise felt no desire for by putting advertisements for them in places they will be seen while the victim is trying to do something else. Billboards are a blight, radio and TV ads are an intrusion, web banners are a nuisance. I filter them all out of my life as hard as I can, because I don't want people getting into my head and making me desire things I don't need. Ye olde hedonic treadmill never stops spinning, you know? Making a living by telling people to feel less satisfied with their lives, so they will want to fill the lack with whatever you are selling, does not seem very honorable.


Someone has to move the product.


Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.

Advertising is part of that trade.

I’m happy it exists.


> Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.

Unabated capitalism has more poverty than capitalism with social programs. Social programs save people from poverty.

Also, capitalism can exist without advertising.


It doesn’t need every form of advertising, but you can’t start a business if you can’t reach prospective customers, and if you can’t start a business then you don’t have capitalism.


Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.

You meant the EXACT opposite, right? :)


No. Poverty is the default state. Capitalism creates inequality but it also reduces poverty.


+1 IMHO too.


Just a side point from the article

>When Conner was checking in to his hotel later that night, a ball bounced by on the sidewalk. He was 4 or 5 miles away.

I have to assume there was so many they never found just left to the ecosystem.

As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce. Even if bouncy balls in and of themselves are a tiny portion of that overall waste.

For example I live in the South, Mardi Gras is huge here and after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone of trash and waste left behind for prison labor to clean up as best they can. If it was me I would do a ban on plastic beads entirely as throwable parade objects.

> It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.

IMO at some point we all have to look back at the reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.


> As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce.

They're not useless. As you've just pointed out you enjoyed them as a kid. For a few cents in plastic how many hours of enjoyment did you get? What was wasted here?

> after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone

Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.

> reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.

Humans are always going to want to have fun. From my point of view have all the plastic beads you want. It's the nuclear weapons and daily war that gives me pause.


>Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.

Bleak reminder that I will never jive with the general vibes of HN and the VC trash types polluting the world for a tax write-off.


People aren't buying beads simply because they exist or they have some sort of scripp arrangement that forces them to buy them. It's demand. You can suggest that your moralism requires everyone else to live by an austerity that you're comfortable with but this is flatly inhumane. There's only one bleak outlook here.


I can understand your sentiment, but to be fair, he wasn't talking about write-offs, at least how I read it. He was talking about tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants." Revenue generation via people paying taxes on things is kind of the opposite of write-offs.


Ah, I'm thinking of my local understanding that many of the Mardi Gras Krewe's have beads and other objects donated to them for tax write-offs for businesses, or they get the whole float sponsored, etc.

>tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants."

The other local problem being from 1985 to 2024 Mardi Gras beads were sale tax exempt, but we've somewhat closed that loophole to more specific circumstances.[1]

[1]https://casetext.com/regulation/louisiana-administrative-cod...


It's a little bit of both actually. The point is when you draw in a massive crowd to a city for an event you generate huge amounts of taxes. Airport taxes, hotel taxes, sales taxes, they all take an appreciable jump. Even without the tax on beads, which as a percentage, was never going to be astronomical, it's around $15 million in sales tax increases alone.

The total economic value of Mardi Gras to the city as a whole is estimated around $800m.

This, by the way, is true for almost any successful event. For every $1 you invest you generate at least $2 in revenue.


Exactly, taxes on that fun is what supports food stamps and medicine for the poor, to the extent it is available.


This is the first time I'd ever heard of or seen that ad. I guess my efforts to avoid advertising work really well, hooray!

It is visually stunning for sure, but I have to not think too hard about the implications of it.


It never aired in the US so that could be one reason.


Could be. Although that was well after I stopped watching television, so if it didn't appear as an online ad, I wouldn't have seen it no matter what.


General thing of the internet, really. We've all become used to being rewarded for negativity and critique.


There's some irony in this comment. It's also a textbook ad hominem.

I love the ad and the stunt. I would have been as giddy as a child if I'd seen it in person.

It's also rings true to me that it's rather wasteful and destructive in service of selling TVs.

Shrug, what's done is done so I'm free to enjoy it guilt-free while also thinking we probably shouldn't do stunts like this anymore.


Seems cool enough to me that it should have been done independent of selling TVs. I don't think it is wasteful, and to the extent it was destructive, it was well worth it.

We should encourage and welcome more of this, not less. How it is funded does not diminish this, IMO.


Pardon me if "it looked cool" isn't persuasive.


To each their own. I hope there is something that sparks joy for you.


I already admitted that this brings me joy. I love things like this.

It's just not a very persuasive argument, even when I make it to myself, because I believe so strongly that other things are more important.


>It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.

This happens frequently for a good many things. Collective ignorance gets replaced with the lens of hindsight.


> Collective ignorance…

… and there it is. People knew but saw through it all to just maybe enjoy the wonder of the event.


I feel like the current generation will be remembered in the history as "the generation of sad fucks". It's incredibly difficult to escape the overwhelming sense of doom, but sometimes I have moments when I watch the sunset and think "this is cool", or listen to the music and feel comfy.


This might be usual teenage apathy mixing with rage-bait seeping out into the real world.


“I think our bill was $74,000 on broken windows,” said Ranahan. “And the crazy thing is, everyone loved it. The people, the neighborhood, they still come out to me and talk to me about it.”

"We want to set City Hall on fire, we want to bump a blimp into the Golden Gate Bridge and we want to jump a hook-and-ladder truck over Lefty O’Doul Bridge with Roger Moore on it’ … and they were seriously like, ‘OK.’”

My main question is, where did this San Francisco go? I'd love for the city to create more memorable moments because the city is special. But today, this ad would've been buried in CEQA lawsuits. Hell, parking in the wrong public spot could get your car keyed by some irate millionaire[1].

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/parking-wars-sf-billion...


First the dotcom boom pushed the artists out to Oakland by 2000, but there were still burners and hipsters in 2005. Then the subprime boom/bust took a lot of the hipsters and older businesses out, but the tech busses brought the Silicon Valley nerds in 2010. Then the rise of Uber startups through 2016 pushed the artists into warehouses until the Ghostship fire, but there were still techbros and crypto in the Mission. When the pandemic finally came for the rest of Frisco there was hardly anyone left who cared or they were so old they wanted everyone else to just leave. If you remember Market street and the Tenderloin from the old days, the tents today are kinda quaint.

I'm sure somebody has a similar timeline for NYC.


I would have so much fun doing various kinds of tit-for-tats with this guy.

That is until he, inevitably, would shoot me with impunity.


Only boring people can afford to live in SF


Wow, as someone with vivid and fond memories of watching this in college, I'm seeing this in this very thread. Kinda wild, and really makes me feel old and out of touch. And that heartbeats song is a banger and will forever take me back.


Yeah, it’s interesting that they have no motivation to separate the art from the commission nor any attempt to understand that it was a very different time. Broadcast television and low bandwidths.

The idea that advertising is a “cancer upon society” fundamentally misunderstands how mass media, telecommunications, and modern society works. It’s about passing and sharing information.

I hate most ads and almost all modern advertising sucks. But this ad ain’t it. It relies on nostalgia, a dream like element. The amount of pollution is, globally, negligible, and they largely cleaned them up. We hear stories of people keeping balls as mementi [1].

Call me cynical but if we are not meant to enjoy even the aesthetically pleasing stuff the neoliberal environmental disaster of the last 40 years creates we are in for a bad time. May as well go back to hunter gathering of subsistence farming.

[1] I know it’s non standard but if “octopi” is cromulent then so is “mementi”


> younger generations seemed to only view it negatively

I’m too young to remember this ad but I’m disgusted by it now. I hate advertising to begin with but this one floods the street with plastic which destroys private property and will never get cleaned up. What is there to like about it? How was this ever allowed? Imagine today I make an ad about dumping red 40 into the Mississippi River for a Netflix show. It’s evil and everyone knows it.


Don't get me wrong: as a piece of advertising, this is one of the few I would be willing to watch again. On the other hand, I am left asking: what is the point? It is not as though there were many venues where you could enjoy the vibrance of it. It certainly looks better on my modern monitors than on my Bravia TV of that era.

As for children, I would be strongly opposed to showing a child that commercial. It isn't hard to imagine them trying to haul buckets of bouncy balls to the roof after being ... inspired.


Seems like hyperactive concern to me. I would want my child climbing up on the roof with a bucket of bouncy balls. I would even buy them.


Better a child dump a bucket of bouncy balls off the roof supervised than unsupervised, right?


Sure, depending on the age. 5-6 is prime tree climbing age, at which time they should be fine to go up themselves.


Forgot the /s




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