this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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I saw a lot of them in my teenage years, and I saw similar propaganda in printed media such as TIME, Newsweek, and US News (I used to be quite a liberal even with the bad vibes detector going off and me trying to ignore it and eventually the tear gas wakeup call).

For those that don't remember or weren't there, the most well known versions of these, but not the only ones, were the AT&T "You Will" commercials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo

There were some creepier ones I am having a hard time finding now, one involving upward camera tilting toward skyscrapers and a blue sky with distant echoing sounds of children laughing while a narrator voice said something about knocking down all the old barriers and uniting the world in the new information superhighway and so on and so on. For all it was promising, even as a teenager watching it it felt creepy and that was especially because there was no product, sometimes hardly even a corporate logo put on for long, but a lot of "everything is going to be amazing, you'll see" from what was likely the same batch of aging vampires that are continuing to burn our planet down now while frantically trying to escape or hide from the ongoing consequences of their actions.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that remembers that creepy "end of history" siren singing era.

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[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 21 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The modern equivalent are the oil company "we're not demons bent on your destruction, see look at this stock footage of smiling people and nature" ads. Like this cw: psychic damage

[–] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 18 points 4 months ago

BP loved doing that after destroying so much of the Gulf of Mexico. eco-porky

[–] thirtymilliondeadfish@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

so cute and squishy, look at it go

edit: here's a little black rock ad spot from 2015. Their site went from sleek and stylised for the campaign, to a boring nothing-to-see-here agricultural blog before being taken offline in the past year

::: spoiler images

[–] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 11 points 4 months ago

I assume that marketing committees and metrics say that that commercial is endearing to most of its target audience but I felt sick and angry well before it was over. doomer

[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: