> I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit.

That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?

There’s something rather extraordinary about this community, in particular, throwing a fit about advertising in products. This discussion has gone from “fuck that guy” — overlooking that almost every employer represented here has one and the larger employers have entire divisions of them — to “capitalism is bad” in three messages. That’s impressive. It’s almost as if the root cause of why these business models are horrible is slowly becoming more obvious to the people who engineer more clever ways to collect data and serve advertisements to enable those business models (or who work in a cost center orbiting such an organization).

Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.

This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?

Fairly sure HN has been complaining about this for years. We're not a hivemind; it's not even the case that most posters work for FAANG, ycombinator or even "startups" per se.

Samsung positions themselves as a high end brand. These ads are appearing on higher end tv models.

If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.

But that isn't the case here.

Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.

> If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.

And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.

"Samsung learned from the industry represented here"

Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.

Hm. Maybe. Maybe capitalism in its current form is bad nonetheless? Or an exploiting sham? How do you explain companies like BlackRock, Inc. and similar being on the boards of almost any important corporation? Isn't that a conflict of interest?

Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.

What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?

Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.

I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)

edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.

(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)