Matt Phillips Education
1 HN recommender · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2025
1:50 · 100K views · Mar 21, 2018
A two-minute clip of comedian Bill Hicks doing his routine on marketing and advertising, with explicit language. He mocks marketers and urges them to get out of the business.
Invoked in threads about ads, tracking and marketing as the go-to comedic indictment of advertising, often as a joke or a parallel.
8 comments from Hacker News
If you haven't seen it, you might like this Bill Hicks standup routine: this video "If anyone here is in advertising or marketing ... kill yourself" (:
I can't figure out what the point of this article is, but let's talk about advertising and AI, since that seems to be a primary focus. Advertisers using generative AI to create ad campaigns is a diversion at best. The only use of AI advertisers are interested in is how they can embed ads directly in the personal AI assistants the world is starting to use. If a conversational AI model can be manipulated to casually mention a specific brand in its output at precisely the right moment, then that's the most accurate form of targeting, with the highest chance of engagement. AI assistants are trusted much more than any search engine, or any media we consume, so it's only a matter of time until we start seeing these integrations with mainstream models. No AI service provider will be able to resist cashing in on the advertising dollar, regardless of what their "benefit of all humankind" marketing agenda claims. They're sitting on a data gold mine much larger than the one adtech currently controls, with user demand that will eventually surpass social media and entertainment sites. The opportunity to monetize AI is enormous, and that's the next advertising frontier. Advertising is a scourge on humanity. this video
Reminds me the Bill Hicks routine on marketing people. First telling them to kill themselves and then suggesting the marketing people are thinking “he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar, there’s a lot of money in that”, etc. The machine will always extract whatever is useful and profitable. It co-opts everything to make itself bigger and bigger. this video
Explicit (seriously, explicit) Bill Hicks: this video We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
Just going to throw this out there: this video I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.