Bill Hicks on "Marketing" (Explicit Language) on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2019–2025.
comedy · evergreen
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.
“If you haven't seen it, you might like this Bill Hicks standup routine”
8 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
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" (:
in “YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers” · View on HN
Explicit (seriously, explicit) Bill Hicks: ▶ this video We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
in “I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse” · View on HN
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.
in “Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity” · View on HN
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
in “Sorry, Mad Men. The Ad Revolution Is Here” · View on HN
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
in “The first game ‘Easter eggs’ were an act of corporate rebellion” · View on HN
> in the dark-ages, before javascript was a thing " back in your day (and mine) -- there was never such a thing as 'product manager' (read marketing exec MBA - who runs the web show) Bill hicks would have a word ▶ this video
in “Minimal Web” · View on HN
>>> no reason why a publisher should give up sales to people who buy a game multiple times just to make your life more convenient Found the MBA ▶ this video (although he does have a pretty cool site: [link] - so I'm sure he cant be all bad... :-)
in “Ask HN: If I buy a physical book why is the eBook not free?” · View on HN
Consideration: Facebook Pixel is still tracking you across the web, so it's easy to correlate other accounts from other companies to your account; not to mention that other services are probably consuming the Facebook Pixel service. They can build their own databases, referencing your Facebook correlation information, and share that back to Facebook. So, let's say you have a Facebook account and go to "Mom & POP Shop, Inc. dot com". If "Mom & POP Shop, Inc. dot com" implements Facebook Pixel (or has a way to consume it) and you buy something from them, giving your phone number, address, etc., then your other information is automatically correlatable just by those two points of data. The fact that 1,147 other companies have your information tells me that there was probably an intermediary advertising company between "Mom & POP Shop, Inc. dot com" and Facebook, so that intermediary could sell your information to anyone and everyone and, once it's on the "advertising market", it's ripe for correlation from other companies - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. All that's need is at least one, consistent, correlatable point of data - say your mac address or your browser's established fingerprint and you're "fair game" for targeting on the "advertising market". (Insert Bill Hicks' reference to Marketing and Advertising[1] here.) [1] - ▶ this video
in “Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting” · View on HN