Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/11/spotify-ran-ads-for-evil-clown.html
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I see no problem here.
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Your name checks out. 
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I remember a radio station in the Twin Cities, some time in the early 2000’s, that branded itself as the love song station, all love songs all the time (heavy on the Neil Diamond).
One evening I happened to be tuned in, station surfing while driving, when the Nice Announcer Lady assures us listeners that The Station in Question knows that we listeners are family-oriented with family values, and that if anything The Station in Question plays is in any way disrespectful of listener family values, we apologize and hope you will let us know so we can make it right, etc.
(Not to be cynical; the station branded itself, quite sensibly.)
Then they played Indiana Wants Me:
Weird. Either the station didn’t get the word that “Indiana Wants Me” is about a self-righteous murderer, or I was gamed by a very strange A/B test.
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I think there are a lot of times where the general population doesn’t look past a literal or naive interpretation of the chorus and somehow manages to overlook the rest of the lyrics. It’s especially amusing when advertisements misuse a song. You pay thousands of dollars for the rights, but you never printed out the lyrics and read them once?
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Youtube plays scary-ass shit occasionally between Cocomelon baby videos too. it’s pretty fucking annoying when the whole point is to have your kid chill for a minute.
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I used to work in a record store during Sublime’s hit song “Santeria.” For awhile, it was a daily occurrence for parents to return the CD decrying the sex and violence of the other songs, how we were monsters for selling it, and how they’d been hoodwinked into buying it for their kid by that happy ska song. A happy ska song about pistol whipping and killing a guy that his girlfriend had been cheating on him with. But these were also the same parents who’d get upset hearing any hip hop playing in the store, but described Robert Plant’s screaming orgasm about giving “every inch of my love” as “good music in here finally.” Some of it’s not listening; some of it’s generational familiarity.
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A lot of parents hate the horror movie ads. Rated R movies should not be advertised on anything that isn’t also rated R. Nobody want gov’t regulation but keep scaring the shit out of kids during cooking shows and you’ll get regulation.
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Are kids scared for days, weeks, months? I mean I do feel bad when parents lose even a single night of sleep, they’re already short on sleep, especially with young children.
At some point we have to decide if the comfort of families outweighs the operation of a business. Restrictions on advertising can harm an industry if done incorrectly, leading to job cuts for thousands of people. Without any real data I’m going to propose a thought experiment. Is it OK to scare 1000 children to keep one actor working? How about 100, or 10? I think we value the contributions that actors make, even if we enjoy sneering at the hoopla around the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle.
Maybe some children don’t get over a scare, maybe it’s 10% of them, maybe it’s 1% of them. Perhaps we should label broadcasts, websites, and advertising streams if these particular individuals really warrant the effort it will take to eliminate exposure to disturbing content.
Maybe R rated movies are unnecessary and we should only allow family friendly shows to be produced and advertised mainstream. I know some Christian groups try to produce such content on their own for roughly the same reasons of wanting to protect the innocent from worldliness. I can’t say it’s a terribly effective strategy, and that might be because it doesn’t have the force of a government behind it. Or it might be because a large number of people don’t care how a young child feels. Their priority is to satisfy their own excitement at seeing sex, violence, gore, and shocking imagery.
Yes. Kids have told me about adds from 5 or more years ago that still creep them out. Also the point was to not run scary ads unless its adult only content, if that wasn’t clear I’m sorry.
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Is adult only content R rated content. Or prime time content when the kids should be in bed? I think you or someone mentions the former, but the current (or but not strict) practice is the latter.
Our views on the subject if you’re interested!
This is a really long-winded way to announce to the world the difficulty you have in seeing the wood for the trees.
When you go to the movies, the trailers you see are broadly suited in tone to the main content that you are watching. This ensures that ads are suitable to the likely audience (irrespective of age, really) and their expectations, and it also makes good business sense - in fact it may even primarily make good business sense - because it ensures that the ad is likely getting to an audience that appreciates that product or media.
I once went to an evening showing of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in a German cinema, where this wasn’t adhered to - to be confronted with a trailer for The Exorcism of Emily Rose - and it was wholly inappropriate. The audience was largely adults but not all, but also the trailer was so far from the tone we were prepared for (CGI werewolf jump-scares notwithstanding) that the experience was really unpleasant.
It would not take a genius level of software development to restrict horror ads to media that was tagged with thematically-linked metadata, and would probably be beneficial all-round. It’s interesting though that sometimes you get ads on Youtube for media containing themes that Youtube themselves actively demonetise producers for.
They show advertisements to movies outside of movie theaters. Always have done so.
When I was a kid there was a big public outrage for the theater showing trailer for Showgirls (NC-17). They weren’t showing the trailers before Pocahontas, but you put Showgirl trailers (which were sanitized for all audiences) in front of Braveheart and Apollo 13 and people lost their mind.
Of course there were bus stop posters of the film where impressionable children could see a woman’s head on top of a seductive silhouette. OH NO
(is sex on par with violence? no. but in American culture, especially at that time, it is considered equally bad for children. that’s the local cultural values and I’m not about debate the validity of that culture)
Might as well teach kids while they are young that clowns are fucking evil.
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Otherwise they might vote for the one currently in office
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