My Amazon TV Now Unmutes Itself During Prime Video Commercial Breaks

It wouldn't, but could do as a result of a bug that has nothing to do with trying to force you to listen to adverts. My Apple TV box, AVR and TV between them sometimes seem to get into a state where the sound is muted and whenever I unmute it, it unmutes and immediately mutes again. I have to reboot the Apple TV box to get the sound to stay on again. So this sort of thing does happen.

Presumably it's a bug/defect in the TV.

While that is stupid and I would return such a defective product, there's a difference between "my TV's mute is broken" and "my TV specifically unmutes itself during ads".

For the same reason of Netflix requiring writers to announce what there characters doing. [0]

"I'm about to unmute the TV and watch an advert from Amazon"

[0] https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr...

There's a big difference between a bug that slipped through during a release or two and an actively user-hostile design decision

Or maybe until you turn it off and on again.

They do own the house. The mortgage holder has a security interest in the property.

You mortgage your TV?

Very very different, and something which lets the advertising industry of the hook

I don’t think OP is saying it’s not effective. It can be a virus and effective. The point is more about the consequences.

Even if you don't click it, you still receive the message. A big part of marketing is repeating the same thing over and over again in multiple forms so it sticks with you long enough to inform a purchasing decision.

go ask anyone who uses tiktok or instagram regularly, literally everyone woman/femme person i know who uses either platform has bought stuff off of it before

As someone who worked in the ad measurement space for over 15 years: we have no idea what is effective. Advertising measurement is a morass of misaligned incentives.

The marketers at a company that buys advertising do not get their bonuses because of effective, accurate ad measurement. They get their bonuses because their advsrtising "worked". How do they know it worked? By hiring a third party wo uses statistics to estimate an almost entirely unobservable thing: how many widgets were bought that would not have been bought in the absence of advertising.

Well guess what, there are many vendors that offer these "measurement" services, and when you debut a provably more accurate measurement methodology than your prior one, but the results are lower than the less accurate one? You lose business to companies that give better (i.e., higher) results.

This is easily solvable: ad measurement should be accountable to the CFO and not the CMO. The CFO cares if advertising wastes money; the CMO gets their bonus if the advertising "worked".

A few years ago, Freakonomics Radio [1, 2] had a very good 2-part overview of recent ad research done by the University of Chicago [3] and other academics. Their research, which is divorced from the same misaligned incentives I cited above found that ad effectiveness is vastly overstated. At that year's advertising research industry conferences, where some of the academics were invited to speak, they were pilloried by the research heads at some of the biggest people in the ad research industry.

It's all super fucked.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

[2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

[3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising...

I'll add a little more: the vast majority of statistical tools used in ad measurement are basic basic things that have zero hope of extracting causal relationships between ad exposure and behavior. Even many of the more advanced tools have issues with the fact that advertising is usually targeted in one way or another, thereby creating a bias in your test group.

Add to that the fact tbat advertisers commonly time their ad spending with times of peak seasonality or big sales, thereby creating all kinds of endogeneity problems gor a would be statistical researcher. Third, consider the walled gardens: so much advertising happens in them that it is nearly impossible to get a full view of whether your control group is truly unexpsoed to advertising. Fourth, there are vast difficulties in linking online behavior to brick-and-mortar purchase outcomes. Finally, consider the notion that the advertisements qnd advertised products themselves change quite frequently: the results of one ad study are not necessarily applicable to future behavior.

As i said: we really have no idea beyond very basic notions what truly works and what doesn't. Some advertising very likely works; others very likely dont.

I agree even just an auto mute functionality would go a long way.

People used to hack on this stuff decades ago. I suspect it's not as common now because for those who care (said hackers) they already cobble together some ad blockers and pi-holes. But ad delivery has stained so much daily life now they've sweetened the pot for a new generation of, not ad blockers, but... video shields?

I might have talked myself into tinkering on this. Curious what tools HN recommends.

Thanks. That's a good tip. And not even much of a scam: I do have a kid who uses the device, and they do push ads for vaguely pornographic romance novels. (Though I've never read a romance novel in my life...)

No scam required, if you ask nicely they are usually happy to. Not always, but you could always try again with a different agent.

If not that, a relatively small fee will remove the ads. I believe it's under $20, one time.

They'll probably come back when the next update is pushed. That would be my bet, anyway.

Or just buy the non advert infected one.

I did the math last year, and with the discount on things I buy from Amazon cancelling Prime would cost me hundreds of dollars per year. So for me, cancelling Prime wouldn't send the signal that I'd want it to. As far as not purchasing from Amazon to being with, nobody else is even close, sadly.