Dude, who even knows.
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Been thinking about that WB exec who told me around 2008 that the reason there weren’t more “black” TV shows even though there was a pent-up demand was that a network’s real customers aren’t viewers but advertisers and there weren’t enough that wanted a specifically black audience (tho there were for children, teen, young adult, elderly, male, female, rich, poor, etc.)
Makes me wonder how much the rise of “identities” in recent online media has to do with algorithmic advertising where the content and the ads are decoupled so you go for breadth and intensity of audience with a “black” or “feminist” theme (or any other vertical, like “sports” or “cars”) and then the algorithm serves each viewer individually optimized ads for like, Dyson vacuums or furniture or vacations, depending
(And also I wonder if something of the reverse didn’t happen with GamerGate, that games journalism turns on “previews” and insider stuff that’s advertising as far as the studios care, rare and in-demand content to readers, and cheap, subsidized content to the editors, with tighter ties and more effort than traditional media ad placement. So studios felt bound to Polygon and Kotaku cause they had the readers, and readers felt bound cause they had the exclusives, and as it shaded from “yay AAA vidya!” to walking simulators and colonialism thumbsuckers*, the entry costs prevented competitors from capitalizing and everyone just got angry and resentful instead?)
* ‘cause it’s come up twice, “thumbsucker” is an old journalism term for what today would be called a “think piece”
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So I have this memory from when I was younger of a TV ad for this weird flat flashlight that only blinks when you squeeze it, where a young guy uses it in a club to flirt with an attractive woman.
And I had never been able since to find any mention of such a product. No one seemed to have ever heard of it, or remembered the ad. This almost sounds like creepypasta, but it was just too goddamn goofy.
I finally just rediscovered the name, it was the Polaroid PolaPulse, and it came out in 1997.
I found this page at FlashlightMuseum.com, which allowed me to search and find this mention of the ad campaign at AdAge (apparently they were sold at Spice Girls concerts as SpiceLights?), and the holy grail, a copy of the ad at AdForum.
This is basically the product’s entire online presence, aside from a few threads looking for replacement batteries. I think you couldn’t even get replacement batteries at the time, it was purely disposable. They say it used the same batteries as powered the flash in old Polaroid cameras, so you can hack those in.
Honestly, reading those pages - check the comments at the museum site - it still sounds like creepypasta. But now that I know it actually existed, I’m absolutely convinced that this was part of a marketing experiment or hell, even a bet, to see how many units of an absolutely pointless product you could sell based on X dollars worth of ad buys.