Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Ad Nauseum

It’s that time of the year again, when every huckster with something to sell is trying to peddle it anyway they can. For someone who used to work in advertising, I’ve developed a healthy contempt for most sales pitches. It would be nice again to not see an ad on everything my eyes happen to rest on, whether while driving or looking around the web or watching TV. Billboards, signage, logos, infomercials, web banners, blimps. No, scratch that last one. Blimps are kind of cool…

It’s interesting to see how ads have slowly crept onto the surface of many objects, into sponsored events and even the interfaces for cable TV. The last one was one that particularly annoyed me. When the cable company introduced the ads on the bar that appears across the bottom of the screen when you switch channels, they built in a 3 second delay to ensure that you look at the ad. What this means is that to advance across all the 200 or so channels on our cable system now takes several minutes, instead of less than a minute. It’s as if someone took your computer away at work and replaced it with one from 5 or 6 years ago that ran at one eighth the speed of your current one. What value have you received for your time? Nada. Just an ad you try to not look at anyway.

But that’s not what really bothers me about advertising. It’s not just the creeping ubiquity or insidiousness of it all.

It’s the results.

Ad agencies have spent decades learning how the human mind ticks, what you respond to and how to manipulate various feelings, guilts and desires. They’ve gotten very effective at it as evidenced by the consumption rate in the U.S. We swim in a sea of advertising in this country, almost everything we look at has an ad. It’s the same in Japan and Europe. And what’s the result? We buy tons of stuff we are told we just have to get but don’t really need, consuming vast amounts of raw materials and energy while generating megatons of pollution. Then we need to work harder to pay for all this stuff.

Now you know why I don’t work in advertising anymore…

- Bob Woods