2Cool.Net - Jekyl's World

Jekyl’s World - Have I got a Deal for You
2cool.net

Everywhere we go these days we are being bombarded with advertising. Some of it is pretty glaring, some of it is less so, but it’s sneaking in at us from every angle. I, for one, am sick of it.

I get dozens of emails a day from people I don’t know. It’s called spam and is founded on the old Sales philosophy that if you make 100 contacts you might sell one, two, or three items and you’ve had a decent day. This philosophy is employed by these merciless creeps calling us at home during dinner, but that’s fodder for another time. Emails are bad enough, but you can hardly get through a web site anymore without having your eyes assaulted by ads in every corner. Those are bad enough, but a lot of sites (even here at 2cool.net) employ the use of consoles, which are those irritating little windows that force you to look at whatever it is they want you to look at long enough to close them.

I can’t stand in the bathroom at a restaurant and take a piss without looking at an ad pasted right in front of my face. You can’t get away from it. They’re even selling space on the goddamned handles of gas pumps! Have you seen this? It is out of control. Every repair type person that visits my house feels compelled to leave an ad stuck to whatever it is he fixes. Got one on the air conditioner letting me know where to call him next time. On the pool pump, water heater, refrigerator, you name it.

There are ads on the stinking bills we receive in the mail and have to pay every month. They’re on the sides of buses and airplanes, being dragged by airplanes, on bus stops, and taxis. They have painted an otherwise black tunnel wall in the subway system in Atlanta that is so cleverly done, that it looks like a moving picture when you whiz by it. You can’t even escape in a tunnel, in the dark! They’ll even pay you to let them ‘wrap’ your car in an ad so you can drive around advertising Yahoo or something. We’ve got non-stop advertising in the sports business (and business it is). They’re scrolling by on the scoreboards at stadiums, they’re on the uniforms of players, hell, there is even advertising in the naming of stadiums. The Pro Player, Nokia, Heinz, Gatorade, Tampax Bowl! I won’t even get started about Car Racing. You can’t even see the cars for the ads/stickers all over them.

And in the event you don’t know it, you can’t watch a movie without seeing a non-stop parade of products, cleverly placed so that you see the brand while watching a movie. You can’t watch TV without an ad being constantly displayed in the corner of the screen for the station you’re watching.

We’re suffering advertising overload. It was bad enough, way back when, when there were just billboards and TV commercials. These days, you have to go way out of your way to get somewhere that you don’t see an ad. I personally think they’re ruining the whole effect, because if they think we were channel surfers before, just watch how fast we can divert our attention from all this other bullshit.

Cheers!