Ever feel like no matter what it is you read, listen to, or watch, you are constantly be bombarded by advertisement?
I mean, we listen to the radio and hear commercials for mortgage companies, auto shops, concerts, whatever. It gets old fast. In the world of television, we’ve gotten used to commercials between programs but at least when we PVR them, we can skip them. But those commercials seem to be getting longer and longer every day. In fact, if I am not mistaken, I was watching a show the other day and it cut to commercial and I noticed the time. When the commercial was done, 6 minutes had passed. SIX MINUTES! An episode of Lost runs about 42 minutes but airs in a 1 hour time slot. That means that of 60 minutes, 18 of it is purely advertisements. That’s almost a third of the time the show is on. Plus, shows now have cut out theme songs, and credits get scrolled by so fast that shows end right on the hour, just so they can cram MORE ads in.
Then today I was annoyed by something else with advertising. Now that the web has become a part of everyday life, we are seeing advertising there. It really started with popups, but now we see ads in many forms. Web pages filled with them on the top, side, bottom, and in the middle of an article. How many times have you gone to click on a link just to have an ad pop up and click on it by accident? Or how about you click on one link thinking it will bring you to what you want, but you get this ad page instead which you either have to watch, or click another link to skip the ad.
Today, I saw another one that was very irritating. It was a twist on the click a page to show me and ad that I can skip theme. This time, I’m reading an article about the US housing situation and scrolling through just fine, and then the screen goes totally white, a green ad for something useless comes up, and I had to sit through it and wait before I could continue reading. Talk about irritated.
Is this really what the world has come to? Let’s harass people with advertisements to the point that they are so annoyed with them that they don’t bother. Uhm, folks, you need to come up with a better way to promote your products.
Man, if I could come up with some sort of advertising system that worked for companies, but didn’t irritate the users, I’d be a frakkin millionaire.
