Too Many Commercials

I hate when I go through my list of 6 radio stations in the morning, and all 6 are playing commercials. For a second I stopped on the Mix because Eric and Kathy were talking, but then I realized that they were pushing Vermont Teddy Bears for Mother's Day.

I'm convinced that the most evil people in this country are not the lawyers, but those in the advertising industry*. They are probably also the smartest people in this country too, but there's nothing to celebrate about evil genius. These fockers find every way imaginable to increase the amount of ads they can surround us with, and every way imaginable to increase the effectiveness of these ads. Worst of all, they don't care about anything other than maximizing their profits.

Everywhere you look or listen, these people have found a way to fill it with advertising. It's not just billboards, magazine ads, or commercial breaks on TV/radio. It's the sides of buses, banner ads on websites, and even on top of urinals so you can read them while you pee. It's the short commercials like the Coca-Cola Refreshing Moviemakers Award or Celine Dion driving a Chrysler that they show before movie previews, which are actually commercials themselves. Think about that, ads that precede more ads, it's ridiculous.

Not only this, but they continue to find new ways to make their advertising sneakier and more intrusive into our lives. They're not just harmless "click here" banner ads anymore, they are pop-up windows and Flash animations that fly in your face and cover up the article you are trying to read, forcing you to pay attention. You're not free from advertising once the TV show or movie starts, either. There's product placement all over the place, from that Men's Health magazine being read by the dad on Everybody Loves Raymond, to the Mazda RX-8 in X2.

I know that without advertising, many of the things we know in life would not exist. There wouldn't be free TV or free internet sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo. And I have to admit that a lot of ads are pretty well done and entertaining in themselves, not just annoying. Most of the Superbowl commercials end up being pretty clever, and I definitely thought the Aston Martin in Tomorrow Never Dies was cool.

But as they teach you in the first days of economics class, "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Sure, you don't directly pay to watch TV or play Fantasy Baseball on Yahoo. But it should be obvious that somewhere, somehow, they are making money off of you. If it weren't profitable, they would've all been long gone by now. A 30-second spot during the Superbowl wouldn't be worth millions if it didn't somehow cause us to spend more by watching it. For that matter, nobody would pay millions of dollars to Michael Jordan for wearing their shoes, if it weren't bringing back millions more in return.

I'm personally at a point of saturation when it comes to advertising. It would be one thing if the only way it affected me was the annoyance of having to delete all the spam emails or sit through commercial breaks between innings of the Sox game. I'd even be able to accept it, to a certain degree, if the ads subconsciously or consciously made me want to buy more stuff. But I really think it goes much deeper than that. There's way too much advertising, and it is costing us more than the money we spend or the time we waste. It is seriously hurting and draining our society.

The most disturbing thing to me is that advertising controls almost everything we see and hear, which in turn shapes the way we think. This is going too far. We've all heard about the girls who develop eating disorders because they want to be like the impossibly-thin models in the magazine ads, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. With nearly everything in the media being ratings-driven, everything we see and hear is somehow tailored to maximize the exposure and effects of advertising. Sadly, not even the news we watch is immune to its influence. Because CNN has to worry about ratings and profits, we're seeing less and less objective, responsible news reporting, and more and more signs of tabloid journalism, which plays up emotions and stirs up controversy in hopes of attracting more viewers.

The world of advertising is the epitome of capitalism at its best and worst. While it brings us many positive things, in excess it brings plenty of negative results as well. Without further exploding the length of this blog, all I want to say is that we can't only look at the benefits of commercialization without realizing the danger of over-commercialization. And yes, I do consider it a real danger, not just a matter of mere annoyance.

* The evilness of the advertising industry I'm talking about does not include the lovely people whose job is to buy advertising time from the networks for the ad agencies