I am an adult
I am not a great fan of television.
If I were living on my own I would probably dump the device as it would only gather dust in the corner. However, Herself likes it and it calms her down and saves a small fortune on Prozac. Stick her in front of the television with a bottle of gin and peace reigns throughout the land.
If I am home of an evening I take on the duty of muting the box when the advertisements come on. I am quite adept at this and haven’t heard an advertisement in years. That still leaves the visual irritation though but there is little I can do about that.
Advertisements seem to fall into two categories these days – those that assume we have an infantile mentality and those which assume we are brain-dead altogether. I would like to point out a few simple facts for the advertisers which may not help in the promotion of their produce but at least won’t force me to avoid their shit like the plague.
For a start I am not impressed with animation. Cartoons are for five year olds and animated household items fall into that category. I am not going to buy a box of something simply because you show it dancing around the screen, nor am I going to buy something because you have illustrated it with little pointy nosed people [who I find distinctly disturbing and exceedingly irritating].
Forget your computer generated characters too. There is an advertisement that shows people living on little planets where the service man calls. It is a fucking pointless campaign – we do not live on little planets and I do not see the point in claiming that we do. The characters in it too are rather creepy and make me feel vaguely nauseous.
If you want to show little Pacman like characters gobbling up germs then feel free, but do not insult my intelligence by putting up a little sign telling me it is a simulation. I fucking know it’s a simulation and a bad one at that.
If that’s your ad for a laxative potion, then I would advise you rethink your tag-line – I do not want a laxative that “works while I sleep”. I like to be wide awake when I am having a dump, thanks very much.
I actually saw an advertisement the other night that droned on for its allocated thirty seconds and then invited me to visit Facebook to see the other exciting “episodes”. Why on earth would I wish to subject myself to more of your tat? You may think your little bit of film is some kind of epic cinematic genius but I don’t. Fuck off.
The bottom line is simple.
If you really want to persuade me to buy your junk then for fuck’s sake treat me like an adult and not some brain-dead moron.
I still won’t buy it but at least I won’t actively avoid it.
I agree that there are loads of very annoying ads on TV but surely, of all the annoying ones, the ads for car insurance have got to be the worst.
(Except for those adorable little Meercats of course!!!)
The worst are the ones that advertise any website. They seem to think that success lies in having the most ridiculous names too. Those fucking puppets in the Womba or Wimba one are the prize winners. Fucking stupid ad. Fucking stupid name. I blame Google.
The meercats are clever and very well done. However, if I want to watch animated animals, there are plenty children's channels on satellite for that, thanks.
You seem to have hit the nail on the head there GD. But don't forget those strategically timed charity adverts ("This is Christopher" etc. etc.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti charity, but I can do without the emotional baggage of trying to make me feel guilty at dinner time with footage of emaciated children dying.
There's also the daily 6pm "Bong" show, where members of the public are invited to stare into space for a minute. Aren't we a little bit over that religious shite?
True, there's always the change channel and/or mute buttons, but it'd be nice if that weren't necessary.
Charity ads go right over my head. I have trained myself to completely ignore them and console myself with the thought that 99.99% of contributions probably go into fat salaries for the charity organisers.
I never have the set on early enough to see the Bong Show. Herself is usually out in the field until seven or eight so the box stays mute and blank. It's time that crap was dumped anyway.
And yet you have ads in your blog.
True. But…. a) they are silent and b) I have mentioned several times that AdBlock Plus is yer only man.
The pot is building slowly towards the $100 mark, whereupon I shall remove them. I reckon it's around $75 at the moment.
Not having owned a telly (or not one hooked up to an aerial, anyway) for ten years or so, I'm rarely subjected to that sort of inane crap that they sandwich programmes in-between. However, years ago when there was one in my house, I was like you GD in that I would actively avoid products when the advertising annoyed me. Given that just about all the ads were puerile crap, that's quite a few products I would avoid buying if I possibly could. I remember there was an ad in UK for an insurance company which used an animated telephone as its logo / mascot / whatever. Everything about the ad would make me clench my teeth in impotent rage at the sheer grating banality of it. It was an insult to sub-60 IQ intelligence, and I would just about slit my wrists rather than give them my business. Silly thing is, they were paying out thousands and thousands to persuade me never to use them!
Funny old world, innit?
If you mean that Godawful ad with the little telephone on wheels, then that's still around. Quite how I am supposed to be impressed [let alone persuaded] by a fucking toy telephone, I don't know.
The only joy I get out of advertising is the knowledge of all those wasted millions in advertising budgets. But then they just hike up the price of the product to cover that. Insane!
Yeah, that's the one. Fucking dreadful.
You mean like this one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMqyFO6-eo
Oog…no wonder you despise it. Wouldn't take me long to throw a half a brick at the television. If I had one that is (a television set, not half a brick. Plenty of those).
Aaaaaaggghhhhhhhh! 😯
Tell me where to send the $25 you await.
Nice offer, but the whole point of the exercise to to relieve Google of my money. If I quit now, they'll owe me around $75. It's a matter of principle and principal.
I remember when each city had its own bus fleet with its own livery. Beautiful. Different colo(u)rs, coats of arms in gold paint. Now they are all covered in ads. Shite.
The worst is when they paint the entire bus just to advertise one brand. I'm surprised the drivers don't down tools!
Anything that remains static for more than five minutes gets an ad plastered onto it these days.
Ha! Here they painted or rather stickered six buses incliding all windows except the windscreen with a 'potted history' and a large picture of six famous submarines. All well and good but these bloody buses run around Barrow-in-Furness the place where the damn things are built.
BAE, the current owners of the shipyard, say it was to commemorate 100 years of submarine building which is again all well and good but is defacing buses the best they can come up with?
The Corporation buses (corporation was the name for the council before they hid the fact the council is a business and dropped the word corporation from everything) used to have a two tone navy blue and cream colour scheme, very smart and clean and Ribble (swallowed up by those Jock gangsters Stagecoach who incidentally made the privatised Barrow Borough Transport aka Corporation buses bankrupt) were bright red. Equally smart and clean. Now all there is is Stagecoach a company which has the private monopoly of public transport in the peninsula.
Barrow. Spent a week there one afternoon. 🙂
Red Red Wine was on the juke at the rugby club.
Must have been the eighties as t'rugby club is no more.
It's worse than fucking NASCAR.
Hah! Don't watch. I'm spared that one.
oddly your household sounds lot like ours….and my other tends to make wonderful drinkies..humm
LCD: Lowest Common Denominator: (The most basic, least sophisticated level of taste, sensibility, or opinion among a group of people.) This is who the ads are for. This is also the reason that TV has so many Reality Shows!…..Hate'em
Can't watch any programme that involves phoning in a vote. Hate 'em all.
Get a freeview recorder box or sky+ box. When the programme starts set it to record. Don't watch it but go and make a cup of tea or select a nice whisky or talk to the cat for 15 minutes. Now go back to the TV, watch the programme to play from the start of the recording and fast forward the adverts at speed 12. Result – no adverts!
In our house every programme we regularly want to watch is set to record so we can start watching a few minutes (or hours, or days) later and fast forward all the ads.
Aha! I have a Sky+ and that is precisely what I do. All the favourites are programmed to record. Anything that isn't recorded I bang on hold for a while so I can fast forward when necessary. Still get caught the odd time though!
Yes, recently on many progs here in Ingerland they often run direct from the last add and direct into the programme, which is a pain.
Also 'browsing' on the TV has become a pointless and irritating excercise because the adds appear to last longer than the programme segments and all channels have them at the same time.
I record all the programmes I want to see and then fast forward the ads when I view later.
Only one problem … the fast forward button wore out!
You need a remote control with industrial strength fast forward and mute buttons!