Anti-Advertising, the New and Improved Boycott
Are you sick of being bombarded with endless repetitive advertisements for products you are not interested in? You are not alone. In the 70’s, people were hit with roughly 500 ads per day on average. Now it is up to a sickening 5,000 ads per day! It’s time to fight back against Adflation.
God forbid you click a link to check out a product for any reason. That click will follow you around like a creepy stalker for days or even weeks as though your browsing were a public record to be freely shared between companies. Well apparently it is. There are several companies that specialize in monetizing your interests and we all know who the top offenders are: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. View a product on any of these platforms and they all seem to know it immediately. That seems like an invasion of privacy to me but I’m sure its all covered in the Terms of Service you never read. But they are just the visible partners for this data mining. Many other companies specialize in providing the links between platforms, both gathering and disseminating at the same time.
Try to opt out of one of these services and it’s like chopping off the head of a Hydra, 10 more grow back. Indeed once your information is floating around in “the cloud” it’s almost impossible to have any say on where it goes. Companies are so greedy for your private information that they keep it long after you think you’ve deleted it. I work with databases and believe me they keep everything but just set a flag to “not display” your deleted items.
Try browsing YouTube and you are penalized with those “wait 5 seconds” type ads if your lucky or the more intrusive “wait until the full add plays” type. Then in the middle of the content (could be a classical concert, whatever) they need to pop up another ad and interrupt the content you were enjoying.
And none of this includes the nefarious spammers who fill endless servers with digital garbage waiting for the one special sucker to buy what they are spamming about. It’s all disgusting, so here’s what I propose we do about it.
If you don’t like an ad or the way it’s being shoved in your face, make a note of that company or product. Put that company or product on your Do Not Buy List. If we work together we can collectively penalize by turning their Ads in to Anti-Ads. Flip the switch on these desperate attempts for your attention and time. If we can get it going to a sufficient degree of commitment we will change their behavior. Otherwise, that 5,000 ads will become 10,000!
Advertising is as old as life itself. Ancient mating rituals of almost every animal was, and is, all about attracting attention, hoping someone will buy what you are selling. It’s natural to want to let people know you exist and have something to offer. But mating season shouldn’t and doesn’t last for ever. Make your point and give it a rest, people. We should encourage those companies who advertise less and punish those who make large ad buys that are polluting our minds with clutter. I know, so many depend on ad revenues to survive but that doesn’t have to mean MORE ads all the time. It could mean fewer, better quality ads or shorter “reminder” ads. We should challenge advertisers to say in 10 seconds what they say in 30. Give us back our time, don’t just cram in more ads either!
Or another possibility for relief, advertisers could become more creative making ads less repetitive using artificial intelligence and randomization. I once invented a form called Dynamic Non-Repeating Advertising (DNA) that randomized elements of ads so they were never quite the same. Already a major improvement and even easier with today’s technology. Today’s advertising doesn’t lack creative imagination, it lacks technical imagination.
Adflation is out of hand. Because of this bloated practice, the value of a single ad has gone down so now you need a wheelbarrow full of ads to sell a loaf of bread. It’s honestly turned almost every company into spammers who are spamming every square inch of the web, every second of radio and TV and interrupting our lives to sell, sell, sell. Enough!
We seriously need to tame these practices by using a carrot and a stick approach. The carrot is buying products from companies with nominal and ethical advertising, word of mouth, a good reputation, a beloved brand that speaks for itself. I’m more likely to buy a Tesla because I hear from real people they are great cars and I rarely, if ever, see them advertised. The stick is refusing to buy a product you might even like from a company you might also like but wish to make behave more kindly to its advertising audience and potential customers. Spamming is rude!
Of course, all this is much easier said than done. There are gigantic sums of money at stake and huge agencies that specialize in producing ads and buying ad slots across all media. Companies certainly have a First Amendment right to free speech but at what point are their rights destroying our mental health and Pursuit of Happiness? We need to find a balance and de-escalate this war on our minds as it’s already gone too far. In reality, current advertising has become boorish and overreaching and plain old fashioned and out of touch. Same old, same old. Blah, blah, blah. Time to up your game advertisers!
In my book, Wealth and the End of Money, I talk about the inevitable demise of money itself as a medium of exchange brought about by mass automation and AI. One of the consequences is also the end of advertising because you don’t need to sell what’s free (except during mating season). I also say that it’s not happening any time soon but we can already see signs of it as I wrote in The Assistive Age Is Near here on Medium. But we don’t have to wait until then to start reclaiming what is rightfully ours—our time and peace of mind.
In the mean time, I predict that new services will arise to aid us in tracking what not to buy in the form of web sites and apps or to at least give companies a deserved Spam Score. They love scoring us, whether it’s credit scores or our hidden “sucker” score so it’s only fair we start scoring them back!
