Advertisements

 Advertising: describe or draw attention to (a product, service, or event) in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance.

 Advertising is used to get the news out of a new product. But when does it cross the line from informative, to assaulting our lives with a bombardment of hellish voices telling us sprite is made of natural preservatives?

 In 1952, while watching T.V., you could watch an entire half hour cartoon with 4 minutes of commercials total. Now if the same cartoon was aired, that half hour cartoon would be chopped into 4 parts spanning over an hour laced in between with commercials, along with probably being edited for time.

 I just visited the new york times website, guess what they hit me with first thing? A commercial that covers the whole page. On youtube, every time that you watch a video, you need to watch a short ad then close out another pop up window. Sometimes you may end up with pop up windows that announce their presence with loud voices and music purposefully turned up in case you had anticipated the attack and kept your volume down.

 For more relating to T.V. commercial growth time over the years go here,  http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm

 Check your mail. Not just your mailbox on the street, but the one online too. How many times have you gone into your e-mail and hit the spam button becuase a site throws everything they have at you? This is especially true for facebook, which pukes a message your way everytime someone does something even Slightly related to you, and with somewhere around 100 friends that can be extremely annoying.

 So I think we have the point across. Ads are everywhere. Internet, T.V., Mail, billboards, etc. Some ads are even using your personal information to aim a specific advertisement towards you. I refer to this as 'tailoring'. They showed this in the game Mass Effect 2, where on the Citadel Station you could see tubular ad pillars that specifically used the main characters personal information to advertise to him, it's also obvious that they do it as they have a basic ad template thats kind of like mad libs.

 It goes something like this; Greetings (Insert name here). Records show you made (Insert income here) last year. Come by Interstellar Banking today and get the money you deserve.

 I could see advertising looking exactly like that in the future. So has advertising crossed the border yet? Probably. It may not be obvious but because credit information, and other information is already available to the general public, companies are using it against you. Demographics are an example of this. Surveys are used to determine what a population of a certain area is like. That information is used by companies to advertise.

 Advertising has crossed the border on being intrusive.