Are you tired of excessive advertising? Does it feel like everywhere you turn there’s another advertisement popping up?
The idea of advertising is to get the attention of potential customers and maybe entice them to buy them the product. I never had issues with advertisements because I understand the reason for them. Without them television stations, newspapers, magazines, websites, and many other things that I enjoy might not exist.
As of late the excessive advertisements have become too much for me. I’m not talking about the commercials on television that we are all of accustomed to or the print advertising we see in newspapers. My television service now has a channel designated for a new movie from their on-demand service that they want me to purchase. Channel surfing isn’t the same anymore, and they literally add new channels to give these movies a spot. They have an on-demand button on the controller where if I press the button I can access all the on-demand movies. They obviously aren’t seeing the revenue that they want from their on-demand movies and are doing this in an effort to put it in front of customers I assume that aren’t aware of the service. My problem is I’m a paying customer too, and they have altered my service so that they can sell a couple of more movies.
Other culprits of excessive advertising are all those new cell phone apps that you download. If they are free then you probably will see some advertising. I understand than if we are using it for free it is the advertising that is paying for it, but the problem I’ve had an advertisement that pops up on my screen and couldn’t be closed. On the cell phone app WordFeud, which is like scrabble, after every word that I play I have to see some sort of advertisement. It really isn’t necessary to see an advertisement that often.
Video games and consoles have become culprits of excessive advertising. There are a bunch of games that have put advertising into the game. The NFL game Madden for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 has put advertising in their game. Before loading up for a game you would have to see some advertising from one of their sponsors. The most amusing thing is that Madden has categories for the players. These categories are speed, strength, agility, acceleration and so on and so on. In one of their games there was an Old Spice category, I’m not sure what it meant if someone had a 99 in their Old Spice category. Where they the nicest smelling guy on the field? You know if someone has 99 speed that they are very fast, but a 99 Old Spice leaves me baffled. It’s obvious that Madden did it as a way to advertise for Old Spice and that Old Spice paid to be a category in Madden. The sales for the Madden series of video games are one of the higher ones each year so it doesn’t seem necessary for them to excessively advertise.
The Xbox 360 console has an online service that they just recently updated. By updating I mean they made it look a little different and put the services that they want you to buy pop up as soon as you turn on your console. As soon as you turn it on they are trying to sell you a movie from their Zune service. They also added a tab where you can search Bing for anything that you want. What kid turns on their Xbox 360 so that they can search Bing for something? They’ve become culprits of excessive advertising. I understand companies take these steps to try and make more revenue, but when is it too much?
I’m waiting for the day when I buy a car and they have small advertisements engraved into the windshield where it wouldn’t disturb your view. Why not put a Coca-Cola engraved advertisement right on the windshield and every time someone is driving and gets thirsty they think of Coca-Cola. Why not put some advertisement on the back of cell phones. You could put it right on the battery cover so every time you make a phone call you could be looking at a Doritos logo or anybody else that wants to buy that spot. As long as companies are making money they will advertise your product and they don’t care how they do it. They just want consumers to see the advertisements and hopefully buy that product.