I don’t like advertising. Sometimes it can be ahem tolerable. But most of the time I go out of my way to avoid it.
In fact, web ads are blocked. On the rare occasions I’m reading a magazine of a topic I care about I am prepared to ignore them. Once a week when I read the Sunday New York Times, I ignore them. And, television ads are mostly skipped automatically using the MythTV commercial flagging system.
So occasionally I end up watching ads, when MythTV fails to detect them properly. I’m accustomed to the auto-skip so I don’t realize what’s happening for a few seconds. If it’s a decent premise I’ll watch an advert until I get tired of it or I feel like I’m actively being targeted to buy the product.
What troubles me is these annoying jingles. They’re designed to be annoying and to burrow themselves into your brain like a mole and root around in there until you can’t get the bugger out. And they can just pop into your head.
Let me clarify. Music pops into my head all day long. All the songs I know and love from all the bands I know and love: I’ll be doing the laundry and suddenly it’s California Redemption provides him with his rent, room and board inside of a fifth of Comfort, or I’ll be going through my RSS reader hearing, he’s an elevator passenger, bored as he can be and that’s cool. I don’t always have headphones on or music handy, but you listen to music enough it’s just with you and it’s a thrill to have around.
I could be 90 years old with dimentia or alzheimers or some other form of mental decline, laying in my own piss and singing your stupid fucking jingles in my head. Is that what you want? Sick bastards. I take time and put effort into finding good music to have stuck in my head. And now any jackass with the money to put some crap product and a tv jingle out has access to me for the rest of my bloody life.
That’s unethical, I’m fucking sorry.