Desultory Thoughts

My wife and I were watching the Jazz [utahjazz.com] game together (who are on fire, by the way…although we’ll have to see because right now they’re down by 10 in the fourth quarter) and I was distracted by her ripping pages out of a magazine.

It turns out that she received Better Homes & Garden [bhg.com] in the mail today, and she was frustrated by the amount of ads she was having to delve through just in order to read the magazine. She wanted to see what would be left of the magazine if she got rid of the ads.

She started ripping out just the pages that had ads on the front and back. She found 25 pages that were pure ads, no magazine content whatsoever. She then started ripping out pages with ads on them and she found 60 pages. What was she left with? A mere 19 pages that didn’t have any ads at all!

This is just one example of the commercial world we live in. You can’t go anywhere without being exposed to it, whether in a magazine, TV, movies or even a basketball game. In fact, the Delta Center touts a brand new digital marquee that circles the entire upper deck. At first it was fascinating to see content swirl around seamlessly between connected marquee segments, but then it just got distracting. My wife felt the same way about the magazine.

I find myself ignoring it more and more and so do most people I talk to. Whether it’s TIVO that allows you to quickly forward through the commercials or reserved seating theatres that allow you to come in right at the start of the movie instead of sitting through all the commercials, people are getting fed up. But it doesn’t seem to deter the advertising agencies; which means that it must work! Will it ever stop?

A 21 year old college student decided to take advantage of the advertising craze and started a home page [milliondollarhomepage.com] made up entirely of ads. He sold the space at $1 per pixel, so the bigger the ad, the more it cost. He recently sold his last 1000 pixels for $38,100 on eBay! Pretty amazing. That’s actually pretty cheap as compared with the cost of advertisement on the upcoming Super Bowl. There is even a site [superbowl-ads.com] that’s dedicated to the Super Bowl commercials and they’ll even tell you how effective they were.

I’ll have to admit…just the other day I went out a bought a swiffer duster because I was impressed with how well the policeman in the commercial was dusting with it. I guess I’m a part of the problem!