Ad Waste

 Advertising should be considered garbage unless it meets standards that make sense. An ad is supposed to give information that encourages the consumer to buy one product over others. Once that information is given, for a couple of days, "we do GET it". There is no need to repeatedly yell or flash colours or employ dramatics and spend huge amounts of money to convince buyers. They crave only product information. And briefly. The consumer isn't stupid. In the latest gambit, an idiotic and unsafe campaign had a helicopter fly over a city residential area dangling a car over their heads. Apparently, it was in the early morning hours, 5 AM, to be exact, and was louder than any machine racket such as the lazy leaf blower crowd. I rise early so it wouldn't bother me, but bylaws are bylaws. Aren't they? The advertising that I hate is the kind that comes before every tiny film clip contained in news articles. I would like to tell the advertisers that I, for one, turn off their sound and look away until the pesky things are over. I never do know what their names are because I don't look. On me, advertisers are wasting their money  because I make it a point NOT to look at their ads, nor to hear them. I don't care whether they are for The Good or not. I just don't like the interruption to what follows that might be important and /or enjoyable to me. After the multi and mega protestor haranguing on the National broadcasting company that is mainly news from the east and their goings on, I switched to a commercial radio station. Now besides the egotistical announcers who call their programs "shows", and whose interviewing self-assured voices  denote their   wisdom over that of the real experts, I have to suffer ads. It goes with the territory. Most of the ads are childlike blathering, too loud and often just plain lies. Most ads are not cute and funny, they give little information that is truth about their product, and they are nauseatingly repetitive. But there is no other choice if you go to commercial radio stations. What to do?  It's either constant complaints by protestors that go on endlessly with tax payer radio, or enlist in the ad nonsense of commercial radio. Even going onto one's computer, it's ads first, and then the good stuff after.  It is a bit like Cod Liver Oil that some of us suffered during childhood. "Dears, take this spoonful of what's good for you first (and tastes disgusting) and then, you can have your corn flakes. " The local newspaper weeklies are just as bad. The first thing I have to do on retrieving my paper, is dump the thick pile of brightly coloured advertising in the middle, into the bin. The bin is full of them. Even then, the inside pages with their ads of dolled up faces peering at me, their made up mugs and hairdos and cuts and false promises, I might find an article somewhere in the corner, written by a hopeful journalist. I happen to know that the newspaper as it is called, staff, is paid not only to write but likely to clean desks, empty bins, write the obits, sweep the floors and maybe deliver the papers, in order to call what they do "reporting". The reason? Without the ads liberally covering most of the pages along with the "classified" section, the so-called newspaper wouldn't be exist at all. Advertising pays for all the waste paper in the garbage and that's about all it does. Oh yes, there are a few people using the ads in a practical sense. They clip the free-bee coupons for junk food and enter contests.