This article is for Facebook and my blog onlyonly, because it is too sensitive to run in newspapers.
The topic: My hatred of advertising.
I just can’t help it. It runs in my family.
My grand father tore out all of the full-page ads of the Saturday Evening Post as soon as it arrived in the mail.
My father may have invented the first remote. He took a radio volume knob and attached it by wire to the television in 1951. When an ad came on, he would turn off the sound.
What do their offspring do? I never look at any ads in newspapers or on TV. I scroll past everything online. I record everything on TV, even football games, and fast-forward past all ads. Including the Super Bowl. I never see that annoying lizard with the British accent on Geico ads. Or the famous football players raving about their beer.
I don’t watch streaming services with ads either. I even fast-forward the credits and Viking cruise ads on the PBS shows I record.
If I do look at ads by accident—maybe when fast forward is disabled—I feel like I have just lost three minutes out of my life. If you watched TV a lot in your lifetime, maybe that’s an entire year of being dead?
In most of my career as a writer,, I just hung out with other news people. But when I was a magazine editor, I dealt with the advertising staff all the time. When I told them about my forebears’ loathing of commercials, they were horrified. Who could dislike ads, which fuel the free enterprise economy? By avoiding ads, I was stealing from them, they thought. Surely I realized that my news content was just filler to lure people to see the real content—the pitch for hemorrhoid cream, kitty litter or a drug that could kill you.
So I see their point—but I am still skipping ads.
That said, I make exception: local radio ads on WHLF (95.3) in South Boston, owned by Lakes Media Company.l I like hearing the colorful local people pitch their wares in a Southern drawl--the mattress company, the appliance dealer, the restaurant and the lawyer looking for car wreck victims. I know some of these people. I have shopped at many of their places of business. I may actually want something they offer.
If I was selling something I would go there. The audience is well targeted, you hear the station all the time in stores, and the rates are cheap.
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