Ads Against Ads

When I was a youngster, I believed in advertising, even going so far, when my mom took me to the grocery store, to advise her against buying the more affordable store brands. I was awakened to a darker reality when I worked, while in college, for a large advertising agency. There I learned, among other things, that the business either flirted with or was completely dependent upon a lack of veracity—what we civilians call “lying”.

I was familiar with the history of the industry—how, in the 1920s, “reason why” ads (long explanatory text about why a product or service should be purchased) were replaced by messages with primarily emotional content. More recently, I read Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants”, a history of the industry’s century-long mission to capture eyeballs at every conceivable opportunity (the only notable failure being the truncated attempt to install screens above urinals).

In the past two decades, we’ve “progressed” from three 1-minute commercial breaks on network TV to cascades of 30s, 20s, 10s, even 5s in clusters that last longer than most news stories, and YouTube videos interrupted every three minutes by a commercial that may, or may not, be skippable. Streamers have learned that we could be bribed, with lower fees, into watching commercials that we quit cable to escape.

Knowing all that, I was amazed by a new development. There’s a commercial now playing for a downloadable video game, and the selling point is that the game plays without commercials. We have progressed to the moment when ads are promoting the virtue of adlessness.