Walking through Times Square station on my way to work this morning, I became more aware of something I'd always noticed, and always just pushed into the back of my mind - advertising is EVERYWHERE. Spaced less than 2 feet apart down the entire tunnel were ads. This isn't the only place like this, at one point or another both Verizon and Johnnie Walker had taken over all the ad space at the Hoboken PATH station. As in, every single ad there was for them.

It seems that everywhere we turn, we're bombarded with more advertising. We have games with product placement, increasingly longer runs of commercials on TV ('For every 30 minutes of network television, there are approximately 22 minutes of the actual show and 8 minutes of commercials.', meaning over a quarter of a show's 'usable' time (the whole half hour) is commercials), commercials before movies and on DVDs, popups & banners on the Internet, sponsored stadiums/arenas/other buildings, and even more beyond that. Each of these, I think, deserves to be elaborated on.

Product Placement in Games

The most notable example of this is The Sims Online. McDonald's is featured in the game as a prime way to satisfy a character's hunger, with the side effect of also increasing that character's Fun rating. Don't want to eat McDonald's in-game? Too bad, there's no choice. This blatant product placement (and also the completely unnecessary correspondence to an unrelated game stat) detracts from the game as a game, turning it towards being an interactive commercial.

And what exactly did this 'sell-out' accomplish? The game still sells for $50 plus the monthly fee, so the revenue from this certainly wasn't passed along to the players, instead going towards lining the pockets of some EA execs.

Longer Commercial Breaks On TV

As noted above, more than 1/4th of the average half-hour of television is commercials. This number is even worse when you're in the closing of a suspenseful Fox show, like Joe Millionaire, with a 'teaser' recap show that was only a money-grubbing action on Fox's part, or Greed, which cut to commercials 3 times before finally showing the last minute of the show.

It seems that advertisers just want to get their names into our heads by sheer repitition. It's not uncommon for the exact same ad to appear twice during the same break on the same network, and a virtual certainty that any ad you see, you will see again the next break.

It's even better since, with the exception of basic broadcast, cable & satellite channels are a subscription service. We're charged for the channels, and then also are shown ads on them. It's getting worse now, some networks (Discovery Channel comes to mind) have annoying and intrusive ads for their own programming be shown over the bottom of the screen. Annoying and irritating because these ads are animated, and distract from the show. I can't imagine it'll be long before one network sells that space for ads (or has someone already?)

Commercials Before Movies

The price for a movie ticket in NY is $10. At the AMC Theater near where I live, it's $8. So I've paid money to see a movie, and for at least 5 minutes before it starts, I'm stuck watching ads. Not the slides that they show when the lights are still on, I mean full-motion ads, shown right before the previews. And not just ones for the concession stand; I've seen ads for MovieTickets.com, AFI, Lego Mindstorms, and some game which I can't remember the name of. And for what? These ads don't bring down the price of my ticket, I actually pay more now that I did years ago before there were ads (though the ads aren't responsible for that at all).

Commercials on DVDs

This is quite similar to commercials before movies, in that commercials are shown in front of content I've already paid to see (and in the case of a DVD, paid to own a copy of). Yet some companies put unskippable commercials (see section 2) at the front of the DVD. After paying $20 for a DVD, why should someone be forced to watch commercials every time they want to view the movie? The fact that getting around this is illegal is a subject for a whole other write-up, but the fact is that it's a misuse of a technology to force ads on the public.

Popups & Banners

Anyone who uses the Web has undoubtedly encountered banner ads, and almost certainly popups. Popups are bothersome enough that some ISPs are offering popup blockers as part of their service, and some browsers have a popup blocker included and enabled by default. Banner ads were generally considered the 'right' way to do Internet advertising, at least to me, until ad companies starting doing Flash ads. I've seen Flash ads that expand to take up the whole screen, ones that have sound, and ones that hang my browser. This sort of invasive, disruptive advertising actually accomplishes the opposite purpose, I know that I would never buy or visit the site of someone whose ad crashes/disrupts any part of my computer. Conversely, when a banner or text ad is done right (Google being the #1 example of this), I do click on the ad, if only to to support that site in some small way. This differs from the other things I've mentioned so far in that many of these sites don't have any other way to obtain income, and advertising is the only thing they can do to offset some of the cost of keeping the site up. Movies and TV have no excuse, because I've already paid them, and then I have to be fed ads to make them even more money.

Sponsorship

Think back 10 years, about how many sponsored stadiums you can remember. I for one can't think of any. Nowadays though, we have 3Com Park (formerly Candlestick Park), Enron Field (now Minute Maid park, the old stadium being the Astrodome), the First Union Spectrum (formerly the Corestates Spectrum, originally just the Spectrum), and so on. So much of sports tradition in naming is being lost to corporate sponsorship. As shown by Houston's Enron Field, we see that a corporate name is hardly a permanent or dependable thing, this one having come and gone within 2 years, while the Astrodome name was around since 1965, or about 35 years, lasting the entire life of the stadium. But it's not just stadiums which suffer from this sponsorship; NASCAR has a racing series called the Winston Cup, which from it's inception has been sponsored by Winston, the cigarrete company. Recently, though, RJ Reynolds (which owns the Winston name), has made it clear it's through with sponsoring the series, possibly sooner than the 2007 date it's contract with NASCAR is through. NASCAR itself seems to be little more than a money-making venture, with all the sponsorship of the cars, and it seems that any entertainment is provides is only secondary.
This isn't just confined to sports though. On my walk from work to the PA Bus Terminal, I typically walk past the Ford Theater. Ford as in Ford Motors, evident since the Ford logo appears all over the building. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of this just in NY alone.

Hallmark Holidays

Secretary's Day (apparently this is now Administrative Professional's Day). Boss's Day. Mother's Day. Father's Day. Just a few of the 'holidays' that are artificially created by companies like Hallmark so that they can squeeze money out of the public when they feel compelled to buy cards and gifts for people.

Even More

Beyond those, we have some other advertising ideas that are just plain stupid. There's a company that wants to buy advertising space on college students' foreheads and stories of Pepsi and Coca-Cola grafitting pristine natural formations. There were rumors of a Pepsi game show with up to a $1 billion prize; contestants would be winners of a contest (one of those bottle cap-type ones).

And it's not like the quality of advertising has gone up. It's been quite some time since I've seen a commercial I didn't think was stupid, even after putting aside my dislike for them in general. A short discussion with Joe about this brought about the logical idea that nearly all advertising is aimed at the stupid people, and since it's so prevalant, there must be a lot of stupid people. Which won't get any argument from me, but still, either I underestimate or ad agencies overestimate the number of stupid people who will be viewing their ads.

Before I'm labeled anti-capitalist, I want to go on record as saying I'm not opposed to capitalism. I also want to say I think that socialism is a good idea on paper, though it will never work in practice. The whole point that I'm trying to make here is not that companies shouldn't advertise, they exist to make money, but it's certainly not a right that they have. And when their desire to make money, and the actions they take toward this end, go too far and become nothing but ridiculous, something needs to be done, like evaluating the effectiveness of current techniques, and coming up with something new, innovative, and effective. When done properly, advertising can be an effective tool, but the overcommercialization of nearly everything in America has greatly decreased the potential impact that it can have.

And now, having spent much of the day working on this, I prepare for my trip home, which will have me on the ad-laden subway, to a bus with a ads on it's sides. The other option would be to take the PATH, with the same level of ads as the subway, but with the added 'benefit' of seeing the flashy animated commercials that are displayed between 23rd & 14th street stations along the wall of the tunnel.