I hate advertising.
I was recently thinking about the companies that I will refuse to spend money with. Some companies are because they are evil and unethical, and I don't want to finance that behavior. After reading about how horrible Nestle are I decided to stop buying their products, despite the KitKat being my favorite chocolate bar. That was about 15 years ago, and I haven't bought a KitKat since.
Then there are companies that have just filled my life with adverts to the point that I can't stand to even see their logo anymore. I read a blog post recently where the Absurd Pirate talked about how tired they were of adverts, which I could relate to quite a bit. From the post I think the author lives in the USA, and being in the UK means that I don't see quite so many adverts whilst out and about.
If I think about where I see adverts, they are usually on one of the following:
- YouTube adverts
- Adverts inside YouTube videos
- General advertising on web pages
- Newsletters (post and email)
- Instagram (I rarely use any other "corporate" social media site)
- TV (very rarely, because of the adverts)
I have an advert blocker on my network, which cuts out most of the adverts, but there are still a few places where adverts still appear, or I can't block them. So I do see adverts every day.
Seeing the same advert over and over again gives me advert fatigue. Seeing the same advert from the same company over and over again for weeks and weeks makes me never want to have anything to do with the company.
Case in point is Dominos Pizza. I detest with a passion that stupid noise they make at the end of every advert (the word Dominos sang like a bad yodel). That hate comes from the fact that I live within 2 miles of a Dominos Pizza and so I will see at least 10-20 adverts for it a day, mostly on YouTube. In fact, if I even detect that a Dominos advert is playing I will go out of my way to mute, skip, turn off, or otherwise destroy the playing advert.
Years ago, I quite liked Dominos Pizza. The pizza was filling, and as long as you picked them up yourself it was fairly inexpensive. When I worked in Manchester it used to be quite common to eat Dominos Pizza at various work or tech meetup events.
After being bombarded with Dominos adverts every day, I now flat out refuse to have anything to do with them. It reminds me of the crazy frog adverts from around 2005, where that bloody frog was on the TV for months and made me only hate the company. I couldn't imagine anyone actually bought anything from watching it.
Some other examples are:
- remarkable - I'm sure it's a good tablet and a decent e-paper display, but they went WAY overboard with their advertising a few years ago and now I'm totally not interested in it.
- Compare The Market - Those stupid meerkats are everywhere.
- Confused.com - Their recent body horror adverts that show people turning into helium balloons terrifies me. More than that though, I can't get away from them!
- Jet2.com - If I have to hear that stupid "Hold my hand" song one more time I might jump on a table and scream.
I don't know if this is an established phenomenon, some say it's called "ad fatigue", but it certainly has an effect on me. The more and more I see an advert, the less and less I want the products. At one point it actually flips the other way, where I go from ambivalent to wanting nothing to do with the company at all.