Ad Madness

On Facebook, ads have started popping up right on the main stream of friends’ comments. This started rather recently and at first it made me feel like I had done something to invite this abuse. It is typical of the victim to take the blame, I suppose. I thought that I had visited the website posting or maybe I had hit “like”. But now I don’t think that. I think Facebook just lets businesses do this as a way to make money, like commercials on TV and ads in the newspaper. It comes with the territory.

There is one ad that comes up every day: “Women Get it Free.” I do believe I clicked and visited this web site once. The deal that it offers is if you sign up for this service, you will receive in your mail all sorts of product like make up and cleaning and laundry products. I signed up for a deal like this years back and I can tell you, it was like the invasion of killer bees. I received samples, it is true, but I found that I only really liked a small handful of them. Then I was left with what to do with the ones I didn’t want to use. It turned into a city dump-filling experience. Cancelling the deal was easy enough and I did so very quickly. I leave these unwelcome ads alone now. It seems that most of them drop away after a while if I don’t visit them or “like” them.

Ads in my local newspaper I can live with. It is easy to simply divert my eyes from them if I want to. Many ads are from businesses familiar to me and I am likely to find these to be of interest. If a magazine has too many ads, I usually toss it. It seems to me that actual articles are thrown in just to entice you to buy the magazine. It is really the ads that they are promoting in the first place.

As for TV ads, these are a constant irritation. I always channel-surf during commercials. Unfortunately the stations tend to show commercials during the same time slots. I wonder if there is some kind of government regulation about this. I mean, wouldn’t it make sense to do programming during the time most stations are showing commercials to catch surfers like me? One would think so.

I proclaim this to be ‘Down with advertising” day.