A World of Ads

Sam Vimes

Moderator
Sep 7, 2020
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It seems to me that advertising is getting more and more invasive in our lives. Of course a lot of the things we take for granted as being free are actually paid for by the advertisers or by the data collected from us and sold on to companies that want to push - yes, more personalised ads to us.

Over the years I've done my best to avoid much in the way of any service that inflicts mind numbing adverts on us. We block them as best we can when surfing the Interweb; gave up on television - equally because the program content was getting dire - just how many reality tv programs can there be; well they're cheap to make I guess. Emails never get junk or spam unless its something we've specifically signed up for - not the spam I should add. Don't get much actual real junk mail - but the mail box is right next to the recycling bin fortunately.

Now its the Radio that we've had to change. Since it came on air we've listened to Classicfm. To be honest its mostly just background music, not actually sitting down to listen to it specifically. It has adverts but until recently they've been not much of a problem. Since its in the background we don't pay much attention, not only that most of them are of poor quality audio and hearing defficiencies take care to filter out much.

Over the last few weeks we've noticed that the advert periods on ClassicFm have become more frequent and longer. Also the presenters are becoming more obnoxious - why do they have to keep telling us who they are every few minutes.

So we've ditched Classicfm and take all the classical music we have, put it onto a memory stick and have a random selection playing back.

Interesting to note that it would seem that the station is losing a good number of listeners - but I've always wondered how they actually know. Also one of the ads is about advertsing on the radio as its 49% more affective - doesn't say more affective than what!

Just in passing there's book I read years ago. It came out in 1952 and is called the Space Merchants by Fredrik Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth. Read the plot on Wikipedia and it looks like it refers to today.


Enough rant for today.
 
Nov 30, 2022
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In addition I do question what these advertising "experts" are thinking of when they produce some TV ads, some of the cleaning product ads are, in my view, incredibly peurile and child like. Especially those for Flash and some of the plug in air fresheners.
 
Nov 11, 2009
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Strangely enough I spent two days last week transferring my BiLs CDs to my MAC. He had a phenomenal collection so now I’ve transferred all that we need, so I’d like to donate them along with my CDs to the local hospice charity.

The MAC sits upstairs but using Airdrop I can play them through the lounge soundbar, so no adverts whatsoever, and the music is totally our choice without egoistical presenters talking too much, or holding lengthy conversations with listeners. My kids and grandkids are all Spotify subcsibers, no adverts or presenters either, but £10.69 per month.
 
Nov 11, 2009
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What annoys me are the constant adverts on the BBC. I thought we paid the licence fee to avoid them on the Beeb.
They aren’t commercial adverts and they don’t interrupt your viewing of a programme. But as we record a lot of programmes from BBC or commercial channels they don’t bother us at all.
 
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JTQ

May 7, 2005
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For long now the Humax TV recorders give sterling services, only way to make commercial TV at all tenable.

In this vein, I can't understand why the programme providers think we all have only a few mintues attention span, probably because they are not confident in the attention holding of their content?

I don't do football, but do they there infuriatingly switch to adverts as a player with the ball runs to the goal, like they do with F1 during the interesting bits?
 

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