Media

What I have done about preventing my viewing of offensive advertising that appears in some video content, is to just not watch the video. The written story below the video is usually an intended or unintended description of what happens in the video, after the insulting and demeaning advertising has finished playing. Of course there are some sites that are so rude as to begin playing their loud, super high volume advertising as soon as a person opens up the web site (without their even having to click on the video). It's like they are professing their right to cram their advertising down our throats, whether we like it or not. When that happens to me, I just click on the video's pause button to make the ad stop, and then I begin reading the written content below.

As to whether this gross intrusion on our lives is paying off for the broadcasters, I kind of wonder because when I watch a show that has 30 repeats of the same advertisement throughout the course of the show, it says to me that the broadcaster is unable to sell advertising to any other clients; and in order to at least generate some revenue, the broadcaster has had to sell multiple runs of the same ad, *at a reduced price*. The Rachel Maddow Show on the Internet is guilty as sin of this practice.

In the case of Yahoo, I don't think their having sold out to having predominant advertising in the content of their web page has payed off for them. Yahoo shareholders have gone through more CEO's than I use rolls of toilet paper ("Hey CEO, either you make us a bunch of money or we'll fire your sorry ass&quot . In addition, Yahoo is consistently "re-designing" their web page so as to include more and more shiny advertising trinkets to distract a person's attention from the real reason why they logged-on in the first place (I guess their philosophy must be that their page will sell because a lot of today's hip kids actually want a lot of fast and flashy trinkets to distract their eyes, due to their minds having a zero concentration spans to begin with).

Have you ever watched the teaser reel for an up and coming movie (especially an action movie)? It is usually impossible to gain any idea whatsoever about what the story of the movie is about. It's just a bunch of meaningless flashes and sound bites on the screen that tell you nothing about why you might want to see the movie. In our society of today, few people want to think about whether they want to see a movie or not. For them, it's just a matter of responding to a collection of dream images on the screen that seem as though they are something that the person might like to say or do to impress their friends in real life.

Then you have Twitter, which is in the same vein. When using Twitter it is really not possible to express a meaningful idea to another person using 18 characters or less of the English language. But Twitter users like it that way because it absolves them of the burden of having to actually think about saying something that has meaning. It's all about looking cool in saying nothing at all.

But I have digressed.

Elsewhere in the Yahoo business plan, they can no longer afford to have humans answering their telephones; most probably because they can no longer afford to pay them. On their web page, they no longer advertise an email address or telephone number where a person can write or call them regarding problems with their software. Everything for them is now solved by their having posted on-line cumbersome tutorials that require a person to spend a great length of time to read through all of the verbiage in hopes of finding that somewhere in Yahoo's pile of fecal matter, their particular issue has been addressed. If Yahoo's customer is lucky enough to have finally found a written answer to their problem, then they will still have to experience whether or not the answer they have found actually works to solve the problem that they are having. And of course, the answers they provide would also make a lot more sense to us if they could afford to hire actual technical writers to write them.

In my experience, once a person has installed one of the more adequate, free, pop-up blockers, they can usually feel certain that the pop-up blocker is doing it's job. Any other advertising that gets through is usually there because the host of the web site that they are on, has tracked and sold the person's browsing information to the web site's advertisers as a means of generating more capitol for themselves. Those ads cannot be prevented. In other words, their greedy asses have sold you out.

Since I wrote my post that you responded to above, I have become totally disgusted with Yahoo. I never go there anymore. The browser that I now use is Google. But let it be known that I will be the last person to ever accuse Google of sainthood.

It warms my heart to discover that there is at least one other person on this board who is equally as offended by offensive advertising in our lives. In the past, I have contributed these same ideas of to other threads, only to receive responses from other board members who vehemently disagree with me. Because of that, I suspect that there must be quite a number of other contributors on this site who make their living in the field of advertising. I have learned that it is pretty difficult for me to contribute anything to DU without offending at least someone.