Gave Up On Advertising

Some people on this wiki GaveUpOnTelevision. Has anyone done the same with advertising?

Avoiding advertising is harder than avoiding television. You have to:

Has anyone else tried this? What are your experiences?

When I saw the page title, it sounded like something written from the point of view of a person making marketing decisions: gave up on advertising, presumably on the grounds that it doesn't help. That might have been a more interesting page to read, or less...

I probably fit the bill, but this was not a goal so much as a side-effect. I have very little exposure to adds for the following reasons: I

I didn't choose to do any of things things to avoid ads, except the proxy server. The lack of ads in my life is merely an added bonus! I do, however, find that I am sufficiently removed from the ad culture (for going on 10 years now) that when I am exposed to advertising it often seems surreal.

Don't forget billboards -- http://www.billboardliberation.com

"GaveUpOnAdvertising?" I did. I just wish it would give up on me...

I have only watched television with a digital recorder for the last three years, and for two years before that I didn't have cable. So its been at least five years without television commercials. I don't listen to commercial radio and haven't since probably about 2002, since CD-Rs and Ipods came into existence there has been no need to listen to radio in the car. I don't subscribe to any magazines or newspapers and couldn't be bothered, I read Reddit, News, Blogs etc... but always with adblock, so again no ads come my way. I have a cell phone and no home phone so I don't get solicitations. I have very gently and easily cut all advertisments out of my life in the last five years without skipping a beat. If I am interested in a product I will read reviews or go to the companies website or something so there are some exceptions where I've self subjected myself to ads. -- Totally Canadian

I think those who go through the above exercises to avoid exposure to advertising are making themselves slaves to it. Wouldn't it be easier to just live with it and ignore it? -- AnonymousDonor

But the problem with advertising is that it can't be truly ignored; advertising is designed to affect you even if you consciously try to ignore it. Seeing an ad for a particular soda every day for a year will subconsciously affect your actions (even slightly) when you stand in front of a soda machine. It's not simply a matter of ignoring it. -- BrentNewhall

Perhaps what we really need is exactly to live with it and not ignore it, but learn to control our reactions to it. We can make excuses like saying that it affects us "subconsciously" or "subliminally", but as Falk notes below, you can get to a point where the reaction you have when you stand in front of that soda machine is that yes, your subconscious will be telling what to do - it willing be telling you how stupid you'd have to be to fall for the advertising. And you won't.

It's hard to ignore something constantly shouting at you.

I wonder if those who try to avoid advertising are really as unaffected as they want to believe. -- KrisJohnson

Of course they're not. Unless their cars, clothes, computers, white goods, and food are all unbranded or they can demonstrate some rational process by which they chose them, then they've been affected by advertising (and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing).

An (admittedly obsessive) friend makes his own spines for his CDs. Most are similar to the original, minus the brand information. Seeing his shelves of unbranded CDs was an epiphany - it made me question why advertising exists, and why it is so pervasive.

I gave up on television, systematically switch radio channels when there are advertisements on, and use Mozilla's ad-blocking features. One remarkable thing I noticed is that I'm getting more and more annoyed by advertisements when I have to endure them - they feel like intrusive spam to me. But, on the other hand, maybe that's the natural reaction, and what really should be remarkable is the degree to which most people permit advertisements to be done to them. -- FalkBruegmann

Excellent point. Why aren't we asking "WhyDoYouPermitThisToBeDoneToYou?"

[I'm the same way. I can't go to the movies anymore, even when there's something I want to see.]

Can't give up TV - too hooked on certain shows. But advertising! The thing I hate most is what I call saturation bombing - when they run the same commercial twice during one show. They've even started doing it twice in the same break! It certainly gives the lie to the propaganda line about advertising being a neutral system for informing consumers about available products. -- TomRossen

The thing to remember about TV is that when you watch you are not a consumer. You are a product. Really? Who's trying to sell me? Who wants to buy? I'm high quality. Seriously, what do you mean?

Follow the money. The TV industry works by networks selling you to advertisers, *not* by you buying content.

To my mind, you are all trying too hard. Advertising is going to be there for the foreseeable future, but that's not a problem. It's really *interesting*! I look out for adverts which stand out, use clever new advertising techniques, have effective artwork, etc. When people complain that many modern artists don't seem to be doing anything skilful, they're looking in the wrong place for their artists. Ads contain loads of very powerful art, particularly the best ads. Why fight against the advertising? Sure, I make a mental effort not to buy products due to the subliminal effects of the advertising, but I've been doing it for so long that it's a very small effort now. Instead I can concentrate on the actual advert and the ways in which they're trying to overcome that reaction. In fact, somewhat perversely, if I ever see a really good ad, or one which fits my views of acceptable advertising, I wouldn't be averse to buying a product simply to congratulate the advertising team. Well, that may be going a bit far, but I'd conciously select in their favour. This will encourage a higher quality of ad. Adverts are art kept relevant. -- AnAspirant

You may have missed the part above where I said that that basically none of the things I had done were to avoid ads, that was just a lucky side-effect. I find the ads-as-art argument a bit weak, since any time I sample them to see whats going on in mainstream consumer culture (which I do semi-regularly), the vast majority are, to be charitable, garbage. By the way, I am sure you do make a mental effort to not be affected by ads, but there are studies that suggest you are not successful, even when you think you are...

I'd be fascinated to read them. Link? Also, I didn't mean to suggest that any of "the vast majority" was art, any more than most "art" is. It's hard to find a point of reference given the not-quite-global-yet nature of advertising, but in the UK, there's quite an artistic but utterly unconvincing Orange advert featuring a new matrix-like long-exposure camera trick in cinemas at the moment. The Smirnoff ad with the girl in the green dress that soaked cinemas for a long time was good too. -- AnAspirant

AnAspirant asks "Why fight against advertising?" One of my background tasks is improving the SignalToNoise ratio around me. Giving attention to advertising-supported media lowers that ratio. Decreasing local entropy is so selfish. -- AnAspirant

Interestingly enough, a recent NYT article noted that some advertisers were pretty much giving up on the 25-38 year-olds (so-called generation X) as a target audience. The implication was that this group simply did not respond well or predictably to advertising, in contrast to the baby boomers and the generation younger than 25. The reasons for this phenomenon are not entirely clear.

Perhaps because there are two types of ads - lies and damned lies. Ads and damned ads? But I repeat myself...

Or, more seriously, maybe because people under about 40 tend to research purchases on the internet, using objective opinions (e.g. e-pinions site), but you need to be about 25 or more to have been burned enough by misleading ads to care enough to do so?

This is an interesting page, I think it will fit well into the FictionWiki?:MarketingMan? story at http://www.blogan.com/cgi-bin/fiction.cgi?TheMarketingMan (BrokenLink 2004-04-08)

If we all quit listening to/watching advertising, we'd all be doomed! (doomed) ...

I somehow managed to give up on most advertising without even thinking about it. I grew up watching donation-funded public TV (Dr Who and Marty Stouffer's Wild America) and now I just don't have the time for TV. I've used Adblock for Firefox for about as long as I've used Firefox. I listen to college radio stations, mostly because they don't play the same six songs over and over until I start thinking spree killer looks like a good career choice.

It gets weirder:

Of course they're not. Unless their cars, clothes, computers, white goods, and food are all unbranded...

Funny you should mention that. I make my own computers. I remove tags from clothing. I feel that if I'm going to be doing someone's advertising for them, they can start paying me. There's no reason I should pay them to work for them.

The main effect I've noticed is that I'm somewhat sensitive to advertising, the way someone who lives in a cave would be sensitive to light. It's worst on unfiltered web browsers, where the presence of ads on the web really bugs me, but even in real life, the ads stop blending into the background. I don't know if this makes them more effective, since I end up reading them, or less effective, since I end up thinking things like "Gee, they are trying really hard to play up the mostly imaginary virtues of that car/snack/shirt. I wonder how much that space cost them."

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I gave up on advertising when I stopped watching TV, unless you call looking at Amazon's suggested products list advertising. Firefox's Adblock was the next big blow to advertising for me and Growing up with Google was the stone column that broke the camel's back. Not needing to watch advertisements to get product information really made it's importance just die off for me. Advertisements do affect me when I watch them, but I don't actively make myself aware of or involved with advertisements unless something out of the ordinary happens. --Kent Johnson

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