Last Wednesday night, I took a short 15-minute break from my homework for a quick online game of “Collapse,” which is a race to remove groups of colored blocks before they pile up to the top of the screen.
I was on a roll, with several thousand points racked up, but when I finished the level, suddenly the game screen disappeared and was replaced by an animated monkey hawking a career-builder advertisement.
Now, even online games have commercial breaks – what could more acutely demonstrate the irritating omnipresence of the advertising industry these days?
The Internet has become a prime example of invasive advertising. Many Web sites now open with a bombardment of ads that pop up faster than you can get rid of them.
Banner ads, once innocuous little strips at the top of a Web page, have become expandable, animated and noisy – some complete with video clips that appear in the middle of the screen. These ads are literally everywhere.
Television and movies are no better these days, either. Movies have become two-hour car commercials – just look at the Mini Cooper being splashed all over the film “The Italian Job.”
Car “commercials” are now routinely incorporated into movie trailers. Chrysler recently used the Harrison Ford flick “Firewall” to flash its 300-series automobiles, and the movie’s Web site held a contest to win a Chrysler 300 sedan.
On the small screen, actual TV shows, promotional segments for other shows and commercials have become indistinguishable.
A month before the Winter Olympics began, the NBC show “Las Vegas” ended in a promotional for the Turin Olympics, which simultaneously hyped the games and advertised Chevy Tahoes at the same time.
It’s getting to the point where I’m expecting advertising to invade my actual apartment. Maybe one day I’ll step into the shower and see a shampoo ad flashing on the tiled wall. Considering the pervasiveness of today’s advertising, the scenario doesn’t seem that ridiculous.
In our world, we can’t watch or read anything or go anywhere without some industry flinging yet another commercial in our faces.
And then we have the gall to wonder why there’s such a shallow, superficial, materialistic and consumerist culture in the United States.
Often, we can’t even be serious about life and death issues such as the war in Iraq. Even an anti-war Web site, www.peacetakescourage.com, briefly toyed with placing banner ads over its anti-war flash animations. The banners proved to be so distracting that they completely reduced the impact of the animation. It’s hard to continue downloading information about a serious issue while an animated banner ad dances in front of your eyes. The Daily Aztec Web site, like most others, has distracting ads about buying this and that if you read this column online.
It’s too much.
I fully understand businesses’ need to advertise, but the inundation of ads in movies and TV shows, and especially online, has gone too far. We need a break from this constant drone of “buy, buy, buy.”
The more commercialized our culture is, the more materialistic our society becomes. It’s easy to see: The most popular films are always the ones with the most commercial publicity, not the ones that are the best quality. It’s the same with stores, clothes and gadgets – anything that’s part of our common identity these days – the products that have the most advertising become the most desirable.
They become items we supposedly can’t live without.
Maybe if we could have a break – just a short break – from all products and services being sold to us all the time, we could get back to what’s important. We could have a moment to focus on the direction our country’s going, or the future we’re creating for our children.
Maybe we could teach ourselves something besides what we should buy next and could actually debate the critical issues of our lives without a commercial interruption.
-Veronica Rollin is a political science junior and a staff columnist for The Daily Aztec.
-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec. Send e-mail to letters@thedailyaztec.com. Anonymous letters will not be printed – include your full name, major and year in school.
