I recently read an article about how Americans are now marketed to more than 5,000 times a day. How perfectly disgusting! Now I’m really starting to pay attention to just how many ways marketing invades my life, wasting my time, rotting my brain.

There’s a Secret Antiperspirant TV commercial out now where a woman is dancing at a nightclub with a guy, and she throws her arm up to sniff her armpits. I am supposed to sit on my couch while watching that and think, “Wow, I really need that product. The next time I sniff my pits in public, (and doesn’t everybody do that?) I know Secret will be protecting me.” And what about commercials for local restaurants with low quality camera work and horrible theme songs you just cannot get out of your head as you are tossing and turning in bed at night? And how emotional can I get about the brand of paper towels I use and the absorbency? How hard is it to choose the right paper towel brand when you go to the store? Even worse, what about the animated toilet paper commercial with the bears in the woods and the “residue” the t-paper leaves on their behinds? It’s hard to watch that ad while eating lunch. Gross. And I just love the commercials with stick-thin models devouring chocolates – as if they ever eat chocolate, or anything else. Don’t get me started on drug commercials that sell medicine that do nothing but make your illness worse – or kill you altogether.

And I don’t even watch TV that often.

Television is the most obvious venue for advertising, but there’s so much more to marketing than the idiot box. Here are just 10 of many thousands of ways:

dog-with-bone

http://www.webweaver.nu

  • Ads on the back of stall doors in public restrooms. “Need your car towed? Call Charlie.” No, I don’t, Chuck. I just drank a quart of ice tea and need to use the facilities, if you don’t mind.
  • Ads on paper placemats in your favorite local restaurant from other restaurants. Isn’t that competition?
  • Ads in doctor, dentist, and other professional office offering more services to you. “We don’t just clean teeth, we cap them at a cost of $2,500 each. We also have tanning bed services.”
  • Door hangars from solicitors telling you they will trim your trees, but fail to tell you they do not have a license, nor are they insured.
  • Billboards on the highway with letters so small that you almost get killed trying to read it.
  • Direct mail from politicians telling me why the opponents are corrupt and nothing about what they can do for me.
  • Checking out at the grocery store, the cashier asks you to donate $1 to a charity, and you know that $1 will go to an executive’s salary and $0 will help anyone in need.
  • All the cute items displayed at the pet store, that your pet now needs since you saw them. Naturally, your dog is picky about the design on his new toy shaped like a cat , so you better select carefully. And when it comes to your pooch’s haute couture wardrobe, be sure to get her a matching purse and hair bow, or she will be so depressed when you get home and may need to see a canine therapist.
  • Sitting in the movie theater watching the pre-show ads, on a never-ending loop, selling me ridiculously priced junk food, asking me to patronize local businesses and buy tickets for more movies.
  • Massive-sized products at the warehouse stores beckoning you to buy more than you will ever need (like a 6-gallon jar of yellow mustard too huge to fit properly in the fridge) to make the unit cost go down. Though in reality, if you cannot use it all, the unit cost will go up.

So tomorrow, when you are out and about, start noticing the bombardment of advertising you are so used to experiencing, you never even thought about before.

Oh, and please tell 1,000 of your friends about this article.

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