How many insurance commercial tag lines can you recite? Have those taglines ever made you switch over your insurance? Seriously, think about this. Have you ever watched a commercial, as entertaining as they are, and thought “Wow, I better change my insurance company. That one looks better. Those commercials are fantastic!”
Here’s an even more intriguing question. Is it ironic that insurance can be so expensive, yet they advertise with a seemingly never-ending budget? Those advertisements are non-stop, they keep coming, and rival movie quality production. How much do you think that adds to your premiums?
Cell phone carriers are the same way. Constantly trying to grab your attention, trying to get you to change carriers. The focus points are always the same. Coverage, phone options, pricing plans. It’s a race to the bottom, and it only gets cheaper and cheaper. Your plan would have been cheaper already if they didn’t spend all those resources trying to get you to switch.
If you’re old enough to remember MySpace, that was a starting point for my friends and I to have an online presence with each other. An online page, in an online community, linking you and your friends in front of the rest of the internet world. You could design your page how you wanted: put up photos, put up music to play when someone opened your page, write witty stuff that made no sense to your parents or anyone outside of your social circle, chat with your friends. But alas, somebody had to make money from it. Instead of a community, it changed to a place you went to get marketed to.
Facebook was next. Similar to MySpace, better in some ways, worse in others. The connections were better, easier, further reaching. You didn’t have as much freedom with how you dressed up your profile, but it was still fun. It worked well for a while, until Facebook needed money. Money means investors, investors means return on investment, and that leads to advertising.
YouTube used to be free. Not only free in that you didn’t have to pay for it (they now heavily promote their paid services), but also free in that you didn’t have to watch their garbage ads every time you wanted to watch a video on how to put together that IKEA bookshelf you bought, get stains out of a rug, or change a spark plug on your lawn mower.
How much attention do you really give Google when you search for something? It used to be that all results were all results. Then the first result was an Ad, and everything after that was real. Then the first two results were Ads. Then three. Then four. Now a quarter of your page one results are Ads. Does this mean that I’m still searching the internet for something specific? Or am I simply searching through a huge sea of ads to see which one will pop up to try and convince me to buy something?
The more something opens up, the more we get marketed to. The end game from start to finish is to get more out of us in every direction. Pay for our connections, pay for our entertainment, watch the ads, buy more garbage that we don’t need, change services we aren’t happy with for one that you will be just as unhappy with.
This is all a race to the bottom. Is it any wonder that off the grid and tiny house living are a thing now? Go away. Leave us alone. Stop marketing to us.
If only we could live, for even a few days, a week, a month, with no advertising whatsoever, how would our lives change? Our attention is more and more valuable, it costs more, and there is less of it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Take a chance. Disconnect. Focus on family and friends. See what happens. I bet things get pretty quiet (in a good way), and you get to see what really matters is right in front of you.
Ramble On 