We're Already Here, Stop Advertising!

  ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with One Eye is Still Made Fun of.  ~

                Advertising has gotten out of control.  I write about advertising a lot because it’s gone crazy, because it affects our lives more than we admit, and because when every single little football statistic needs its own specific corporate sponsorship, the time has come to rethink our relationship with advertising.  We’ve been monogamous with it for decades, but now we might want to consider breaking up with advertising and trying to just be friends.  “Bob, let’s look at Adrian Peterson’s yards per carry on the Taco Bell Nacho’s Bellgrande Meter.”  Yeah, it’s time to pull back the Subway Fresh Take throttle and look at our Baskin-Robbins’ 31 Flavors options. 

                I’ve got way too much to say about advertising for just one blog entry, so let’s look at just one weird aspect of it today.  I freaking hate it when stores, or any entity, advertises at you WHEN YOU’RE ALREADY THERE.  You’re already at Target.  Do you really need to know how wonderful Target is?  Don’t you already at least kind of like Target?  Didn’t you prove that when you drove to Target?  Do we really need the Target dog (the most sadistic mascot of all time—he’s got a bull’s eye around his eye socket—that’s really disturbing) telling us anything? 

                The one I hate the most is the gas pump audio ads that are now at every Golden Gallon/Shell station gas pump.  You’ve paid for your gas.  You’ve pumped about a gallon (and paid just short of four dollars).  You’re halfway thinking of the next item on your errand list and fantasizing about the girl in the boots at the next pump when, as if out of nowhere, a mild jingle fills the toxic air and a generic white woman’s voice tells you about how much a bag of Doritos costs inside the store.  Her siren’s song leads you to think that eating a gas station taquito is a viable lunch option.  She’s lying to you.  She wants you to buy gas station 2% milk.  Her corporate-seductive voice sweetly convinces you to spend fifty bucks on scratch-off lottery tickets and a six pack of teriyaki beef jerky with enough sodium to allow you to throw out your refrigerator.  And, since she knows that you’re not doing anything that requires more brain cells than picking your nose, she’s got you trapped…and, in her devious mind, she wants to lure you back into the store. 

                I hate this woman.  If you’d been planning on buying an 88 ounce Styrofoam Giganto Gulp of Diet Dr. Pepper, you’d have done it before pumping your gas.  That’s the proper order of the gas station shuffle.  Nobody window-shops at Chevron.  You know what you need.  You pay for it.  You enjoy.  That’s what you do.  That’s what you DID until that woman’s voice started interjecting itself into the process.  For now, she still has a mute button, thank God.  But, once we all get used to hearing her and forget that once there was a time when human being pumped their gas in silence, with the quiet reverence of an Amish family kneading multi-grain bread, her mute button will magically disappear and we’ll be stuck with her voice forever.  I can barely contain my hatred for this woman. 

                Gas stations may be one of the worst “I’m Already Herevertising” offenders these days, but they’re certainly not alone.  What about those thirty second radio station spots that are just listener testimonials telling you how awesome the station that you’re already listening to is?  “Before I found out about Q-97, my life had no meaning.  I was on the verge of loading my grenade launcher and shooting up a nursing home.  Then I turned on the radio one day and heard Q-97’s Light Hits of the Seventies.  Now I’ll never listen to another radio station as long as I live.  Q-97 is my new God.”  What?  I’m already listening to your stupid radio station.  I don’t need to be reminded that it’s good.  That’s why I tuned in.  How does hearing about Amanda’s love for Q-97, The Jaguar, help me at all?  (Amanda is the fictional, grenade-toting, octogenarian-hating, woman in the testimonial, in case that wasn’t obvious.) 

           Even the station identification is unnecessary.  Radio stations have been doing that trick since “Come here, Watson.  I need you…to help me find Sugar Hill Gang’s 45 to play on Z-1, The Raptor.  Caaaww!  Z-1, the only station in existence.  Here’s Amanda to tell you why you should listen to Z-1 instead of talking with your family over dinner.”  They always PAUSE for station identification.  It’s always a pause, which implies that nobody inside the radio station is allowed to move for the ten seconds when the station is being identified.  Freeze Tag is big in the radio world.  And djs are some of the fattest guys on the planet, so pausing isn’t easy for them.  It’s a big deal.  Is the listener testimonial a natural extension of the station identification?  It’s seems so to me, but I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this. 

                This “I’m Already Herevertising” trend is the K-Mart Blue Light Special of modern advertising without the low, low priced sales on six packs of tube socks.  It’s the “buy five cans of Judy Shrumfoot’s Rectangular Beets and get the sixth one free” of modern advertising theory.  You weren’t planning on buying even one can of oddly-shaped geometrical beets when you entered the store.  Now you’re going home with six cans.  And you won’t even realize that you’ve just been wallet-raped until you get home. 

            << photo courtesy of www.allovermedia.com >>