Just to preface this: this is mostly going to be negative (I think), so feel free to check out here if you want. I just feel a need to blow off some steam, TBH.
Ads suck. I mean, seriously, they just really, really suck. And I know that everyone’s already like 99% on board with this but it bears repeating since it’s not like we can get away from them.
I still watch broadcast TV at dinner, mostly because my mom can’t peel herself away from trashy political TV “news”. Gods, the ads there are just… unbelievably repellant. There are three major types of ads on these shows that I see: 1) pharmaceuticals including vaccine ads, 2) junk food ads, and 3) during election times, political ads.
I find the combination of the first two to be amusing. Lots of junk food ads intermixed with lots of prescription drug ads. The two types of commercials compliment each other well, don’t you think?
I can hardly believe how yucky and unappetizing the food looks in those fast food ads. It looks horrible, like big piles of gooey sludge and mystery meat, piled up way, way too high. It looks gross.
Honestly, it’s baffling. I’m not a small man by any means, here. I’m 6 foot 3 and 195 pounds, and even I wonder how someone could eat the amount of food the people that make these ads want me to eat. It just looks… wayyyy too much. It looks gross. Too much calorie dense meats and carbohydrates. I mean… holy fuck, people.
Back in college I tried the whole college “thing” that many people do in university, and I tried out a bunch of fast foods and pizzas and such myself, I guess just to see what they were like. I didn’t like that much, though. I stopped after college and never returned to that stuff, unless it was given to me for free. It was just… gross, I guess. Too much, although I had to find that out for myself, which I think was a good idea just for the experience of it. It was worth it, I suppose, to find out what not to do.
But yeah I don’t get it. It’s all so horrible looking. And the pharma ads they show that accompany this stuff look even weirder and worse.
I truly hate those big pharma ads. They’re just… strange, and usually incomprehensible. The products and visuals in these commercials never ever match up.
If the product is about, I don’t know, heart burn, the commercial will show a bunch of people fishing, or something. Or playing charades, or… something else, something that has nothing at all to do with the drug itself.
Hair loss product? Show some people in a studio, making music. Blood pressure medication? Show people line dancing. What?
These ads are so freaking weird and strange. They always include a list of potential side effects, most of them ghastly sounding, and these are always played over a visual of smiling, happy people walking in the woods or something. The cognitive dissonance here is off the charts.
“Potential side effects include seizures, blood loss to the lower extremities and heart stoppage. Talk to your doctor if you experience problems while breathing. Never take this medication before bedtime if you want to live to see the morning.” Oh, and here are some scenes of an old woman hugging her cats! How cute.
Yeah, no thanks.
These ads play like some bottle messages from a parallel universe or something. Watching them, you would never believe that only 12% of the population here is black or part-black. I have seen commercial blocks here where every single fucking person in every commercial was black, and this was during news broadcasts that babbled on endlessly about “black oppression” or some such similar phantasm. The TV here is always tuned to MSNBC. Hilariously terrible, all of it.
It’s all gross and strange, and all very, very dumb. It’s comical how stupid and weird all of this shit really is, and it’s all getting dumber as time goes on. I’ve had to stifle my laughter more than once this week while watching this ridiculous drek.
It baffles me that the people that run and operate these news networks cannot seem to understand why they are failing so badly with the public.
Watching MSNBC and CNN, I’ve come to understand that their audience is delusional white women, aged 75+, who are ardently democrat and probably suffering from some undiagnosed case of bipolar, BPD or both. Which as you can imagine is a small percentage of the population, which is why these channels are only watched by a small percentage of the population. I think something like a quarter of one percent of the population here watches MSNBC on a given night.
Gods though is this shit retarded, and the rest of the programming on offer over broadcast TV is hardly better. Whatever the shows may be, they are always hamstrung and sabotaged by the stupid commercials that air during their run. I can hardly watch anything on cable TV anymore.
I saw the first episode of Kat McNamara’s new CW show, and it was good, but gods, those commercials. I muted the TV during the breaks, and I had to routinely fight to keep the TV on when the show wasn’t running.
I know that other fans of hers had similar problems, with some of them devising ways of seeing the show by other means, like through an app or such, just to avoid those damn commercials.
Ads just aren’t fun anymore. They used to try to be at least clever, but now they’re always so… similar that they just blend into some kind of mush.
I can clearly remember that old Rogaine commercial, with the woman in the hat, but I can’t for the life of me remember the names of the products in any of the new pharma ads. All the commercials are just… the same, now. It’s really weird. It’s like the same team of guys is making every commercial out there, or something. Which might in fact be the case, I don’t know.
But no commercials are funny anymore. And it’s odd but I can’t remember them, even. Years ago I saw some commercials from the 50’s on youtube and I actually remember those better than the ones I saw last night during the “news”. It’s really weird, TBH. Kinda inexplicable.
I hear the Netflix is adding commercials now, and that Disney+ is going to add them, too. Oof, gods, does that suck. What would be the point, then?
IDK. It sucks, tho. Sometimes I play mobile games- they’re a good thing to pass the time with while using my bike, or something, or while listening to some important health-related podcast. And even there the ads are getting worse. There are more of them, now, in the games I play, and they are longer, and uglier, more annoying, and more offensive. I wonder sometimes now how the ads I see on mobile games now could be considered acceptable for kids, since they are so filled with overt sexuality and violence.
There are games now that show ads while you are playing the game, which is a whole new level of ugly.
I use an apple tablet, and their ecosystem has turned to crap. Reports of problematic apps are everywhere. Apps stealing money, apps stealing content from other apps, apps that trick you into downloading apps you don’t want, apps forcing you to watch inappropriate ads that cannot be muted or turned off, apps that are broken on purpose, apps that are data mining the users, etc. It’s a real shitshow. What good is the technology if the apps that run it are all malicious garbage?
It’s a good thing that I have no data of value on my tablet, on purpose.
But that’s another essay for sure.
Well, I blew off some steam.
Good.