DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here is a sad comment about media saturation and advertising and, well, the sloth of the average American: regarding its new series of anti-iMac television advertisements, computer maker Gateway estimates that “83 percent of U.S. adults would see the TV ads an average 14 times through September.” (local mirror)

If the ad is 30 seconds long, then 83 of 100 adult Americans will spend seven minutes next month watching the same commercial, over and over. How productive is that?

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, there are 248M people in the country, of which 74.4% are 18+ years of age. So that’s roughly 185M adults. If 83% of them see seven minutes of Gateway commercials next month, that amounts to 2051 years of wasted time.

Fortunately, the media companies have not yet succeeded in making it illegal to skip past commercials (in spite of Jamie Kellner’s efforts), so some of those 153,583,320 adults won’t actually see all 14 broadcasts of the Gateway commercial. I feel good about this: perhaps those people will be out winning the Iditarod or inventing revolutionary transportation devices or ghostwriting autobiographies for people who didn’t spend their lives watching computer commercials on television. But I fear that some large percentage of the people who leave the couch during the commercial will just be going to the kitchen to retrieve some Jiffy-Pop or a Snickers bar, which, while in one sense good for the economy, in most other senses doesn’t address the productivity problem.

An associate of mine views advertisements as entertainment. I can’t be so positive, or even impartial: I think advertising is a virus. It feeds on attention and turns brains to jelly. Check out your neighborhood toddlers in designer footwear if you disagree.

Most people I’ve talked to claim they’re not affected by advertising. That argument can’t be true — if advertising wasn’t effective, why would merchants spend so much money on it? In fact, the people who think they’re somehow untouched by the manipulative messaging are probably the advertisers’ favorite audience, as they are puppets who insist that there are no strings.