A Casual Rant on Interruptive Advertising

As a consumer, and really as a teenager in the 21st century, I tend to dislike interruptive advertising. I'll close out a webpage if it doesn't load in ten seconds because it isn't worth waiting that long. So clearly, when my favorite TV show is interrupted every ten minutes to squeeze in three minutes of advertising, I can get annoyed easily. But most of the time, I really don't mind them, especially since I can spend the time that the ad is playing to do something else, like pee or check my phone or get a snack. I know many people share that opinion, so I definitely don't think TV is the "elephant in the room." At least not anymore.

That being said, I also don't think TV advertising is as lucrative as it once was for that exact reason. People just don't pay attention to it anymore. If they aren't doing something else during the commercial break, it's probably because they're just fast-forwarding through it. That's why there's a huge movement toward Internet video advertising. But unfortunately, this is becoming a problem too, because those fifteen second ads before a two minute video on YouTube, or minute-long commercial breaks on Hulu, get annoying too. In fact, they're more annoying, because unless you have AdBlock, you're forced to sit through them. You can't fast-forward or skip ads. And I've noticed that now, if you even press the mute button, the ad pauses. It's very forceful.

This presents a problem. People already generally hate advertising, so when the ad interrupts something you'd way rather be doing and actually forces you to listen or watch, 
you're not going to internalize or even appreciate the message. And since you usually see the same ad in front of every video, the saturation combined with the interruption get to be too much.

So what's the solution? It's near impossible to find an ad that isn't in-your-face because advertising, now more than ever, is literally in your face at all times. Advertisements are all over your phone, computer, TV, food, clothing, airplane, car, street, town, city, country, ...the list goes on. It's becoming harder and harder to get a message across without the saturation factor causing issues. That's why I think interactive advertising is gaining so much attention: it gives you something to do, so you aren't stuck with a blank stare or an annoyed look on your face.

I'm a relatively patient person, so I rarely find myself aggressively annoyed by interruptive advertising. But many people my age are, and since adults always tell us that we are the future, something needs to be done. 

Actually, I just thought of a form of interruptive advertising that I really hate. I hate when you're reading something on a website and those ads pop up that cover the text you're trying to read and can't be moved until you scour the page to find the hidden, microscopic "CLOSE" button. And sometimes you can't even press that button for fifteen seconds so that you can "read this message from our sponsor." They used to be found mainly on pretty sketchy pages, but now I find them more and more on news sites or professional blogs. Yeah, can that just stop, please? Ugh.

-Saige