It has taken years, but I like to tell myself that I am getting pretty good at filtering out commercial noise from my environment. I don't watch much TV, it's pretty easy to ignore print ads, and as for website advertising, well it just seems to be a complete waste of bandwidth so far.
Advertising is pervasive and irritating and generally pretty inane. But when you select the best of the advertising content that's out there and put it in one place, I have to admit that it is pretty darned compelling. I was flipping through a recent edtion of "Communication Arts" which features the best media advertising from 1999. I couldn't believe how smart and funny some of it was.
For example, there were a series of print ads for the board game "Scrabble", which is a fun game, but which I think has a pretty dull image. The game was probably developed about 50 years ago, and the packaging doesn't seem to have changed much during that time. And yet the ads were really funny. Using the letter pieces from the game messages like this one were spelled out:
The only time that celibacy is better than sex I can't remember how many points "celibacy" or "sex" are worth, but its a cheeky and effective commercial. Certainly its far better than the Scrabble web-site.
Another one of my favourites used a very similar approach. Ads for a ski resort showed photographs of well worn lift tickets with helpful messages printed on them, like this one:
All hazardous obstacles have been clearly marked for safety. For example, all trees are covered with large green branches. They weren't all funny, and many of them relied on graphics rather than language for their message. But they were consistently compelling.
Seeing really good advertising like this just reinforces how completely useless the vast majority of advertising really is.