I just spent the last 2.5 hours, dizzyingly navigating my way around an internet article, manically clicking off random, auto-start, pop-up commercials and arrows and boxes that when I clicked them, whisked me to over to some other universe of irritation, in a powerless attempt at reading a
3 minute article on the wonders of composting toilets.
Remember back when YouTube and the internet were the places you sought refuge in from the onslaught of annoying as fuck commercials that yelled at you to buy something you didn’t need, at 15 minute intervals?
Only every 15 minutes, you say?
A mere 4x an hour?
Compared to what's going on now in 2017, that seems like some tranquil, zen like dwelling I’d suddenly rather be time-machined back to.
Honestly, the pop-up ads on YouTube, the commercials that come on midway into a heartfelt video, the advertising noise sprinkled throughout every single article and news page opened, aren't even a little funny anymore.
Imagine being deeply immersed in a scary book or movie, and intermittently, a squad of differently clothed clowns and axe murderers alarmingly jump out of the closet to sell you different heart attack remedies.
It’s like, I'm just trying to walk to the kitchen, to get a simple glass of water, and the hallway I need to walk through is lined with 300 mentally unstable, needy people, nervously rifling car insurance leaflets at me at the speed of an industrial paper-sorter, as they’re slashing my face with obsolete business cards, gluing useless gadgets to my forehead, dipping posters in throw-up and fire ants, and then crumpling them up and jamming them down my esophagus.
Just trying to get a glass of water here.
I’m considering hiring a few Samoan bodyguards so in the future, I can safely open that video you sent me.
Maybe my memory is skewed, but back when I was in advertising, I feel like commericals attempted to have a modicum of class. They were carefully analyzed, tediously created, beautifully shot, and placed according to a very specific demographic.
Today, they are more like like writhing, screaming, clots of fast-moving information, that now have the capability of being fire-launched up your ass the minute you sit on the toilet.
Over the years, in an effort to preserve their own species, it seems that ads started to develop a mind of their own, their own ways to intuit that we’re leaving them. Like some bad ex, they somehow know when we’re trying to avoid contact with them, so they show up at other places you might happen to be. Like they've explicated some radical, genetic mutation to battle their impending demise. Attempting to stick to your retina from every possible angle of your life’s periphery like some industrial grade, double-stick Velcro, would stick to a colony of unsheared, dry sheep.
Honestly, I can’t imagine that any of these irritating pop-up ads are even relatively effective because all they ever make anyone wanna buy is mace (for the jerks who keep jumping out of the closets and hallways), a 1-way ticket to a Himalayan mountain top, and a crate of soft-covered books that don't yell at me while I'm reading them. So if that’s what you’re selling, stick to that.
You’ll make a killing.
