Mind Pollutants: Ads May Be Harmful To Your Mental Health

A US marketing firm announces plans to send an inflatable billboard adorned with corporate logos into stationary orbit, viewable every night like a second moon; A Japanese schoolboy becomes a neon sign during hi his daily two-hour subway commute by wearing a battery powered vest promoting an electronics giant; Administrators in a Texas school district announces plans to boost their revenues by selling ad commercials on the roofs of the district's 17 schools arresting the attention of 58 million commercial jet passengers who fly into Dallas each year...A boy named David from Sidney, Australia, literally rents his head to corporate clients, shaving a new ad into his hair every few weeks. Some 2,000 students at his high school will be reading them; "I just wish that I had a bigger head." the somewhat sad student says. An American woman is paid $10,000 to tattoo the name of a casino on her forehead...Boy Scouts sell corporate ad space on their merit badges; Coca-Cola strikes a deal for six months with the Australian postal service for the right to cancel stamps with a Coke ad; a company called VideoCart installs interactive screens on shopping carts, so that you can see ads while shopping,(a company exec calls the little monitors "the most powerful micro marketing medium available today!" Some time in the 90's, marketers began installing ad boards in men's washrooms on college campuses, at eye level above the urinals, From an advertising perspective, it was a brilliant coup: where else was a guy to look...Makes you wonder what they so magnanemously did for the women's washroom ...Kids watch Pepsi and Snickers ads in classrooms on freely supplied audio-visual equipment by the advertising firm...you reach down and pull your golf ball out of the hole and there, at the bottom of the cup, is an ad for a brokerage firm or a law firm or a porn film...software engineers demonstrate a program that turns your cursor into a corporate logo whenever you visit any commercial site. If you attempt to flee this corporate world of mind pollution by driving out into the countryside, your views of fields, meadows and woods will be broken at intervals by enormous billboards thankfully obscuring the usual overflowing junkyards of previous models of computer enhanced cars that no longer work or even operate ...
"Ad marketers are going through a difficult time", declares a company's website. "Channel proliferation, attention span reduction and overload are creating and increasingly cynical consumer audience who are each subjected to over one million ad messages per year,(or over 3000, per day). Seemingly some people are desperately attempting to free their mindspace, they are simply stunning out or turning off everything around them; flipping channels out of frustration with commercials; some even staring right-through banner ads on websites!
Even the "well-adjusted" (no pun intended ) among us are feeling the pressures. The effects may be subtle...a slight anxiety, a cynical attitude, a sudden wave of fear or sheer panic at being possibly labeled as unpatriotic, but this makes people all the more insidious. You can see a Coke can in a movie, and you lose the plot to crave a Coke, yet you never see the subliminal ad ad running faster behind the screen...you see a kid wearing a bandana loitering by a convenience store, and a flood of mental images assault your brain and messages warn you that he may be a gang-member and you check your NRA approved guns...You so love their ads...makes ya wanna do things with those guns....