Advertising has become an invasive and obnoxious nuisance.
I’m tired of getting slammed with endless ads in literally everything I do and everywhere I go.
Read a news article? Wham, face full of intrusive ads.
Watch a hockey game? The entire ice is covered in sponsorships, and the players have them on their jerseys to boot.
Go for a walk? My eyes get raped by endless fliers, billboards, posters, and clothing brands with ginormous logos.
Nothing makes me want to patronize a company more than having their ads punching me in the face full-force any time I try to read something. I’m serious, look at this shit:
I made the mistake of clicking a link to an interesting Vice article, and was immediately raped with scrolling ads. I couldn’t even read the article, half the page was just a paragraph followed by more ads. Fuck Bottega Veneta, I don’t even know what they sell but fuck them. As for Windows, I haven’t paid for a version of Windows ever, and once Windows 10 is completely obsolete I intend to switch to Linux. I don’t reward obnoxious advertising, and will go out of my way to avoid companies that pull shit like this.
Yes, I know, I could be using an ad blocker for my phone like I do my computer. But should I really have to? I get having a few ads, hosting isn’t cheap and money is good. The problem is these ads take up most of the screen. Vice was a tame example. Try looking at any Wikia page, you’ll be hammered with ads that expand to cover the entire screen and make the X hard to click. Why is this sort of thing not only considered acceptable, but also the industry standard?
What’s worse, sites are starting to block users for using ad blockers. In 2023, YouTube began sporadically rolling out a three-strikes policy that forces the affected users to either whitelist sorry, allow-list, ads on YouTube, pay for YouTube Premium, or be denied access to the site after three videos. The public outcry has been enormous, but like with any large tech company the complaints have fallen on deaf ears. What’re you gonna do, go to a different video site? Good luck, in two years those other sites will most likely be doing the same thing.
I’m also tired of being served ads on platforms that I’m specifically paying a monthly fee to not deal with ads on. I’m looking at you, Spotify and Paramount.
I’ve railed on Spotify in the past, but I’m not done, because Spotify is never done sucking. Every time I open Spotify I’m hammered with pop-ups telling me that I should upgrade to their Duo plan or that some artist I don’t even follow released a new single.
Likewise, any time I watched something on Paramount Plus I was forced to watch an ad for whatever shitty new show they were pimping out. I’m paying for the ad-free plan, why the fuck am I seeing fucking ads? In the end I dropped them because of this bullshit. No big deal, I can just pirate Star Trek and South Park.
These companies somehow skate false-advertising laws by claiming these aren’t ads because they’re promotions for their own companies, but that’s bullshit because promotions are still ads and I can’t skip them or disable them. I’m not upgrading shit, Spotify. You guys can’t even fix your god-awful shuffle system which favors the same handful of songs over and over again. The only reason I still even use Spotify is because it makes it easy to find new music and my phone doesn’t take memory cards so I can’t build a portable music library unless I want to carry a second device everywhere. The moment I figure out how to stream locally saved music from my computer to my phone for free Spotify can eat a bag of dicks.
You can’t even listen to the radio without getting ads crammed into every corner of everything. I’m not talking about the standard commercial breaks. Literally everything is “sponsored”. I used to listen to Preston and Steve every morning on WMMR, but I stopped. Why? Because it got to the point where even the traffic report had a fucking sponsor. It wasn’t just “Here’s Kathy Romano with the traffic report”, it was “Here’s Kathy Romano with the NJM Insurance Group traffic report.” What? Are you fucking serious? Did the traffic report really need to be branded? Is NJM Insurance Group so hard up for business that they just had to slap their name on something as innocuous as the traffic report? I’m not going to hear “NJM Insurance Group traffic” and think to myself “Man, I should really switch my insurance to NJM”, I’m going to hear it and think to myself “What kind of greedy and obnoxious company puts their name on a traffic report?” and make a mental note to never do business with them.
Driving down I95 I’m bombarded with some of the most obnoxious billboards I’ve ever seen. There’s one company in particular that takes the trophy for most obnoxious and annoying billboards though, and that’s a personal injury law firm named Morgan and Morgan.
Morgan and Morgan is a law firm based out of Florida. Not content with just ruining the scenery in one state, Morgan and Morgan have partnered with satellite firms in other areas, including right here in Philly, hence why his billboards are up and down the Philadelphia corridor of I95.
The only thing larger and more obnoxious than John Morgan’s billboards is his ego, since his ugly mug is on every single one. Which isn’t a problem in and of itself, after all you’re selling your legal services, you want people to know your face. The problem lies in how gaudy and asinine his billboards are. Just look at this shit:
You’re not from Philly, you’re an old Jewish lawyer from Florida. Don’t go around trying to use our slang, you look like an asshole.
Here’s another one:
Who would actually hire this clown after seeing these billboards? Saul Goodman had more class than “Jawn” Morgan. Speaking of that, have one more:
Yes, that’s a real billboard intentionally designed to look like someone vandalized it with a Better Call Saul reference. Morgan and Morgan can get bent, I’d rather die penniless in a gutter than hire this jerk-off to represent me for a workplace injury.
I was originally going to end this article here before it got too long, but you know what, I’m not even done yet. I have an entire laundry list of companies and programs I want to call out for their obnoxious and intrusive advertising practices. Let’s keep going.
Discord requires almost daily updates (I could write a new article every single day for an entire year on the problems I have with most modern applications and still not even scratch the surface of everything that’s wrong with the state of game and app development today). Every other time it updates, I have to click off an in-app pop-up ad begging me to sign up for Discord Nitro. It’s all the fucking time, it drives me insane. I don’t even really want to use this app, but I have friends who insist on this being the only way we can communicate. Stop harassing me to give you money, Discord. I’m not buying Nitro just so I can use custom emotes in other servers or upload larger files.
The other day I logged into Ionos (my web host) and was greeted by a huge splash screen telling me something about an “advent calendar” (I’m currently writing this article in December). I couldn’t do anything at my control panel until I clicked out of the ad. What was this “advent calendar”? I got curious and checked it out. This is what I got:
It’s yet another ad trying to swindle me out of more of my hard-earned money, being served to me on a platform that’s already getting my money. It’s not just this instance, it’s quite often Ionos feels the need to try to upsell me on services I don’t need by hammering me with ads as soon as I log in. A salesman at Best Buy is less pushy than Ionos. Add “Build own web server” to my ever-growing list of self-reliance projects, and add Ionos to the ever-growing list of companies I plan on severing all ties with at the first opportunity.
I go to the local Wawa to put gas in my car. As soon as I start pumping the gas, my eardrums are raped with a video ad for Wawa sandwiches blasting at 130 decibels. Hey assholes, if I wanted a Wawa sandwich I’d go inside and get one. Forcefully sticking a giant auditory cock into my ear isn’t going to entice me to go inside and grab a hoagie, it’s going to entice me to hurry up so I can get the hell away from the annoying ad. Panhandlers and crackheads also utilize this distraction to sneak up on you and try to hit you up for cash, or in some cases even outright rob you. By blasting loud ads at the gas pump Wawa is not only being obnoxious, but they’re also endangering their customers.
Some time ago I managed to snag a 50″ Hisense TV for $150 on an Amazon lightning deal. I use it as a tertiary monitor for watching videos and playing emulated games. Unfortunately the TV comes with Amazon Fire installed, which requires me to manually switch to my computer’s HDMI input when I turn the TV on (UPDATE: Apparently I’m an idiot and you can actually change the default input in the settings). This is only a minor inconvenience, and I can live with it. What I can’t live with is the TV immediately slapping me in the face with an autoplaying ad for various movies and shows the second I turn the thing on.
The TV is just a glorified monitor so I simply disconnected it from the internet, and viola, no more ads. Unfortunately, this causes the TV to perpetually search for an internet connection, which means that even when the TV is powered off it’s still drawing power. I know this, because the USB powered LED backlights that normally shut off when the TV is turned off have decided to permanently stay on in an annoying form of protest for disconnecting the device from the internet:
I’m not sweating this because of the power consumption (though I can’t imagine this being good for the longevity of the device), which probably amounts to pennies a month. This one is about the principle of the matter. If the TV is off, there should be minimal power going to it, definitely not enough to keep an LED light strip lit. It also shouldn’t be repeatedly attempting to search for an internet signal while it’s turned off. Why are they so insistent that I connect the thing to the internet anyway? Oh yeah, because no internet means they can’t serve me their ridiculous autoplaying video ads.
I realize I sound like I’m being petty and overreacting to what some might call minor nuisances at best, but where should we draw the line on intrusive advertising? I’m waiting for the day where cars will play ads on your windshield when you’re sitting at a red light. How far are we going to let this go before we as a society finally put our foot down and tell these companies that enough is enough? Are we waiting for it to get to the point where they’re beaming ads directly into our dreams while we sleep? It’s already invaded practically every single facet of our waking lives, might as well take the next step and invade our dreams too.
Do you want to live in an ad-filled dystopian hell hole? I sure as hell don’t. Think I was exaggerating about ads being inserted into your dreams? Think again, they’re already working on it. Right now it’s only via suggestion, but mark my words, the time is coming when they’ll be able to broadcast at a frequency that your brain can pick up during sleep.
Short of pulling a Unabomber and shacking up in the middle of the woods, you’ll never truly escape the excessive advertising. However, you can minimize the amount of intrusive in-your-face ads you have to deal with by utilizing a combination of ad blockers, piracy, and a little bit of good old fashioned ingenuity. If they block our ad blockers? Then stop using their damn service. Sure, it might be kind of inconvenient at first, but if we don’t send a message now things will only get worse.
We’re at a pivotal point in our history. Will you sit idle and allow yourself to become a slave to oligarchic companies and their unscrupulous advertising practices, or will you stand up and take your life back by freeing yourself from their bombardment and punching them right in their wallets?
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