I started noticing how much time I was spending on my phone waiting for advertisements to finish. I’m fed up with watching the same ads back to back, especially when I’m paying for it.
With some subscriptions, a regular membership still gets you advertisements. It’s not just “pay and you won’t get ads” anymore. It’s “pay our premium price and you won’t get ads.”
The same happens if you want to watch that film in movie theatres. Say I pay ₹500 for a film that starts at 9 pm. At 9, the advertisements start. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the film starts. Then it stops for an intermission, and I’m sitting through another fifteen minutes of advertisements. The ticket wasn’t free. What exactly did I pay for?
So it’s pay with your money or pay with your time. Sometimes both, apparently.
If this sounds like complaining, it partly is. But if advertising gets to be this embedded in our lives, shouldn’t the person watching get a little say?
With advertising, the discussion seems to stop at whether it worked for the business. Did people notice? Did they remember? Did they buy?
I think there should be another question.
What did the person watching get?
And it doesn’t stop when you put the phone away. Imagine going for a ride because you want something other than a screen. Even far from the city, there are what feel like fifty billboards competing with the view of the hills.
Someone looked at that stretch of road and thought, excellent, we can advertise here as well. Even the second or two I spend looking outside has to be used to sell me something. How much of the day are we going to optimise for this?
Just because a business can buy that space and someone is willing to sell it, they get to decide what sits between me and the view. I’m sure some responsibility should come with access like that.
Of course a business needs people to know it exists. A restaurant has invented another version of tandoori paneer or maybe someone has put paneer and chicken together to bring the vegetarians and the non-vegetarians together and wants to spread this important cultural movement. Depending on how hungry I am, I might sign up. But discovering that dish and giving them access to me at five in the morning are different things.
Say I’m making a sandwich and realise I’ve forgotten the bread. (Does happen sometimes.) I open an app to order it, and I’m getting offers for things that have nothing to do with the bread. (This usually happens: everything except what I want will have offers.)
Before paying, there are more suggestions. Why not buy a soft drink? Get the cart over ₹300 and save ₹3. Fine, I think I can use this to pay for my tax on UPI transactions and I add it. I place the order. But the app still sees a potential opportunity.
Would I like to gamble while my bread is on the way? Or apply for a loan?
I want to write a letter:
Dear app, I just wanted to finish making the sandwich.
That frustration is behind the two-part Attention Advertisement experiment I’m developing.
Now, let’s see what the soft drink advertisement was about.
The usual formula: a famous celebrity, a dramatic stunt, a production that clearly wasn’t short of money. Give it a line like “Taste the hurricane.”
First, who tasted the hurricane? Where did they go, and how did they taste it? Then I want to hear from whoever decided to broadcast that experience to the entire world instead of checking whether the person was all right.
These advertisements seem to say everything except what the business actually brings to the table. Is the drink any healthier than competing products? Are they paying their employees properly? What is the environmental impact of making it? How sustainable are their practices?
Instead, I get to taste a hurricane. And apparently I’m supposed to want it because I recognise the face holding it. I might like the actor. I still have questions about the drink.
I’m not asking every advertisement to become a nutrition label, although occasionally that would be an improvement. I like some ads. They can be funny, strange, twisted, or make me think about something I hadn’t considered. Sometimes I’ll watch one again because I was just so embarrassingly entertained.
Imagination isn’t the problem. The problem is when it starts covering for businesses that have nothing to say. If a company really does something worth talking about, maybe it could tell us that instead of another stunt.
Advertising is obviously built around getting noticed. I just don’t see the same concern for the person sitting through it. A memorable slogan doesn’t automatically make an advertisement good. Thirty expensive seconds don’t make the product good either.
If you’re going to interrupt someone, give them something worth the interruption. Information, entertainment, a thought they hadn’t had. Something. Spending money on the production doesn’t mean I owe you my attention.
I think businesses should have an answer to a basic question:
What does the person on the other side get from this?
You wanted my attention. You may have paid someone for access to it.
Now tell me what you intend to give back.
I don’t want to taste the hurricane.