Groups of people who refuse to accept the obvious, #1

(This is to be an ongoing series.)

#1: Advertising executives.

It seems to me that advertising executives aren't prepared to accept the fact that people do not want to watch the fruits of their labours. They began by putting advertisements into broadcast television. Humanity was given the VCR and, lo! some form of power was returned to the masses. Programs could be taped, minus the advertisements.

This battle continued for a long while, until free-to-air television became less and less important. Advertising executives have at least realised this on some level, because it is now a stated goal of theirs that they need to work harder in capturing an audience.

This is poop. Doctors need to work harder to cure cancer. Advertising executives need to stop making ads. Haven't they ever turned on a radio station -- common station slogans now involve promoting the frequency (or, rather, infrequency) of the station's commercial breaks. They are attempting to attract people to their station by promising to play fewer ads than their competitors. This is not a subtle message.

Software exists that attempts to hide advertisements on Internet pages. Again, there is nothing subtle about this. People don't want advertisements. If what it takes is a subscription service to any entertainment stream of worth, I know I'm ready to pay for it. It's not that radical an idea -- when a person goes to a music store, that person pays for an album... that is, the person is paying for music, not advertisements.

As an aside, allow me to vaguely paraphrase an extract from Carl Sagan's only novel. In it, a character is described who is the bane of the advertising companies. This character has invented a device that is able to detect a commercial break in a television broadcast. Upon identification of the advertising, the channel is automatically changed.

In the novel, this character is taken to court by the advertising companies, who assert that the character is undermining the companies' right to free speech; they assert that he is being unpatriotic.

In response, the character claims that his device is extremely patriotic -- if all products were the same, there wouldn't be any need for advertising. Consumers would simply buy the better product. By preventing advertisements from reaching the consumer, the character was ensuring that the public would not engage in lazy decision-making. It would also have the benefit of pushing manufacturing companies to produce products that actually were improvements on existing designs.

The courts find in favour of the character, and his device continued to be marketed. He then attempted to market his device on the commercial networks (who were, of course, partnered with the advertising companies). In this case, the networks attempted to block the character from advertising his device -- the character then took the networks to court, and won.

No real point to this story, but it does make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.