>>Missing shows? Not really - I've just discovered that they actually look much better on DVD (finally went Netflix, delayed it for a year because of their aggressive advertising). Did you know that by watching TV you actually waste an hour of your life for every five hours (or less - the 20% mark is for serials) on waiting for the commercials to crawl by?
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>You crack me up! Delayed for a year because of their advertising? I guess the only way for a company to reach you is to remain very quiet, LOL.

Exactly. Occasionally something printed, if it doesn't try to scream at me, may be looked at. Sometimes we even shop based on that.

But, you see, it should work the other way around, IMO (NSH implied). When I want to reach them, I want no obstacles. So... no attempts to harvest my address, email, phone, rectinal DNA scan etc; no attempts to get me on the phone with a top grade [strike]con artist[/strike] sales specialist; no hiding the price; no more than 1K of small print; no blurbs on the specs page - give me data, not "x delivers y". Show me what you have, and if I want details about it, give me details, not soundbites.

Come to think of it, we've spent a decent wad of money in the last few months... on stuff which wasn't advertised to us at all.

>Have you checked out their new feature to download movies or TV shows instantly to your PC, or to your TV with an appropriate box? (I have a Roku, which costs about $100 -- and they hardly advertise! -- still laughing). They have about 12,000 titles available now and have announced it is going to expand greatly in the next few months.

Netflix already has really a lot of that immediately viewable content, and we occasionally view an old episode of CSI or L&O:CI which we missed when it first aired. Reruns... when and what we want, from old seasons, not what we just saw a few weeks ago.

With two DVDs circling back and forth and what's viewable online, I'm fine, covers about 7-8 hours a week; could do more, but I prefer to spend the rest doing something else than watching the monitor. And that's for just $1 more than cable used to cost, so it is well worth the money. And I like their business model - no attempts to get extra money from you for infractions, like video clubs do.

>You really seem stuck on this point of "something that someone already paid (for)." Who says that was enough money to pay for it in full?

I don't have to go into fine details about what I do with my money, do I?

But here it is: the advertising such as it is is bullstool. Everyone does it because everyone does it. The biggest success of ad industry is that they convinced their customers that they have success. So manufacturers, retailers, buy ads because they believe the ads work. In most cases, it's pointless, though. You can't expect some glamourous increase in sales of a toothpaste, because the number of teeth in the country doesn't grow in such a way; so you push a lot of money into taking customers away from other brands - including your own - but then when your campaign runs out of steam, someone else will fire their own campaign and take customers from you... looks almost like the joke about JFK and Khrushchev, when the later said "let's tell each other everything and save big - because now I'm paying my spies and I'm paying your spies, and you're paying my spies and paying your spies".

I.e. advertising is a cost to everybody, and it is not really taken off the profits - the margin remains as it was. It's included in the price.

Now let's consider the other valuable asset: your time. Do you feel enlightened, elated, elevated, enriched or any other e-verb when you watch the same ad for the enth time? What's its value to you? That you may know one more possible thing on which to spend money? Does it tell you anything useful about that thing? IMO, most often, it tells you nearly nothing, and what it tells is either selling an image, misleading or outright lying. Furthermore, you are doing the job of their salesforce: convincing yourself that you want to buy it. And you're not only doing that on your own time, you're doing it for free. Worse: you paid the cable company to show it to you.

If there was no advertising, I guess some of the products would be about half the price. I think the brown sugar waters(*) and a few others are already in the range where advertising costs more than production. Advertising is a form of invisible tax - it gives you nearly zero value, and doesn't bring much value to the manufacturer, either (they have to do it because the competition does - it's an arms race), yet everyone has to pay.

Hey, after I stopped smoking (**), this was easy :)

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(*) Brown sugar-waters, not brown-sugar waters. There seems to be no rule on how three words like this are grouped.
(**) I resumed after a year, a bit - 3 or 4 cigarettes in the evening. None before dinner.