>>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.

>The purpose of advertising is not to enlighten, elate, elevate, or enrich us. The purpose is to sell a product. An ad (in whatever form) needs to let us know what a product is, what its benefit(s) are, and make us want to buy it. That's all. Awards are given for clever ads, but that isn't the ultimate measure of their effectiveness. It's whether they sell more of the product. Some take the sledgehammer approach and are almost completely artless. Those ads are not unsuccessful if you remember the product and wind up buying it, or more of it.

Whose side are you taking here? :)

I don't mind ads for a new product, or a reminder here and there "in case you want something like this, here's what we have". Most of the time, however, it's none of that - it's more ads for the same thing, enth campaign for the same product, or enth version of the same old, new and improved (while it's actually worse than it was), or just an attempt to outgun the competitors. It's not bringing me much useful info - it's unilateral by definition (and often raises suspicions - "now with real chicken meat" is a confession about the past... and why exactly would we start believing you now?) and sometimes it actually carries negative information (i.e. now I know less than before).

But it's getting out... no, it has got out of control long ago. It's a power unto itself. It's actually driving its own customers and other players in directions they wouldn't otherwise go. Just take the web: whatever way of making money on it you come up with, you'll find that someone somewhere is doing the same thing for free, hoping to ramp up visit counters high enough to attract ads.

>Advertising is one of those professions it's easy to make fun of, but I have always thought it would be a fascinating business to be in.

Building stone walls without mortar is even more fascinating - it's one of the things pretty much anyone can do, but computers/robots can't. Too complicated. That's fascinating for me... but is also not something I'd do for a living (or a dying either).

Fascinating are the ways they find more and more public space, private space, time, occasions - anything where you were doing nothing in particular, to fill it with their pressure. In most places, when you wait in line, there's a screen somewhere... with sound on. It's usually Fox or CNN, from what I saw here. The worst I heard was one in front of a treadmill in a gym - not only have you paid to lose energy, but actually watch ads while doing it.

Look, I can watch all the ads you want, for a small fee.

>Although I might be one of the ones who came up with clever ads that made people laugh, except if you asked them later what the product was they wouldn't remember whether it was ketchup or underwear ;-)

That's ad for ad's sake :)

...did the ad feature red stains?