advertising overload ?

First blog of December with the delay due in part to my vacation trip to the UK.

Well now I'm sitting in a rental flat in London, jet lagged and ready to rant. So what's got me bent out of shap this time....advertising overload !!

Now for a media guy to critisize too much advertising is of course sadly ironic. Just last week members of the Just Media team where brainstorming what disruptive additional advertising could we inflict on airport passengers as part of a campaign to reach busy travellers.

However today as I sat inside one of the new fleet of London buses, now equiped with on board TV screen showing ads for Typhoo Tea and various other unfortunate products I realized it's not always a positive thing...why you ask?

Well as I tried in vain to point out interesting landmarks, my two kids could hardly be convinced to take their eye's off the damn screen. As I looked around the bus, about half the passengers looked passively into the moving pictures...great for the advertisers but a little sad none the less (the content was not exactly award winning)

I had similiar feelings a few weeks earlier when I attended one of the Oakland Raiders games. OK so perhaps I should have been grateful for stops in the action, but honestly it's hard to be kept captivated in an experience when play is stopped or delayed for nothing more than a promotion from Budweiser, Burger King or Coke.

I guess my point here is that in these cases, whilst the advertising is obviously achieving some of it's goals, at what point as an industry do we decide we are killing the hand that feeds us. Consumers deserve fewer but better advertising, placed around media that adds to an experience rather than just hijacks it. I don't mind ads around sports but please don't let it start reducing the experience I've come to enjoy. At that point my view of those brands is not exactly positive...

and I never did get my cup of tea :-(