[quote user="WallaceL"]
When I first started reading about this I was very leery, and I began thinking about things like Spam, etc. One of the most depressing changes I've seen in the last decade is advertising. It's seriously sickening, it has gone to the point where if you are in any way connected to the outside world electronically, there is some tiny space where someone has decided to insert an advertisement. This has been an incremental thing throughout history, and I was ok with it a good 15 years ago, but the beast has seriously changed our entire landscape.
I'll get more into iZigg don't worry, but for now let me get this off my chest :P.
People have become extremely tolerant about advertising, not because it has done us any good, but because we haven't had a choice. What once used to be 5 minutes per 1 hour TV show, has now become a stream of commercials with segments of movie in between. Email used to be a fairly pure function, but once your info is exposed to even the smallest of bad sources, its all over. You will fill your spam filter up so fast your head will spin. You can't read a magazine without 5 cards falling out of it anymore, or play a video game without blatant billboards that completely ruin immersion. It used to be you might see a Coke sitting on the table in the back ground of a movie, but now its become a parody of itself, and the star is drinking it with the label conveniently facing the camera, and the producers know it looks ridiculous, but that ridiculousness has somehow become a virtue.
You can't even surf the web smoothly anymore, because if you unconsciously move your mouse over the wrong part of the screen, a huge window will pop up and if you're lucky; won't blast out your eardrums with some @$hole telling you you've won a free Ipod. Go ahead and turn on the radio I dare ya. If you're lucky you might hear a song in between all the marketing nonsense. If you get bored with that you can go on Youtube, but you may not enjoy watching that since that too has pop ups now. Yup, in the middle of your vitally important video, you have to hit an X to close whatever nonsense they throw at you. None of this is enough of course, because there is still room for more, on your phone and on mine.
The only blessing here is that according to iZigg, you can disable the feature, but you better believe it will most likely cost you, and that's not limited to that one company. We are a tolerant species, and we will let them trample on us eventually too. The text advertisements will become the norm over time, and you will be able to pay an extra $6.99 per month to disable them. And you will. I don't want to sound like an anti-marketing nazi or anything, but why is it necessary for a price tag to be place on everything in the entire universe? It just seems like not too many things are very fun anymore because of this intrusion, and I can't imagine services like this doing us any good overall.
I know that you me, and everyone else all want to improve our business every which way we can, but for the love of all that is decent in the world, when do we draw a line?
Ok, so I realized I advertised that I would talk a bit more about iZigg, but that was only a marketing ploy to make some of you read my rant! :D
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Wallace, that is probably going to be the single most unpopular opinion on all of these boards, and you're no longer allowed to make fun of my rants by the way, since you seem to deserve an oscar for this one. Despite the fact that this pretty much is a gathering of advertisers discussing business, I couldn't agree with you more. I think advertising once had class, it was direct, and sometimes subtle. Advertising could even have once been considered pleasurable in moderation, but you know what? You're right. It seems like another form of pollution now. The worst part is, you can't beat its effectiveness, and the only way to compete with the advertising of another is to out advertise him or her, so we're all stuck either drinking the poisoned water or dying of thirst. That's life my man, that's life.