Does anyone except marketing people understand the marketing business.  Do the marketing people themselves really understand it?

We are awash in advertising overkill – ads on radio and TV, now even at movies; ads in periodicals and in our mailboxes; billboards, signs, posters; spam and pop-ups on the Internet.  Ads are so ubiquitous that we try to tune them out mentally if we cannot avoid them physically.  Once merely a minor consequence of living in a capitalistic society, advertising has become a blight of epidemic proportions.

The epidemic feeds itself.  The more companies advertise, the more competitors feel they must advertise to stay in the game, so that few businesses think that they can survive without a steady barrage of self-promotion.  No matter how annoyed the public becomes with the intrusion, advertising continues to escalate.  Companies that do everything they can to cut costs in every other area of operations think nothing of spending billions on ads.

I suppose that the gurus of marketing hope that even ads that are mentally tuned out will register at some subliminal level.  I also suppose that they assume that even a super-obnoxious ad serves a purpose by building brand recognition.  And I suppose further that marketing people presume that the public comprises so many utter morons that people will believe the most outlandish, hyperbolic claims.  The evidence suggests that it never occurs to any marketing guru that Joe and Jane Public consider the truly moronic minds to be those of the advertisers themselves.

Many years ago, when advertising began increasing to its current fevered pitch, I anticipated a backlash.  Unfortunately, it hasn't happened.  No matter how intrusive, omnipresent, and extensive ads become, people accept them as part of the way companies do business.  Rather than say "Enough, already," we have increased our tolerance of extravagant marketing practices.  The public reaction to the "don't-call" legislation that successfully stifled telemarketers is perhaps the only exception.  Otherwise, we shrug and say, "That's the way it is; we can't change it."

To the satisfaction of the people in the multibillion-dollar advertising business, few people react as I have.  When the proportion of advertising to actual programming increased dramatically, I swore off network television.  That was years ago, and I still watch it only rarely; if I really want to see a network program, I record it and fast-forward through the commercials.  When the movie theaters introduced advertising before the feature film, my attendance at movie theaters dropped dramatically.  If a company has annoyed me by excessive advertising or by particularly annoying ads, I make a mental note to choose a competitor or a competitor's products.

Recently, I exercised my prerogative as a consumer to protest promotional clutter.  Not long ago, for a variety of reasons, we switched from Verizon to AT&T for our phone service.  Since then, we have received a steady stream of offers from Verizon in an attempt to get us back.  The last straw came when Verizon phoned me, in direct violation of no-call restrictions, with yet another solicitation, followed up the next day with two identical pieces of junk mail.  The junk mail was not only duplicated; it also promoted a DSL service that I happen to know is unavailable in our area.  Rather than settle for being rude to the telemarketer (which I was) and dumping the junk mail in the wastebasket (which I did), I fired off a letter to the marketing director at Verizon, stating that I found the call and the mailing to be annoying, that their duplicate mailing and offer of a service that didn't exist on our area suggested that they were wasteful and inefficient, and that their marketing practices made me only more determined to stick with AT&T.

I firmly believe that, if more of us would take half the time and energy to lash back at promotional clutter that marketers spend in generating the stuff, we might see a shift away from annoying advertising and toward something that resembles true customer service.  I can dream, can't I?