Many years ago I used to joke about how nothing is sacred to advertisers and that one day you wouldn’t even be able to go for a quiet visit to the “throne room” without being advertised to; unreeling the toilet roll, there would be an advert on your triple-quilted soft-ply toilet tissue and you’d finally realise that there was nowhere safe to hide from the advertisers. But at least, if you didn’t like what was being advertised, you know what you could do with it 😉
Seriously though, in this day and age, advertising is really starting to cross the line.
Now I must state that I’m not here to bash advertising full stop; I work in the web industry where advertising pays the bills and puts food on the table and advertising has it’s place – but the definition of “it’s place” is now a rapidly moving target.
This morning, I was out driving in my car, using the Waze app on my iPhone, not to naviagte around the roads that I know like the back of my hand, but to keep abreast of developments in traffic. After 30 minutes, for the first time ever, an ad flashed up on my screen. It makes sense that, using a free app, it had to be paid for somehow and, since Google brought Waze for a cool billion dollars, there are now ads in the app.