Ad Avoidance

Take a look at this one, from Get Rich Slowly. It's about advertising - its pervasiveness, and the avoidance thereof - which is one of the things I'm always going on about.

I saw a study somewhere that says that even people who think they are avoiding or not paying attention to or not affected by advertising, in fact are all of those things. Susan Linn said that children can name brand logos before they can read.

I've often looked through the Sunday New York Times, which I love, and seen all the ads for all the high end designers, high end real estate, etc. and thought - how much can this "liberal" paper call attention to class or income distribution issues if so much of its income depends on high end advertising?

And avoiding television helps, but marketers are smarter than that - that's why there's advertising in magazines, on billboards, and on every website you (and your kids) see - except this one!

And remember rule 1 - don't buy anything you see advertised on television!

Ad-free zone

I've been getting intermittent email messages from people asking if I would help sell their products, either by putting an ad on the site or by writing a sponsored post. I'm not sure why someone would pay to get access to my 15 daily readers (Lean Green Mom gets hundreds) but after a modest amount of reflection I've decided I'm not really interested. I'm not always 100% sure what my message is, but I'm pretty sure it involves encouraging people not to buya lot of extra stuff. The people who are reaching out want my readers to buy stuff that's supposed to save them money, but it's still buying stuff. There are plenty of other sites that can point you to coupons or whatever.

(Of course, this may just be my ironclad and dependable financial stupidity talking. I write book reviews periodically for Jewish Currents, and it takes a lot of time, and my pay from this rather threadbare outfit (financially speaking; the magazine is actually quite strong content-wise) is usually a salami from Katz's delicatessen. Now if they asked to advertise on my site, I might take them up on it!)