Random Access

Where will it end?
The intrusion of advertising into our lives — where will it end?
Once upon a time, in-your-face advertising consisted of a couple of teens in animal costumes standing on the side of the road waving big placards that promised a pepperoni special.
Now advertising is becoming downright menacing. You can’t tune into any sporting event without being bombarded by logos.
There’s the virtual blimp on the football games and the advertising logos that make it look like some company is sponsoring the names and numbers of those retired players whose names are emblazoned on various “rings of fame” in football stadia.
Everything is sponsored. The scouting report on the starting pitchers is brought to you by this corporation. The out-of-town scoring update is brought to you by another.
Sooner or later, there will be a brush-back pitch followed by this corporate pitch: “That close shave brought to you by Gillette.”
Some broadcasters are thinly-disguised pitchmen who actually look for ways to work the sponsors’ names into the story line of the games.
It is just a matter of time until they show a tight shot of the Blue Jays’ dugout, which is polluted already with “virtual” corporate emblems, and you see the “expectoration of the day” brought to you by a local company that specializes in cleaning up toxic waste.
It’s too bad all-time Jay pitching leader Dave Stieb – who led the majors in scratching of the nether groinal regions every year during his long career— retired before he could get a deal endorsing an anti jock-itch powder. Suggested tag-line: “Dave Stieb doesn’t worry about scratch hits now that he’s discovered Anti-Jockitis.”
All of which brings us to the new lowest form of advertising that has recently hit the streets — literally — in Mississauga and environs.
It’s a billboard on rolling stock — a huge lime green truck with revolving advertising panels which drives around on our busiest roads giving maximum exposure to the advertisers’ message and maximum aggravation to anyone who thinks about the concept for a milli-second.
Talk about your aggravating ad pitch. Here we have an advertising vehicle that is burning our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and abetting global warming unnecessarily, promoting gridlock for pure commercial gain and consciously expanding its ecological footprint to boost the bottom line.
In the Why It Works section of its web site, the company says that Statistics Canada reports that, “Canadians spend 6,570 minutes a year commuting to work (109 hours).”
You can add a couple of minutes thanks to their little enterprise.
How can consumers fight back? In the same old way they always have when offended by advertising or, in this case, by the means of advertising: by refusing to buy the products of those who haven’t figured out that sometimes the messenger is as offensive as the message.