Today in Tedium: This is nothing new if you’ve tapped into a streaming service like Hulu recently, but ads can overwhelm you with their loudness, something people find annoying enough to fill up the Federal Communications Commission’s inbox. This has been a problem for years, one that was so bad that a straight-up law, the CALM Act, passed in the early 2010s to address it. Unfortunately, streaming services aren’t covered by the law, and have largely nullified the gains of the CALM Act. And that means, when you watch a show like The Bear, you are likely to get taken out of the moment by an annoying ad. It is, in fact, designed to do this. Annoyance is an excellent advertising strategy, a fundamental one even. Today’s Tedium talks about the relationship between advertising and annoyance. — Ernie @ Tedium
Today’s GIF comes from an episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien, which had a one-time character named Barry Caldwell, the guy who wants you to know that he is not annoying. He doesn’t live up to the name.
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“Any attempt to make the radio an advertising medium, in the accepted sense of the term, would, we think, prove positively offensive to great numbers of people. The family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless it is invited.”
— An op-ed, published in the advertising publication Printer’s Ink in April 1922, an advertising publication, discussing the emergence of the advertising model for radio The piece noted that there was a distinction between print and radio advertising: “The man who does not want to read a paint ad in the newspaper can turn the page and read something else. But the man on the end of the radio must listen, or shut off entirely. That is a big distinction that ought not to be overlooked.” It was of no use.
The computer that led DEC to spam hundreds of ARPANET users. (Wikimedia Commons)
The first marketing message on ARPANET really pissed off a lot of people
In many ways, advertising is always meant to be a distraction. An intentional one, even. After all, just think about how billboards work, for example. In their most effective setting, they represent focal points in a sea of dead space, commanding your attention because you are a captive audience, insisting on being right there, not even asking for permission in the equation.
They know you’re stuck. If you’re in a classroom and Channel One News starts playing, you should know that you’re committed to watching, even if the ad for Twix annoys you. And unless you want to pay for YouTube Premium or subscribe to a premium feed, know that most videos have some sort of ad in them, mildly frustrating you.
But what if you’ve never experienced such a mild frustration or distraction before? What if you used a medium where you never before experienced the annoyance of advertising? What would that feel like?
In 1922, as NPR reports, New York’s WEAF (now WFAN) played a short promotion for the Hawthorne Court Apartments in Jackson Heights, representing the first-ever advertisement in a broadcast medium. It was the idea of AT&T, which owned WEAF at the time, and had developed much of the station’s infrastructure (using its Long Lines coaxial cable service) with the idea of advertising in mind, a concept the company called “toll broadcasting.”
AT&T eventually sold the radio station to the modern-day NBCUniversal. The ads stayed, and eventually moved to NBC’s next broadcasting medium, television.
The first ad on that medium after the FCC allowed them, a commercial for the Bulova watch brand, appeared in July 1941 on an NBC affiliate in New York, and cost a mere $9 (equivalent to $192.29 today). The message, aired during a baseball game, was simple: “America runs on Bulova time.”
A commenter on YouTube on this ad nailed down the mindset we collectively have towards advertising perfectly: “I'm sure back then people thought that ad was too much.”
At the time, TV producers barely knew what they were doing, and television didn’t really support pre-recorded ads at the time. None of the tricks and tactics that shape modern advertising had been set, so instead we experienced ads in this very plain, simplistic format for a bit. (World War II also slowed television’s entrance into the market—in the U.K., for example, the BBC’s television service was off for nearly seven years. Imagine if that had happened to the internet.) Television ads didn’t hit their stride until at least the 1960s.
But what about the digital medium? What was the first ad to appear there? There have been many claimants over the years, but the one that feels like the most obvious choice appeared in 1978, when Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) decided to share the details of its new DEC-20 machine, which had built-in ARPANET support, with users on the service.
The ad was a disaster. While well-written, and essentially an announcement of a product demo rather than a hard sale, the message was sent essentially as a mass-mailing into a system that could not support such a thing, as longtime software developer and onetime EFF chair Brad Templeton wrote in a post on his website. The message, with hundreds of intended recipients, was intended to go so many places that the message did not get sent to the entire list. (Sending through a mailing list to avoid such awkwardness was possible, but they didn’t use that function. Oops.)
And people were upset. Major Raymond Czahor, the Chief of the ARPANET Management Branch, underlined his annoyance as such: “THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.”
(In case you found that passage annoying: At the time, all-caps messages were kind of a given. You’re applying modern norms to a 46-year-old message.)
But the thing is, advertising always has had the power to annoy, even in its most basic forms. The problem is, advertisers didn’t rest on their laurels. They got more sophisticated.
“The average consumer now sees 20,000 commercials a year; poor dear. Most of them slide off her memory like water off a duck’s back. Give your commercials a flourish of singularity, a burr that will stick in the consumer’s mind. One such burr is the mnemonic device or relevant symbol—like the crowns in our commercials for Imperial Magazine.”
— David Ogilvy, the ad legend, in his famous article, “How To Create Advertising That Sells.” To think of this in the context of annoyance, the “flourish of singularity” is the thing intended to annoy you (or at least stick with you).
If you don’t want an earworm in your ear, do not press play.
Five annoying marketing tactics that you’re probably familiar with
- Cloying catchiness. Anyone who has ever had an ad jingle stuck in your head is a victim of this. As David Buck wrote in 2021, jingles were an essential element of chewing gum commercials. Later on, commercials got even more annoying, and the jingles even worse—in the case of Kars4Kids, arguably weapons-grade.
- Oversized and odd-shaped everything. Giant scissors and giant checks are ways to get people to notice the thing you’re doing, because often physical scale doesn’t match the emotional scale. Back in the day, before they standardized check-distribution, we used unusual sizes and shapes for checks, which made them more memorable.
- The shock factor. In the late 1990s, Doom co-creator John Romero was trying to get a game studio off the ground—but the advertising (Actual slogan: “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.”) was highly annoying to the target audience of gamers, to the point where Romero had to apologize for it years later. The Daikatana gaffe was the culmination of a decade of edgy ads. But shock shows itself in more subtle ways, too—the higher volume I mentioned on some ads is an excellent example of this.
- Repetition. This is a specialization of the targeted-ads era, where an ad will trail you for miles until you finally relent and become a customer. When video is integrated in, they can be particularly brain-destroying. According to a Washington Post piece from last year, such advertising isn’t (usually) intentional, but I mean, they built the tracking technology for a reason. In the world of television, you might see the same ad six times in an hour, which gets annoying, but helps you remember the ads. Even if it doesn’t repeat, the personalities in said ads may repeat—hence why figures like Flo or Ernest get used so heavily. You remember them, and then remember to buy whatever they were selling.
- Gimmicks. Throughout the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the fast-talking nature of John Moschitta Jr., a commercial mainstay best known for pitching Micro Machines. (Fun fact: Moschitta recorded a spoken-word album summarizing a dozen classic pieces of literature. Here’s Gone With The Wind. You’re welcome.) Leaning hard into gimmicks like these is a great way to make advertising that sucks you in, and for brands like 7UP, it can even be seen as their M.O. Unfortunately, though, gimmicks get stale and begin to grate—which is why you haven’t seen John Moschitta Jr. on TV in about 30 years, even though you probably didn’t need much to remind you of Micro Machines.
86%
The percentage of consumers that say too many ads on a website make them disregard advertising altogether, according to a report from the ad agency Picnic and YouGov. The research highlights how too aggressive ad experiences can actually work against advertisers, to the point where users put ad blockers on their browsers because of the damage ads cause to the user experience.
There may be content under those ads, but we’re having trouble seeing it. (via Pixabay)
The id of the annoying ad
Here is the challenge with advertising of all kinds: If it doesn’t annoy or frustrate you, it may have zero effect at all. In other words, those distracting Taboola links are not frustrating or annoying by accident.
If anything, it requires them to be even more annoying than usual—an effort to twist the phrasing and suck you in just a little bit more on each read.
In the late 1990s, a movement of sorts coalesced against advertising as a concept, often with an anti-consumerist bent. The two key elements of the movement, the publishing empire Adbusters and the Naomi Klein book No Logo, each concerned themselves with the inherently manipulative nature of advertising, particularly the long-term damaging effects it has, and how spending on ads is constantly on the rise. As Klein wrote in No Logo:
This pattern is a by-product of the firmly held belief that brands need continuous and constantly increasing advertising in order to stay in the same place. According to this law of diminishing returns, the more advertising there is out there (and there always is more, because of this law), the more aggressively brands must market to stand out. And of course, no one is more keenly aware of advertising's ubiquity than the advertisers themselves, who view commercial inundation as a clear and persuasive call for more-and more intrusive-advertising. With so much competition, the agencies argue, clients must spend more than ever to make sure their pitch screeches so loud it can be heard over all the others. David Lubars, a senior ad executive in the Omnicom Group, explains the industry's guiding principle with more candour than most. Consumers, he says, "are like roaches—you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while."
So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid. And nineties marketers, being on a more advanced rung of the sponsorship spiral, have dutifully come up with clever and intrusive new selling techniques to do just that.
Essentially, advertisers must continually shift gears, or the ads threaten to lose relevance.
Sometimes, these changes don’t come across as clever, but annoying. Ads show up in increasingly invasive places—as Klein noted at the time of No Logo, they started showing up in places like envelopes for unrelated products, on pieces of fruit, or even by pumping scents into movie theaters, invading every part of life in the process.
And it’s worth noting that Klein wrote what she did before the extremely invasive nature of online ads became a problem. In fact, at the time No Logo came out, the ultimate kind of ad-based annoyance was emerging—the pop-up ad. Much like the Bulova watch ad, the roots of the pop-up ad were modest and simple, but easy to explain in context. Ethan Zuckerman, in 2014, wrote in The Atlantic about how his goal with this invention, developed while he was at Tripod, was brand safety, not audience exploitation:
At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.
The reason why the pop-up ad (and later, the targeted ads) became a serious problem for the internet ultimately points to diminishing returns—almost exactly as Klein described it in No Logo.
The use of pop-ups seemed aggressive, but at the time they first came about they were actually somewhat rare, per CNET reporting of the era, which put their total percentage at 2 percent of online advertising impressions. (Helping: Browser makers took steps to minimize such ads where they could.) But despite limited impressions, their aggressive nature made them an outsize weapon of annoyance. And as a result, they burned out pretty quickly, to the point where pop-up blockers became more common than pop-up ads.
The story arc of the pop-up ad is really the story of online advertising in general: First, it started with the need to make money. The publisher saw a way to fund the site they run by just adding these pop-up ads. Then the advertiser saw success. But slowly, the effective thing became a victim of its own success. End users started complaining. “What have you done for me lately?” questions emerged from the publisher. Then, the advertisers moved onto something else that was even worse, like video ads or chumboxes. And when those stopped working, they went for the next thing.
Where’s the limit? Mobile game ads seem to suggest there may not be one. Often built as roadblocks that you cannot avoid, intended to get you to tap in the wrong place, and leading to a clear lack of trust, these ads are arguably worse than anything you’ll see on a web browser. Recently, they’ve been the subject of an annoying trend: Ads that do not actually match the content of the real game. While they’ve been banned in some countries, they persist, to the point where a parody of said fake games came out and went viral.
They don’t care if it’s annoying or basically lying to you. They just want you to buy the thing and buy it again once you’re done with the first thing you bought.
Annoying advertising leads to annoying products. A great example of this is the rise of products that make poor choices for dinner conversation, but nonetheless dominate your social feeds. For example, think about all the gaming and technology creators who spend time talking about Manscaped, a company that specifically sells people on products intended for shaving body hair, specifically in sensitive areas.
Or you might listen to podcast ads about dog food that talk about your Chihuahua's digestive habits. Or you might see commercials that specifically try to add an entertainment element to going to the bathroom—think Squatty Potty, whose initial advertising campaign remains legendary.
The advertisers clearly know that talking about bodily functions in this way is gross, but they also know it’s attention-grabbing. Hence why they do it.
And as highlighted by the example above, annoying advertising shapes products. I am skeptical that Paul Tran, the founder of Manscaped, would have come up with his product line without the knowledge that forcing YouTubers to talk about shaving pubic hair would stand out. It is essentially a product that exists because it can be marketed.
I think a lot about annoyance, because I am frequently annoyed. My spam issues are famous. Ultimately, these nuggets of marketing annoy you to wear you down. Eventually, your annoyance, your frustration, will continue to linger until you just give in to the capitalist forces that want to separate you from your money.
It’s a complicated balance. How do you get people to support the thing you’re doing, while still ensuring the ads you need to run don’t completely turn them off? Everyone on the publishing end of things has their own way of measuring all this, but my calculus is pretty basic: I run a couple ads on the page, a sponsorship in the issue, and otherwise leave a lot of money on the table. No autoplaying videos; no gambling or weight-loss junk; nothing that takes you out of the reading experience.
That’s what I can handle, and I likely leave a lot of money on the table because of that.
But my level of annoyance isn’t your level of annoyance, and you might be annoyed about different things. But advertising is often a nice way to say “annoyance,” as annoying as that association might be for advertisers.
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What would you like to see out of online advertising? Can you handle a little annoyance? I kicked off a poll on the topic on Mastodon. Vote there (and comment) if you’d like. The conversation is already going strong. And be sure to share today’s issue with a pal.
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