Obnoxious Advertising from 3 Mobile
Advert in a field that appeared near an airport giving everyone a lovely first impression of Britain.
It was predicted by Philip K. Dick. He saw a future in which everything was advertising and garbage. Cheap disposable products, plastics, consumer culture, buy-all-you-can! culture… Yeh, he saw it coming.
Not that I have anything against buying things. I drop more money on expensive gadgets than really I ought to, but my point is we are now at the stage where advertizing is reaching peaks of obnoxiousness never before reached. See the picture on the left for one example.
The thing that sparked this post might at first appearances seem simple, my wireless broadband from 3 Mobile updated itself. After it updated itself it began to open up the 3 Mobile website every 10-20 minutes or so. Now I have nothing against it opening up it’s website once, each time it connects. But when it is constantly opening up the website it gets annoying, and eats into the bandwidth that I’m paying for. With the damn thing was popping up so frequently I ended up with several tabs worth of the 3 Mobile website open while I worked on something online. I had to actually call their technical support to find out how to switch it off – so I can only imagine there are folks who have no idea how to switch it off, and are still putting up with it.
Such an inconvenience to the end user is justified as being a ‘service’. They want to ‘help’ the user ‘find’ the 3 website, so they can enjoy the ‘customer service’ (be sold to). It’s stealth advertising at its very worst. And 3 Mobile should be ashamed of themselves for pulling it on customers like myself. If you get stealthy advertising through a medium you pay for, you must complain, otherwise soon we’ll be overrun with adverts everywhere. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Another instance is the lengthy adverts at the beginning of some DVD movies. WTF? Followed for a big long advert about why piracy is crime. Piracy crime? Yeh? Well the people who are watching the pirated videos aren’t having to skip through a dozen adverts only to be made to watch an advert about piracy. The pirates take that shit out, and I think they have the right idea. If I pay for a DVD I don’t expect adverts on the damn thing. Fair enough on rental DVDs but DVDs I’ve bought? No way! That’s like the BBC charging TV license money and then displaying adverts, that’s like selling me a desk that has an advert for IKEA carved into the top of it, or selling me vodka that I can only open after I’ve listened to the bottlecap spew forth a litany on the evils of moonshine.
Yeh… it’s time the subjects of overzealous advertising rose up and told these companies where to stick their quest to convert every last inch of everything into an opportunity to market to us.
