Seriously, advertising, you’re, like, everywhere. I myself even engaged in a bit of billboard liberation when a Comedy Central (my favorite channel, btw) ad started talking to me at the urinal. Something snapped and I dug the electronic voice box out of the ad and through it in the toilet. Enough! Advertising jumps around in banner ads more than a five-year-old after a 20oz coke. And I really think that’s largely due to the fact that ads are just a fading fad. When the whole world’s information is at folks fingertips and you’re trying to get a message to them, what’s the use in irritating them?

It strikes me that advertising got spoiled during the good ol’ days of linear media where every fifteen minutes on the (free) radio or the free (television) it got to yack at us. But when media goes nonlinear like the web, you just can’t afford to be that obnoxious. Advertising needs to get its class back, like The Deck or like BMW films. Class, advertising! Class! You can talk to people without shouting, you can persuade people without lying. But in the long run, business is still going to have to get back to basics and start trafficking in real information; not shinola.

With people more and more saturated with advertising messages that scream about lifestyle and how to be cool, it’s actually refreshing to run into an ad that looks as though it belongs on Saturday Night Live but that is taking itself completely “seriously.” I think the manufacturers know that they could have just released a square cube with a strap on it and called it Seatbelt Relief, and that the Tiddy Bear was clearly a better strategy. It’s a brilliant strategy, in fact, because in an attention economy, it’s something that will get people talking and in the meantime, they’ll sell a few since it solves an albeit trivial need. It’s still a little frustrating (to me anyway) that we’re still a culture not above manufacturing products that have two and three year lifespans as products and decades long lifespans as garbage, but whatever; I still think we’ll get there. Asking for a totally sustainable product lifecycle for the Tiddy Bear just sounds silly, doesn’t it?

But one thing that bothers me about this mass spamming kind of thing is that I’ve in the past made an effort to mention my blog on another blog and included the URL in the hopes it would get some traffic. I suppose trackbacks are largely the same thing. And I guess I’m not sure if I feel like I would delete comments that were commercial in intent. If I had, for instance, just completed an entry about personal finances and Citibank wanted to jump in and explain how their services could help and provide links, I don’t think I would mind. The obvious objection is “they should pay for that privilege.” But let me be clear, I’m not talking about a generic comment posted on numerous blogs. What I mean, is that if someone at Citibank took the time to make their comment directly related to my entry, I would likely leave it.

It makes me wonder if their isn’t a viable advertising business in sending people around commenting on blogs on behalf of businesses — a less massive and more personalized version of AdWords.