Nobody particularly likes commercials. They invade our private space, interrupting TV shows at moments of high tension with insipid renditions of silly jingles designed to make us remember, and buy.
That’s the key—remembrance. You don’t usually just rush out and buy something after seeing it advertised on TV, hearing about it on radio or seeing an ad for it in a newspaper or magazine or on the Internet.
That said, it’s easy to understand the importance of advertising while at the same time decrying its negative effects, e.g., Saturday morning cartoon show commercials that whip kids into a frenzy and prompt them into entreaties to parents for the latest high-tech toy.
You worry, sometimes, about the effect of the many admittedly funny beer ads on college and high school students who too often turn to binge drinking as a form of recreation.
You think about the effect of commercials for the various state or multi-state lotteries on those who can ill afford every week or twice a week to drop $10 or $20 or $50 in the hope of being that one-in-a-billion winner of a million bucks.
Yet advertising also informs, telling us about products and services that we may wish to buy. It educates, as with public service announcements by the TV networks with celebrities urging young people not to drink or do drugs but to stay in school and reach for the stars.
Like everything in life, there’s some good, some bad and probably a lot in between.
But it’s hard to see a lot of good with two recent advertising bits, one already existing and the other apparently in the works.
I speak first of the ads on the outfield doors at Wrigley Field for “Under Armour,” the first time in the modern era that the pristine walls of the outfield have been so disfigured.
I know, I’m a purist, but it’s about all that remains to Cub fans these days since the Cubs are certainly not playing a pure form of baseball.
But it seems to me that Wrigley Field offers enough advertising opportunities without having to change the essential character of the park by placing ads on the doors, no matter how “non-gaudy” they are. After all, you know the old saying, “Once the doors are gone, the ivy is next.”
On another, much more serious front, the war against terror, our government, always at work for us and always thinking of ways to make a buck, is seriously considering or in fact may already have implemented advertising messages in the bins used in security procedures at airports.
The proposal apparently calls for ads to be printed inside those small plastic bins in which you place your briefcase, purse, coat, shoes, laptop, etc. for X-ray examination by the highly skilled Transportation Security Administration technician.
So what kind of ads are we talking about here? Who knows? Do we want funny ones, like beer ads, so as people go through security they’re laughing and maybe, just maybe, the security folks do too, and miss something.
Do we want melodramatic ones, like the public service advertisements prominent during World War II, as in, “Shhhhhh! Loose lips sink ships”?
Do we want advertising with coupons, as in “Use this coupon for Security Line #4, which is always shorter and has friendly, smiling TSA agents”?
It’s serious business, screening passengers for weapons or explosives and to trivialize the operation by advertising makes it less serious. I don’t care how much money can be raised. Funding TSA and its operations and paying competent people to do the job well should not be a question of money. It should and must be there.
This has to be a situation where some number-cruncher got a brainstorm and then convinced some other living-off-the-federal-cash cow muckety-muck that, “wow, here’s a great way to help our pension fund by advertising to a captive audience.”
The net effect is that some people will read the damn ads, back up the lines even more and cause more anger and consternation than is already the norm at the nation’s larger airports.
And that’s not funny at all.
Contact editor Don Kopriva at dkopriva@thebusinessledger.com or at 630-428-8788.