Damnit ... Stop That!!

Some would say that television ads have become far too numerous. They sometimes seem to be coming at us every four or five minutes. There are the infomercials that seem to populate every channel during the wee hours of the night, making subliminal assaults on our wallets. Go ahead, look around, do you have a Magic Bullet or a How To Make Real Estate Millions With No Money Down kit somewhere in your house? Do you remember buying them? But my purpose today is not to address the infomercials. No ... today I want to address an annoying and increasingly more common advertising tactic that seems to have taken root in another medium.

Imagine that you've just woke up, poured a cup of coffee and collected your newspaper from the front step. You sit down open the paper to whatever section that you normally look at first, Just as your eyes dial in on your selected story, a flier is stuck in front of your face. Only then do you realize that someone is standing beside you. It seems that there is a sale at the local farm supply store and they want you there. You are annoyed and you try to push his hand from in front of your face, but it doesn't budge.

"Just touch the "X" on my hand," he says.

"I don't see any "X" on your hand."

"It's there."

Finally, you put on your glasses, lean in and squint, and you see a microscopic letter "X" under the cuticle of his thumb. You touch it and he moves the flier. Relieved, you pick up your now lukewarm coffee, take a sip and read your article. Your eyes drift too another interesting article and BAM ... you get a flier in your face again. Apparently, Preparation H hopes you will consider their product the next time you feel that burning itch. You glare at "Flyer Boy" and jab at his cuticle. No luck. After 4 minutes of searching, you find the tiny "X" which is now placed in the webbing between his ring finger and his middle finger. This goes on for the next fifteen minutes, and you finally give up. You put the paper down and the annoying man vanishes.

This is the sort of torment we are exposed to more and more frequently on the internet as advertisers become more bold in their attempts to extract as many dollars as they can from our wallets. We cannot count on our government to stop these invasive tactics and we certainly cannot count on advertisers to develop any sort of decorum. The sad thing is that we have the means to put a stop to these and any other sales tactics that we do not like, but we don't choose to take a stand. What we have is numbers. Consider Facebook, which has 500 million active users. If we developed a place on Facebook where people could report the merchants that used this and other annoying tactics, we could agree as a group to boycott those merchants in favor of their competition. Up to now though, having superior numbers has never really worked in our favor. Someone could easily create an online form that would allow us to report annoying advertisers for irritating pop-ups, persistent junk mailers and even those who run ads with irksome content. Then we could post he highest-ranking offenders on a Facebook page, or send out a weekly or monthly e-mail (would that make them offenders) listing the top culprits. Those offenders would then be financially punished with a boycott of their products. Perhaps we could even let them know that we have placed them on a DNP (Do Not Patronize) list as a result of their advertising practices. But first we must demonstrate the ability and will to pass the word. If you too are tired of the torment and willing to make the slightest effort to fight back, post a link to this article on your wall at Facebook. If there is an adequate response, perhaps we can convince someone to do the setup work and give us a way to push back.