Newton's Laws They're in your pocket!

Author: Thomas Newton

Does this sound familiar? You open up the Sunday paper, hoping to learn if it's a good day for skiing, only to find that to get to the forecast you must sift through 50 pages of advertisements. In frustration you give up and turn to the TV, only to discover that you must sit through several minutes of commercials before you can hear the weather on the news. You turn off the TV and look up the weather online, only to be bombarded by flashing banners and pop-ups announcing, "You've won a free computer, Click Here!" In a last ditch effort to find the forecast you retreat to your phone and search its web application. Finally, no ads, just simple text and graphics displaying the five-day forecast.

The fact of the matter is that advertising has become an integral part of the modern world and is far too profitable a business for companies to pass up any medium through which they may be able to get their message across. Advertisements change people's preferences, raise demand and increase total revenue. If ads weren't capable of penetrating the consumer conscience as much as they currently do, companies wouldn't be paying $2.7 million to show thirty seconds of their commercials during the Super Bowl, and James Bond and friends wouldn't have been using only Sony electronics in the most recent Bond flick, "Casino Royale." The ubiquity of advertisements seemingly cannot be helped.

The mobile phone, however, is the last safe haven from advertisements. In the U.S., one can surf the web on a cell phone without distracting banners or noisy pop-ups. This sanctuary is soon to be invaded, however, as there are around two billion cell phone subscribers in the world, meaning that more people have access to cell phones than to personal computers - a market too large for any advertiser to give up. Japan, the world's leader in new mobile technologies and a number of Internet using mobile phone subscribers, has had advertisements on the mobile web for several years now, and the western world is planning on following suit.

How much more invasive can advertising become? It not only reaches us in our offices, bedrooms and cars, but now it will be sent directly to our pockets. Advertising is obviously a profitable industry, and there is no reason for companies not to jump at the opportunity to flaunt their wares on the mobile scene. But there comes a point when the saturation will allow for no more solutes to dissolve in the solvent, so to speak. I know that I never look at banners on websites with anything more than contempt, and that billboards offer little more than distractions on long drives. I skip over TV commercials with Tivo or bathroom breaks and I don't go to movies that start at 7 until 7:20 to miss the trailers. In a sense, advertising has become an endless cycle - the more ads that are in the world, the less responsive consumers become to the ads, and the more ads companies need to introduce to get the same response. The cell phone is the last frontier of mass media not yet tainted by advertisements. Once it falls, the speaking billboards and auto-piloted cars of Spielberg's "Minority Report" vision of the future won't be too far off. Advertising will get even more ubiquitous than it is today. Enjoy ad-free weather while you can.