Are Commercials More Annoying Than They Used to Be? Yes, Yes They Are.

A certain sort of person shrugs off other people's observations about the ways in which the world may be changing with the view that everything is always the same, and any perception of change is subjective and meaningless. The bias of contemporary culture toward respect for ideas that look like "eternal verities," the frequency with which people offer superficial observations that are easily debunked, and the "air of superiority to the world at large" with which such statements tend to be made, allows that shrugging banality and cop-out to pass for great wisdom. But all the same, that objective, material world is out there, and we are undeniably part of it and affected by it. Yes, there are times when life probably really is getting harder for most people--and where such evidence goes it is hard to argue with something like life expectancy, with falling life expectancy proof of genuine hardship. The trend of things in the U.S. this past decade, with (according to CDC/World Bank data) male life expectancy (already eroding before the pandemic) fallen over three years in just the 2014 to 2021 period alone (from 76.5 to 73.2 years), and female life expectancy a more modest but still significant two years (from to 81.2 to 79.1). All of this is the more the case as it is virtually undisputed that the deaths lowering that expectancy (the pandemic apart) are "deaths of despair" (alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, etc.), while the averages conceal significant differences, with the poor suffering more than these figures indicate. Even before the trend had progressed so far the richest 1 percent of men lived 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent--while the erosion of life expectancy in the years since would seem to have hit the poor harder than the rich (the portion of it related to the pandemic included) . . .

"Wait, wasn't this going to be about commercials?" some readers are doubtless asking.

Yes, in fact it already is. Specifically it seems to me that in a world where people are suffering so much--the actual deaths only the most extreme outcome of the untoward larger trend--even the little things are weighing on us more.

Like the annoyance caused by commercials.

Still, I do think the actual experience of those commercials is relevant. There is how advertisers strive harder and harder to penetrate an ever-more cacophonous media universe to reach a hyper-saturated audience that wants absolutely nothing to do them, and has developed defenses against them. There are such disgusting "innovations" as autoplay for videos no one would choose to play, so that before you have even spotted the video you hear the commercial blaring and are left hurriedly trying to locate it and shut off the distraction so that you can get on with what you came for. There is the way that when we are online going to some website we will be hit in the face with a popup demanding we disable our ad blockers--the element of coercion, the fact of our putting ourselves to the inconvenience of disabling our protections (and then having to enable them again as soon as we leave), acquiescing in their harassing us, the more distasteful. There is their readiness to make their content annoying as the price of keeping us from shutting them out mentally--with one tactic the design of commercials so that after seeing them a hundred times you are still not sure what they are about, or even what they are selling, the approach of catching the viewer's attention to insidiously imprint some subconscious association unbelievably cynical and obnoxious (while in the case of some of us making us wonder just what it was about so that we consciously pay attention, manipulated yet again).

Meanwhile there is the ever-greater attention people are encouraged to devote to "status politics." The result is that the cultural traditionalist will not only be annoyed by what they experience as a ceaseless barrage of "representation," "counter-stereotype" and the like, but the sight of it will be the more charged because of that larger context--every commercial, like everything else, a battle in the culture war. Others who are not averse to such politics may still be annoyed by what they object to not for "wokeness," but simply the "corporate kind." And still others who have no objection to even corporate wokeness will be the more annoyed by the occasions when a commercial is not so "woke." (In short, everyone walks away unhappy, which frankly is the point of elevating such politics.)

One may add that the politics can seem to have had a subtler impact on the commercials. Traditionally commercials relied on the casting of physically attractive persons in them. They relied on an element of glamour and, yes, sex appeal. Humor was important, too. It is not always clear that all this actually helped sell more goods. And often it annoyed as many as it pleased. But for those who were amenable to the content--frequently to the point of, every now and then, actually liking the commercial in question, even when they didn't like commercials generally--it made living in an advertising-soaked media universe easier to take, a single good commercial buying a measure of forgiveness for a lot of bad ones. Now--and I admit this is not the sort of opinion you would see uttered in the mainstream media--in the view of a non-negligible portion of the market, when judged by traditional, conventional criteria, advertising has retreated from the use of attractive models, from glamour, from sex, while altering its use of humor (much of which now seems to revolve around subverting the old expectations by delivering precisely the opposite of what people would have expected--and where they would have preferred it, frankly annoying them rather than making them laugh). For those who feel that way all this removed the sweetener, leaving just the bitter pill that was an unwanted sales pitch being shoved down their throat--while those who saw the now vanished content as objectionable merely saw something objectionable diminished, commercials made less unpleasant than they were before in certain specific ways, which is a different thing from their actually being made pleasant, the bitter pill itself still that. And the result, of course, has been an audience with still more reason to be annoyed by the multimedia onslaught on their senses and their wallets.