A Cacophony of Advertisements!

ca·coph·o·ny
/kǝ'käfǝnē/
noun
a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds.
"a cacophony of deafening alarm bells"
synonyms: din, racket, noise, clamor, discord, dissonance, discordance, uproar
                 "despite the cacophony, Rita slept on"

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Everyday, people are exposed to excessive amounts of advertisements.

You can find them in magazines and newspapers. They're seen on TV and before movies.

They're all over the internet, from simply being on the side of your website page to being in a video you want to watch. They might be a pop up, or they might be in a spam email.

You can find them in the sky, whether they're on a blimp, plane, or helicopter.



They can be found on buildings and inside of buildings. They're in cars, on the outsides of cars, and sometimes on top of cars. They're all over buses, trains, and subways.

You can find them on huge billboards outside. And they're even in public washrooms.

It seems that we have—or at least most of us—have built a filter or immunity to them.

We only let a very select number get through this filter, based on different criteria.

Maybe it's funny. Maybe it has a great cause that deserves attention. Maybe it's a visually appealing piece of work. Maybe it's a combination of all these things?

This filter can be good; it can be a means for raising the bar standard.

If it's a good advertisement, we give it our attention. If it's a great advertisement, ideally, it'll retain our attention. And if its an exceptional advertisement, we might just pass it on for someone's attention.

If the ad hasn't captured our attention, it must not be very good.

However, an extremely bad advertisement might still have the power to grab our attention, but maybe just not for the right reasons.

People are stuck in an endless cycle. Due to our filters and the abundance of advertisements everywhere, our attention spans diminish. And due to our attention spans shrinking, companies are pumping out more and more advertisements everyday to compete for our attention.


Below is a video appropriately named I Dare You To Watch This Entire Video, created by CollegeHumor.

As the name suggests, it's merely a video that dares you, the audience, to watch a boring 3-minute video. It's horrifying to think that most people are incapable of watching a simple, short video, without needing to check their phone, skipping ahead to see what happens, or completing the whole video.

Even if they video was about something interesting, I'm willing to bet that most people are incapable of watching the entire thing in one sitting, without skipping ahead or doing something else at the same time.

We're constantly bombarded by hundreds of ads. Everyday, all day, there's a constant flow of information thrown at us. There's so many different social media platforms, all of which have a feed that's constantly changing and being added to. New media, news, and events are always being created or broadcasted.

It's been said that we're in the Information Age. Or you can call it the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age.

Here's another video, called Look Up - A Poem That Will Inspire You to Put Down Your Smartphone by T-Series HD.

But it's not just advertisements and information that's on the rise. In a world so large, with so many people, there's more and more companies, products, and services than ever before. There's just so much of so many things!

Every category has subcategories and variations. There isn't just a product anymore; there's different brands that offer this product, different colourways, different models, different flavours, and different package quantities, to name a few. Consumerism is on the rise, and soon enough this planet won't be large enough to contain it all.

How does one weed out the good from the bad? 

How do we filter out which advertisements, products, or services to trust?

How does one know when to put down their phone, or turn off their computer?

As a designer and artist, it's almost part of the job description to be constantly taking in information—or rather, taking in inspiration.

Going through images, flipping through magazines and newspapers, and reading books are a means of inspiration. It's a means of knowing trends and therefore, a way to create new trends.

Life is about balance.

There needs to be a balance between taking in information, and having human connection.

There must be balance between technological/digital inspiration, and natural/environmental inspiration.

Inspiration can be found everywhere and anywhere, not just in a phone or tablet, on a computer, or on TV.

Let's get back to advertisements and attention spans though.

Are there are a lot of advertisements in this world? Heck yes!

Are there too many advertisements in this world? I suppose it matches the "way too much" amount of everything else we have in this world.

With all these advertisements around, they allow for great advertisements to stand out. Good ads and great ads will be good and great, no matter what, but the bad ads out there help emphasize and contrast with these better ads.

Then again, if these great ads stand out no matter what, there isn't really a need for the so-so and mediocre ads.

The lengths of attention spans are apparently getting shorter. It doesn't help that certain services cater to these shortening attention spans, with Twitter Tweets limit of 140 characters, Vine's 5-6 second video loop limit, and Instagram's 3-15 second video limit.

Speaking of Instagram, the app that vowed to be the last place to ever have advertisements, have recently introduced sponsored posts. What is the world becoming?

The copious amounts of ads we have doesn't necessarily bother me. However, the amount of pollution, trash, and any non-environmentally friendly ramifications of these ads, is troubling and distressing.