After staring at a pile of dirty dish cloths and being successfully out-waited by my girlfriend (who was understandably fed up with being the only one to wash the shared linens) for more than a week, I finally ventured down to ye olde laundry room this fine evening.
There, staring back at me from the row of coin-op machines, were a bunch of ads for some fantasic new detergent.
Now, at this point you’re probably asking yourself one or both of the following:
- Why are you posting about this in your media blog?
- Why did it take you so long to do a simple household chore, you jackass?
In response to the latter, I have no good reason beyond my general dislike of doing laundry.
For the former, however, I have a much better reason. It’s part and parcel of my general wariness of what has been dubbed (by someone more clever than I) ad-creep.
I’ve posted about ad-creep here several times before. I won’t bother digging back for links; if you’ve read this site before you’ll know what I’m talking about. Most recently, I’ve seen Metro print their entire paper on green stock as part of a promotion for some sort of bodywash or something and the Globe and Citizen (among others I’m sure) run full-page-height car ads with the front and back ends of the cars cutting into the columns of the adjoining stories.
I’d post pictures but, contrary to what you might think based on my above-metioned laundry failings, I’ve been vigilant on recycling duty lately and the papers are gone.
I understand that advertising is a necessary part of newspaper publishing. What frustrates me is when there’s no tangible benefit for the added intrusion. Is news coverage getting better as advertising gets more and more integrated with editorial content? Are they opening any of the foreign bureaus they closed over the years?
Is my laundry any cheaper because someone paid to stick their ads around my laundry room?
At least with the laundry room situation I can see some benefit – they just replaced the machines with fancy-schmancy new ones. The old ones worked okay but perhaps this detergent company advertising is part of the deal that got us new ones.
My newspapers, sadly, haven’t demonstrated such renewal.