Yes or No to adverts?

Yesterday when I was sitting down in front of the idiot box following the whole stretch of CSIs from 9pm to 12 am; Las Vegas, New York and Miami, I was so irritated by the high number of advertisements in between. Thinking of it, Astro subscription per month alone is not cheap and with the amount of ads, I can imagine how much Astro is earning! and who says that paid TV has no adverts? In Hong Kong, there aren't that many ads even on public channels. Even if there are, you wouldn't see repetitive ads on the screen; i.e. for CSIs yesterday I've seen repeatitive Nokia, Maxis and baby powder ads. What's more annoying than being able to recite everything on the ad afterwards?

Nevertheless, there are many advantages of watching ads. Some commercials are suppose to be educational and informative. Others might be cheating and confusing...now, let's check out the pros and cons of ads.

Pros	Rebuttal
Ads tell you about certain products that you might not have known	Ads only tell you what the companies want you to know. For instance, diet pills are advertised as effective and harmless pills but the side effects are not told on the ads.
Advertising is just an act to promote a product	Certain products are over-advertised and become branded for no reasons. 2 similar quality products might be sold at different prices for their names.
Ads are informative i.e. the Maxis ad tells you about the services that it’s providing	If they are informative, they should include the prices on the ads of those services.
Some programmes are expensive and therefore must be sponsored by companies. In return, these companies get to advertise their products on TV.	Yes, it’s true for public TV but pay-TVs?

Pros	Rebuttal
Ads are annoying cos they interrupt the watching process	Without the allowance to insert ads in between, there might not be such programmes cos public TVs might not be able to afford to air up-to-date programmes.
Ads are expensive	Although they are exorbitant, they really work to promote the products. Advertising is certainly something that companies can’t save on.
Ads are misleading i.e. it’s not true that you can remove stain by just putting cleaning agent on top of a stained shirt without scrubbing and models for ads take hours to put oil on their hair before they shoot the hair shampoo/conditioner commercials.	Yeah..ads are exaggerating but these ideas are to attract ppl to their products. How else can you create an ad? by shooting a documentary? Having an ad to show how models wash their hair will be funny.
Ads don’t tell you the whole truth	For the whole truth, it’ll take longer than a 5-10 second commercial.
Ads use models who have fine skins to promote facial products and hence are merely promoting the models than the products (cos their fine skins are really not the effects for using such products)	But tell me, do you want to see a fat, pimpled lady on the ads? Can’t blame the advertising industry, can you?

All in all, although I really hate ads, I can find more advantages than disadvantages of them. I suppose since the viewers are the focus, we are the ones deciding what we want to see. Just like the case of the recent news of a star photos being snapped while changing at Genting, the readers of the magazines bear equal responsibility as the press, for encouraging such indecent act. If there is no demand, I am pretty sure that the magazine would not be printing more copies. It has been said that the publicity of the issue has increased the number of searches for those photos online and it's one of the top 7 searches on search engines. The viewers or readers are therefore the ones who should be blamed.

What's shown on adverts reflects what the public wants to see. We want to see good figure models using mobile phones and hence that's what we see on TVs. Hence, we must always be alert of what our interests lead us to and thank goodness that we are not that unscupulous yet to be interested in viewing photos being snapped without approval (cos our magazines have not tried doing that yet!). And yes, you would be annoyed to see how many slimming and breast enhancement ads on HK mags because most women there are just so conscious about their figures and looks. And no, I'm not anti-HK cos I love HK for being the shopping heaven...hopefully it won't change after the GST(goods and services tax) introduction. Not only that, I must tell you about TVB dramas, MTR (compare that to our LRT) and food (dim sum, wanton noodles, beef-ball noodles and Shatin bbq pigeons)!

In conclusion, I feel that ads are generally acceptable although I would still complain everytime I see one on pay-TV.

What do you think?

Yes or No to adverts?
	Yes
	No
	OK OK la.
Free polls from Pollhost.com