How to kick our ad habit
Think of your day as a big party, and you’re the host.
All the food, drinks, music, people and conversations at the party represent your daily life — they’re essentially the various elements of your daily consumption.
Everyone is laughing, dancing, and generally having a nice time catching up, getting to know each other and chatting about sports, books, TV, movies, work, politics and gossip.
That is, almost everyone.
Sure enough at every party, uninvited guests are peppered throughout the room.
Many of them interrupt conversations, commandeer the music, yell across the room, break up groups, step on toes, spill drinks, start fights, and generally kill the buzz.
Usually it’s pretty easy to recognize these troublemakers, and they’re usually out of the party pretty quickly.
Some examples of these kinds of uninvited guests are drag-racing Ford Mustangs and leaf blowers.
But there’s another contingent of uninvited guests — perhaps the largest contingent — that won’t leave, won’t stop talking about themselves, and won’t stop asking for money.
To make matters worse, these sneaky jerks are always hanging out with your friends and commandeering the most popular parts of the party.
This particularly annoying and numerous class of uninvited guests represent advertisements.
And it’s crazy how much we tolerate them taking over our parties.
This article is about 1) recognizing all the different ways we’re being assaulted by advertising, 2) exploring what it would take to live ad-free, and 3) how to realistically get there — or close — by shifting to subscription models.
Advertising assault audit
Let’s start by listing out the ways we’re assaulted by unwelcome, uninvited and often harmful advertising all day, every day.
- Wake up. Roll out of bed, unlock phone, and check social media, text messages, and email. In the process you likely consume a handful of quick ads on social media, even if you just skip over and scroll past them without a second thought.
- Get ready. Put on a podcast or turn on the morning news show on TV while you make breakfast and get ready for work. TV news is one big advertising platform, and many — most? — podcasts are increasingly ad-supported. You try to skip over the ads on the podcast, or run the blender during TV commercial breaks, but they still seep through.
- Coffee. Read the news while you have coffee. For many news publications, even paying subscribers are subjected to ads, which litter their articles, pages and websites.
- Commute. Jump in the car (or train, or bus) and head to work. You avoid radio and podcast ads by listening to music on the drive, but your eyes still soak up billboard ads which stain the metro walls, ugly boulevards, and freeway vistas.
- Work. Get to work, check email, scan social media, and read the news online. You consume more ads on social media and on news websites. Every now and then your mouse slips and you accidentally click on some obnoxious digital ad. Annoyed, you click back over to the article you were reading and attempt to block the experience from your memory. This is considered a win for advertisers — they succeeded in tricking you.
- Google. At work you need to research something, so you type it into Google. The results show Google Ads at the top. You scroll down a bit to find what you’re looking for.
- Lunch. When you go out for lunch, you probably drive to the restaurant and consume more billboard ads on the way. When you get there, a TV is on in the background presenting the always entertaining day-time TV commercials. You also probably check your phone a few times over the course of the meal, which means more social media ads.
- Work. Back to work, where you receive steady drips of digital and social media ads throughout the afternoon. You may even get an unsolicited phone call from a telemarketer, or a spam email that magically found its way to your inbox. None of these experiences bring any sense of joy or benefit to your life. They’re pestering flies that you swat away throughout the day.
- Gym. After work you drive to the gym and consume more visual streetside billboard ads on the way. As you pump iron, the TVs overhead, and the speakers throughout the gym, blast ad after ad after ad. You try to escape by putting on your headphones and listening to music from your phone. In between sets, there’s nothing else to do but check social media, where you receive another dose of advertisements — maybe these are fitness-related ads since they know you’re working out. You swat them away anyways and try to get your mind back into beast mode.
- Decompress. Back home it’s time to wind down after a nice productive day. You flip on the game, which is just another big advertising platform, and consume minutes of ads at every timeout or break in the action. Cars, insurance, pharmaceuticals, fast food, soda, so much shit you don’t need, so much shit.
- Bedtime. Before bed we give one last “refresh” to our social media feeds. Your last impression of the waking real world, before hunkering down for some much needed sleep, is a bright social media ad trying to convince you to buy something to make your life better. Night night.
This daunting list makes it seem like there’s no escape from the constant advertising barrage.
And sadly, in many cases, there is no escape. But we should still fight ads best we can.
Let’s now explore ways to minimize the damage, mitigate the exposure, and lighten the cognitive load.
A day with no ads
Unfortunately, it’s pretty much impossible to live a relatively normal life and not consume lots of unwelcome advertisements in the process. However, as a thought exercise, let’s discuss what it would take to enjoy a day — one day — with zero ads.
- Don’t check social media. Text and call people instead, or talk to them in person, if you can.
- Don’t watch TV, sports or the news. If you must watch TV, watch Netflix or another subscription service that is not ad-driven.
- Don’t drive. The COVID-19 crisis, and our current stay-at-home directives make this reality surprisingly feasible. Sad silver lining. Stay home.
- Don’t walk (or bike, or skateboard, or scooter) down major streets, or anywhere you could get attacked by a billboard. See if you can find an ad-free route through neighborhoods instead. This also reduces your likelihood of getting hit by a car.
- Don’t listen to any podcasts with ads. For most, this means don’t listen to podcasts. Listen to music instead, but only if you can do so without getting hit by ads.
- Don’t Google anything.
- Don’t read anything from the mainstream media or any other publications that are ad-dependent. Instead, read books, or articles from ad-free, subscription-based services.
- You can use email, but only if you have control of your inbox and can ensure you’re not going to receive an unwanted email from some marketing campaign.
- Don’t go to the grocery store and don’t eat out. Cook and eat healthy food at home, with no ads on the side.
It would be impossible to follow these rules all the time and make every day ad-free. Instead, maybe try it out once a week — or once a month for starters — to help clear our heads.
How to get (closer to) ad-free
Finally, even though most of our favorite things push ads on us against our will, I see hopeful rays of sunshine peeking through the clouds. From a supply side, these rays of sunshine come in the form of value-driven, often niche and independent, subscription-based business models. From a demand side, the glimmers of hope appear when we carve out time and space to disconnect from all the stuff that gets in the way, and connect with the stuff that matters.
Here are my suggestions, resources and pie-in-the-sky wishes for a reality-based ad-free lifestyle.
- Go camping and turn off your phone. No ads in nature.
- Create and enjoy silence. Resist the urge to fill the void with background noise.
- Read books. Books printed on paper. Books in which you can highlight, underline and write in the margins. Books you can toss if you realize they’re written by shills, or otherwise not worth your time.
- I wish the NBA would offer an ad-free service where I could pay a premium to watch games with no commercials.
- Here are some ad-free podcasts I enjoy and recommend, in no particular order:
- I wish these other podcasts would offer a premium ad-free option so I could enjoy the shows without having to stop and skip past the ads they’re pushing, in no particular order:
- Here are two excellent, ad-free newsletters I happily pay to read, and happily recommend:
- I wish The Economist would offer an ad-free, premium option for subscribers who — like me — appreciate their reporting and don’t appreciate their advertisements. As it stands, I’m paying to read their articles and to have the pleasure of reading someone else’s ads.
- I wish cities would tear down every billboard polluting and littering their streets.
- I wish ballparks, stadiums and arenas would tear down every billboard polluting their events.
- I like Netflix and Spotify because they allow me to watch movies and TV shows ad-free.
- The genie is out of the bottle with social media. It’s an important part of our lives, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s built to serve extremely powerful advertisements. The social networks — similar to the TV networks, fast food companies and political organizations — do not have our (the users’, or the consumers’) best interests in mind. And even if the social networks were to offer a premium, ad-free option, I doubt many people would be willing to pay for it. So, I keep coming back to either avoiding social media, or trying to be smart and cognizant about how you use it, and how much you use it. Less is more.
Here’s to a future of fewer ads, more subscription-based business models, and many more ad-free days.