I used to read a lot more than I do now. I take that back, I used to read a lot more books than I do now. Most of my reading is done on the web, blogs, tweets, plurks, news feeds, you name it, I read it. It was something I read today that has rubbed me the wrong way, and it made me think of a book. More specifically, it was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and the protagonist, Cayce Pollard, a market researcher with an “allergy” to brand names and logos. Everything she owns is tagless, she makes a point of removing all reference to brand on the clothes she wears, down to the buffing of buttons on jeans to remove the embossed logo.

There are times when I sit here and wonder if there is a marketing saturation point. Is it not enough to recognize the quality of a product by the materials and design, we are now subjected to people moving through the world as walking billboards for some company just because we like the cut of a shirt or the features of a new product we use. Look around right now, how many brand names can you see from where you are sitting?

I was surprised at the number when I did this myself, and equally interested in the fact that I ignore so much of it because it’s there every day. Even the programs we watch are nothing more than ongoing hour long advertisements, sponsored by one set of companies, while within the program, others are highly placed so that we know our favorite characters drink Coke or Pepsi. Advertising has gone so far as to make ads that are meant to be viewed as a program, which cuts out the middle man altogether. We can have a dedicated 30 minutes of testimonials and demonstrations which are just as exciting as most of what we are presented with as entertainment on television.

It was a few years ago that my kid did a project for a social studies class that involved creating a product and making a commercial. The lessons included understanding targeted markets, mainly why you see more pop tart commercials on in the mornings and on weekends, truth in advertising, and ethics on a small scale. Part of one of the monthly PTA meetings included the presentations of some of the products and their commercials. Even at 10, kids get it, and if they didn’t immediately grasp it, once it’s pointed out in what they see every day, they do understand.

Everything in front of us is covered in ads, it’s one of the reasons that I refuse to display them on my site. I’ll promote things I believe in, but I’ll do that for free, be it music, movies, products, whatever. I have no issue with those that do use their site traffic to generate income, if you can do it, great, but there is a difference between those that have ads in a sidebar or a banner and write compelling articles that bring me back day after day because of what they post, and those sites that cover their page with ads and then write posts stuffed with targeted phrases and words that are specifically designed to bring more traffic to their sites through search skewing. The good news is that most people can tell the difference and once we’re subjected to the barrage of pointless drivel, we rarely go back for seconds.

The explosion of micro blogging and social networking has created a new cycle of poor bastards that think by pushing someone’s ads in front of as many of us as possible, they’ll be rich overnight. The fact is, if you post a link about making money, or a great new product along with the thousands of other people who are doing the same, it looses its authenticity, and you as the poster loose credibility. I’m sure the people who design the delivery system for this mess have thought about the numbers of fresh monkeys that will be willing to push buttons daily until the community as a whole beats them into a pulp or banishes them into the land of invisibility, and in their minds there are enough to make a viable business model, because the only ones making money off this type of system is the guy who implemented it.

Part of my issue with this, and our society in general, is the idea of getting something for little to no effort. One well researched and targeted ad stands to hit more people that can and will be interested in buying a product, but that requires time and effort. It’s so much easier to say there are X-thousands of users on different online services every day, so the odds are that we will hit some people that we want in the process. It takes a lot less effort and money to play the odds, and it’s not their time and reputation that are wasted, it’s the individuals that help promote the system by thinking that they can get something for doing seemingly mindless tasks. What ever happened to the old saying “if it sounds too good to be true…”