Advertising....

Advertising sometimes annoys me. Sometimes it's clever, like during the Super Bowl when companies spend enough money to run a small country for a decade or two just for a 30-second spot, but a lot of the time advertising is downright insulting.

I knew back in the 70's or 80's or whenever they changed the law to allow lawyers to advertise that it was a bad idea. If I see one more "if you've been hurt in a car wreck" commercial, I may sue THEM for hurting my feelings. No wonder we have to pay such astronomical rates for insurance. We have to foot the bill for get-rich schemes for deadbeats and their lawyers. Now before you get all huffy, I realize that there are some legitimate claims and cases in which someone NEEDS to pay and get paid. For every one of those cases, however, there are ten that are frivolous and/or possibly downright fraudulent. But I digress. This really wasn't intended to be an anti-lawyer/anti-lawsuit post.

I realize that the whole purpose of advertising is to convince us to buy a particular product or service over another. And I've been just as guilty as the next person of falling for advertising. We took a trip to Aruba one year based solely on their advertisements. And the fact that no one I knew had been there.

Some things, however, make me just scratch my head and say, sometimes out loud, "WTF?" The other day I was on my way to school and I heard an advertisement on the radio for a new hysterectomy procedure. Because clearly there is a good chance that many women, driving to work at that particular moment, hear that advertisement and say, "Well, there's an idea that hadn't occurred to me. I think I'll get a hysterectomy."