Advertisers largely have themselves to blame.
To achieve the greatest ROI per placement, they craft commercials that appeal almost exclusively to the psychologies of individuals who are the easiest to seduce into making impulsive purchases -- to describe them politely. This typically means that for everybody else, most commercials are varying degrees of irritating to outright unbearable.
Internet advertisers also shot themselves in the feet early on in their own ways. Recall their epidemics of "shaking" animated GIF banners, pop-up windows, pop-under windows, browser hijackers, seedy and deceptive visual designs meant to imitate OS prompt boxes, virulent shockwave flash objects, etc.
Platforms like Youtube and Pluto frequently insert their advertisements recklessly into videos. On sites like Youtube, they constantly interrupt videos mid-sentence, and with Hollywood-produced content on platforms like Pluto, they do that even in spite of the availability of commercial blacks.
There's a reason DVRs and Spotify and ad blockers became such big things. In more ways than one, advertisers and advertisements have become like those individuals who get on public transportation and blithely sit down next to people despite being 3 pack a day smokers -- who haven't showered in 3 weeks.
Does anybody have a local Jewelry Exchange outlet in their area? Look at the way this company advertises:
Check out Jewelry Exchange's 15 second TV commercial, 'Holidays: The Timeless Gift' from the Accessories industry. Keep an eye on this page to learn about the songs, characters, and celebrities appearing in this TV commercial. Share it with friends, then discover more great TV commercials on iSpot
www.ispot.tv
All their commercials look and sound like that. And any time one appears on television in L.A., my hand
never jumps for the remote to hit mute. They simply aren't capable of being annoying, because they're so low key and get straight to the point of just enumerating what's for sale and how much it costs while showing some basic, pleasant visuals of the merchandise.
What drives the younger generations (and other early adopters of advertising avoidance like me) away from modern commercials, by comparison, is the high budget, ultra-produced corporate advertising styles that agencies employing boardrooms filled with advertising psychology majors all want to crank out. Does having internet service delivered by Spectrum's DOCSIS protocol instead of by Frontier's XGS-PON really fill a household with patronizingly trendy actors experiencing epiphanal symphonies of group internet euphoria, enabling them to charge through their days together with suddenly re-energized tablets while wildly smiling and nodding 'yes' at the vividly expanded universe of cyberdelights their screens have only now been empowered to bestow upon them by [Corporate Product]? Many millennials and zoomers are incredibly sensitive and averse to insincere bullshit. High-trust generations like the boomers were open to lending advertisers the same suspension of disbelief they lent scripted sitcoms like I Love Lucy. But many people from the cynical MTV generation on down just can't do that. We all grew up on The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy, where every canard of mainstream media culture was mocked to
death. For us, the more fake actors we see, and the more elaborate pretense you use to try and get our money, the less we want to let you have it, and the even-less-than-that we want to put up with watching you try.
If stations are suffering because the advertiser-sought age groups are turning against their advertising, then before selling out for the real estate value, maybe it might be worth looking into whether there's something
about their advertising today, versus that advertising merely
existing, that's driving their most desired demographics away. Perhaps it's something industry and advertisers could work together to change stylistically.
