1: On Television Advertising

…OK, just ah essay I wrote on television advertising (without any links):

A while ago, I decided to watch TV.

The annoying things were the advertisements. There was one that advertised a knife. It could chop through vegetables, chop through meat, chop through mushrooms, and chop through your hand. A grater, potato peeler, and xacto-knife were built in.

This was a good deal. Then, they added in a steak knife, and a fish knife, and several vegetable knives, and measuring spoons of different sizes, and several pairs of chopsticks, and some forks and spoons, and a salad knife, and a bread knife, and a butter knife…

There were 96 knives inside the set. They then added another set, so there were 192 knives. If you called within 15 minutes, they would add another bunch of knives; in total, it was still $29.99.

These advertisements seemed unnecessary and also strange.  Why would they take a knife that was reasonably priced, and add hundreds of other knives? It wastes money and resources.

The company may have too many knives to sell out. However, this advertisement was repeated, so they were constantly selling knives at rock bottom prices. The cost of mining the metals to create the knives probably outweighs the sales price.

The knives may lack quality.  Quality is better than quantity, and these knives overdo the latter. How do they generate sales with products so dirt cheap that you know they’re worthless?

Advertisements also overdo quality. Why buy a cow if you can get milk for free? If you live without a car right now, then why would you need a car later? Some advertisements advertise overly expensive objects, such as the built-in Automatic GPS system, or Automatic Recliner, or Artificially Intelligent Seatbelts and Ashtrays. How do they generate sales with products so expensive that no one will buy them?

Instead of getting what we pay for, we see advertisements half of the time on TV. The companies must use massive sums of money to buy that TV time; but does anyone remember those advertisements? Will they think about buying them? And do they actually have the money?

Buying things through an advertisement is hard. It is not easily accessible; while you can use a shopping coupon in person, you need to phone the TV companies to get their order.

Advertising is annoying, but it is an integral part of society. It is useless; however after many years of watching TV, we have grown accustomed to seeing them. The world would seem much different without advertising, whether in good or bad ways I cannot tell.

The above opinions may be incorrect, as I have no experience dealing with advertisements. Honestly, even though they cost only $29.99, I don’t want to test out whether those 15-cent knives are useful or not. Why?

Because advertisements are annoying.