Advertising....am I a slave?

It is widely known that advertising is a watered down version of a company executive on his/her knees begging you to buy their crap. Ads, especially on television, are literally a tool to invade your home and shove their product down your throat. Which would be good if they were effective, but I honestly can’t see why the nonsense that ads come out with encourages people to give their money away by the bucket load. Take Kingsmill for example. Their tagline is “love bread, love kings mill”. Really? Does anyone actually love bread? Unless its some kind of posh gourmet bread, I really don’t see it. Generic crap in a plastic bag is not something anyone could love. It’s a strong emotion, and brand loyalty is taken to the extreme. And anyway, if someone could actually “love” a cheap sundry product then they must lead a depressing life, which isn’t really the consumer you should be aiming for, unless your advertising prozac of course, but prozac has a loyal consumer base anyway, so it doesn’t need to sponsor big brother, or run a Bluetooth text campaign.
Sports companies are some of the worst, they bend the realms of possibility with the image conscious campaigns that baffle innocent shoppers into buying the product in the hope that all the confusion will end. Adidas’ “impossible is nothing campaign” is a good example. Many a nights I’ve sat and watched the ads and thought “impossible is nothing…..except correct grammar.” Nike are no better, with the ambiguous just do it campaign. This leads them open to a lot of poetic licence to be taken with their instructions. For me “just do it” seems to be an instruction to steal their product, but
I can see how many could justifiably stand up in court and claim the corporate hegemony of Nike and their intrusive JDI campaign forced them do “it”, whatever “it” means to the individual. This gives a lot of leeway. It could be any of the following: Smoke Crack, Sell crack, Eat Burgers, Run over grannies, cut your initials into your patients when performing surgery on them, download bestiality porn, park on a double yellow line and even avoid buying a TV licence. All of these are the fault of Nike. All of them and more.
I think of myself of a reasonably rational human being and I don’t think I’m particularly influenced by branding, but maybe its hard to ignore. I once, when living in the UK, watched the Army recruitment ad with a laptop on my knees and without thinking typed armyjobs.co.uk into the address bar. It was weird. I momentarily became a complete tool of the advertisers. And for something I would never in a million years buy into. Seriously. Apart from the fact that I’m opposed to militarism, I would never, even if I thought the army were a great idea, actually do a job that involved people trying to kill you. And this was in the time of the bloody Iraq war. Bloody hell.
Try to notice the effect ads have on you the next time the tv show ends and the remote isn’t close to hand. Its scary. I have to stop writing now, because I suddenly have the urge to go and buy some Cilit Bang. But don’t worry. I’m not going to be a whore to consumerism. I’m going to poison myself with it. Haha Barry Scott, you’ve just lost a customer!