Pollen and Advertising

As I walked to my car with a friend of mine, I remarked at the apparent lack of pollen in the air. I’ve heard the idiot tube prophets speak of great counts of pollen, oceans of green rolling over plains of black tarmac. According to http://pollen.com, a high pollen count is around 12 grains per cubic meter. I’m not sure if it uses the same measurement, but Georgia usually rests in the several thousands range of grains. As this is true, I remarked that I see none of the pollen. He responded that his car already has a coat of yellow, and I, a man sensitive to pollen, gave him a doubtful look. In response to this look, he told me he hasn’t washed his car in weeks, so the pollen built up. With this explanation in hand, I relented.

Still, I’ve remembered Georgia my entire life as being blanketed by this yellowness. I miss my pollen. Of course, once you take into account it’s all tree sperm, the sentiment quickly fades.

Though this is not the topic of today’s discernment, though tree sperm is definitely interesting. Today I speak about advertising. In my eyes, there are two or three forms of such: Passive, third party, and aggressive.

An aggressive advertisement is any advertisement that is shown to you by the advertiser itself. An ad in a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or television station would fall into this category. I call it “aggressive” not because it’s a Burger King commercial, but because it’s actively hunting for people. It may be as innocent as a Starship ad, as evil as an ASPCA public service announcement, or as strange as a Geico commercial, but they’ll still be aggressively wanting your attention. I guess a better defining word would be “active”.

A third party advertisement plays off of the active-aggressive ads; they are word-of-mouth, the magnets on the refrigerator, the search page you leave open at a Barnes and Nobles kiosk, hoping the next person who browses will see your preferred book and follow you… Basically, they are collateral of the hunt. People talk about it.

The passive advertisement is the effect of the first two types. You buy a pack of gum, eat it all, and throw the box on the ground. Someone sees it, picks it up, and on the way from the landing site to the trash can, he/she wonders a few things:

Why did this person leave this gum here?

Why am I picking it up?

How can Stride keep all that flavor for so long?

Ya know, if Stride’s commercials were really true, and people would maul you to get you to spit out that first piece of gum, then whoever this guy was that ate this entire box was running a huge risk for everyone in the school. I should take this up with the principle…

I wonder when I’ll go to the gas station next…

Then you get to that fifth statement, you have a future buyer. I find this same thing happens with computers: my old ’05 IBM laptop, which was outdated when I got it, is ridiculed by the fools with the Macs. I cannot say anything against them, because they obviously have more up-to-date technology than mine. Even now, my screen is tinted red because something’s loose. People see the Laptop with the PC XP operating system and instantly ridicule all PC’s based on my single old computer’s performance. Sadly, the rest of the computer lab is in similar squalid conditions, with the two-foot-thick monitors and the desktops from six years ago. The Mac users’ computers are stylish, beautiful, and easy to work with, and thus anyone looking at face value would deem Macs as being he better choice.

Anything that can be felt, touched, or seen has a passive advertisement attached to it. A wheelchair has a logo, which you can attach to a company. A computer has the same properties. Not all services have this blessing. Tax agencies, for instance, cannot show off their product in the same visual way as a three-ton, V-8 something blowing down the highway can. A bank has similar limited passive advertisement, as does practically anything that handles money.

Food, on the other hand, synthesizes the three into one. Each French fry at McDonalds is an advertisement, probably made from recycled advertisements (and what delicious, delicious advertisements they recycle…), which, when devoured, follows by word of mouth: “hey, ____ tastes like horse—“or “hey, _____ tastes better than sex”…or variations of the two. If the first quote follows the taste of your last meal, when you bring it back up on your friend and tell them what is coloring their shirt, they will not likely go back to the eatery you threw their food up on.

If, on the other hand, the eatery’s food is indeed better than, say, sex, then tell me where this place is, and me and all of my best friends will go there…which is to say I’ll go alone.

Now, some places are so amazing their reputation precedes them. Let me tell you of such a place. In Knoxville, Tennessee, there is an eatery called Ye Olde Steak House, which forges 60 oz steaks in such a manner to bring Hephaestus to shame. The steak comes out big, tasty, and commonly, there are pieces left when the waiter comes by.

Two more things:

I need to have a reason to go up to Knoxville, if you are interested and know me in real life, contact me through one of the various non-blog related channels so my father and I can pig out with you

My school’s computer lab needs renovation.