COMMENTERRY--

How often do you run into some advertising gimmick that is more of a turn-off than an encouragement for you to buy someone's product or service?

How about those magazine, card inserts, for example, that have the disturbing habit of fluttering annoyingly into your lap as you do a quick perusal of the pages.

Years ago that poor excuse for slick marketing led me to the habit of holding the bound side of the magazine up and fanning the pages over the waste basket to dispose of that annoyance in a fitting manner.

Then there is this marvelous example of creative stupidity.  That's a recent front section of the Vero Beach newspaper with half of the front page covered with some hawker's squawk that I quickly remove and trash just before I tear off things like the orange something-or-the-other and restore the paper's front page to its historic, readable form.

In radio these days the folks posing as creative hot-shots have come up with the noisy contrivance of repeating some vendor's telephone number four, even an occasional five, times as the repeated phone number dissolves into cranial trash so quickly the hapless vendor's entire blather has long since dissolved as well.

Do merchants actually pay for such annoying junk?

Then there was this year's pinnacle of advertising extravagance, the Super Bowl telecast where ads were said to cost upwards of 4 million smackeroos for a 30 second spot.  By the time this year's performance got to half-time advertisers would have had better luck buying a half-page spots in their local high school's, football game program.

Guess there might be a parallel in there.  The quality of the game was about on a par with most of the ads I endured viewing.