There’s no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers [purplerabbits]

Things Purplerabbits hate, loath and despise part umpteen: advertising

Especially captive audience advertising. Like on a dedicated screen in your taxi, or shouted down the phone at you when you're in a fucking phone tree. Fuckers. The phone tree guys get to me particularly because a) I am already phoning your company, so I am already using your products, b) while I am phoning you to complain about the existing service is not a good time to sell me new stuffs, and c) I want to be able to hold the phone away from my ear while I wait in this interminable queue and having a voice interrupting the hold music makes it harder for me to hear when I've actually got through to a human being.

And lately I'm getting adverts as a screen in an installation 'wizard' process. iTunes just did it. I'm installing the new version and clicking OK to the unread end user agreement and then there's an ad for some Mac hardware or other, with a colour photo. What The Fuck! Life is too freaking short for me to have to click through this garbage.

Also advertising that uses extra resources in order to just do advertising, like those wee lorries that pull ad trailers and drive around burning fuel, or the inflatable bill board I saw last summer which has its own noisy petrol generator.

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LCD videoscreen adverts above urinals. Sexist LCD videoscreen adverts above urinals. The sheer waste of resources that they represent.

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. (http://www.gavinsblog.com/revelations.htm)

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I've never seen such a thing, but they sound like an invitation to a "how high can you piss" contest.

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Yikes! How very...disconcerting... The taxi ads I referred to were LCD screens too, though lately I've mostly seen them switched off, which is good news. Also the airport bus has a similar screen which shows a tourist guide to Edinburgh very loudly but which is only turned on rarely.

I'm with you on this.
And something which makes me retch is seeing several company taglines that end in the word 'passion'. Complete with a little TM sign at the top right of the word passion. This is wrong wrong wrong. How can they write a TM sign next to a word like passion and not immediately die?

What phone technology is missing is an agreed standard whereby when a queue wait is over a certain tone is sent down the line and handsets can detect this tone and alert you that it's time to speak. If phones did this then you could place the handset down and have actually have a life while waiting to get through the queue, and once through the queue your handset would beep at you to alert you. Of course this will never happen as it's too convenient and sensible for us poor consumers.

That would involve BT actually conforming to standards at all. There's a lot of things they could do, one example being have a flag which indicates whether a call is coming through their relay service for the deaf or not - they have one for faxes, so why not typetalk....

The problem with standards is no one ever sticks to them, they like making up their own.

Natalya

I want to be able to hold the phone away from my ear while I wait in this interminable queue and having a voice interrupting the hold music makes it harder for me to hear when I've actually got through to a human being.

This is one advantage of using TypeTalk BT's relay service for the Deaf when using the telephone. Some poor sod of an operator has to type all of that and I can see if it's a human or not. But if I were to consider using voice which for me is very marginal advertising crap would put me off

I also love the way that companies are spamming you while you are paying to be on hold to their often premium rate or annoying rate line... I think they should pay you to listen to nasty music or spam.

Natalya

Ask the taxi driver to turn off the advertising, or charge them five pounds for the priviledge of you watching it. Ask if they will take that amount off the fare, else inform them that their cab doesn't meet basic standards of comfort and get another one.

Everyone should go to the LRT office and complain about the video on the bus.

purplerabbits

There’s no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers

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