Guerilla Advertising: Just Another Way to Bother Us

         
         Just give me a break. At what point does advertising become too much? In my opinion, it already has. Ads on the videos I watch, the music I listen to, the filled pages on the back of the comics section in the newspaper, even the door of the bathroom stalls. Yeah, some of the creative ways companies have found to push their product make me laugh or think a little deeper, but the overwhelming majority of advertising techniques just seem like a way to severely annoy me. Our lives have become a pit of companies hurling ads at each other, seeming more like a way to compete than to actually attract consumers. I feel like I'm caught in the middle of a tornado of commercials and billboards that I never agreed to be in. Living in an age of such overwhelming advertising everywhere I go makes me feel like a celebrity never able to escape the paparazzi or live a life without outside influence. It was already too much and now with the boom in guerrilla advertising, it has gone over the top.
       The purpose of these unconventional ways to make consumers interested in products is a method of huge organizations to break through the "clutter" as it was described in the Frontline documentary "The Persuaders." With the amount of advertising present in modern media, it is extremely difficult for companies to get their messages across without sounding or looking like just another bothersome advertisement. But what I'd like to argue is that guerrilla advertising is still only one more annoying flashing light or hyped-up voice on the radio and that no matter how original they may seem, just build on to the piles of radioactive garbage that is advertising. At some point, these original and creative methods for selling products will just become as mainstream and overused as what we currently call traditional advertising. Eventually, at least looking at the path we're heading, companies will be so invested in finding unconventional ways to advertise that not a single part of our lives will be left unaffected. It's an invasion of my privacy. I don't want to see an ad for Nike on the walls of my doctor's office and I definitely don't want to see ads for McDonald's while I pee. It is over the top, annoying, and overall just so unbearable to me to be constantly plagued by ads. Just because things are original doesn't mean they're better, and guerrilla advertising is a step in the wrong direction, regardless of how modern or unorthodox it may seem.