 Why are advertisers at war with us? If you listen, the language of consumer mass marketing is the language of war. It's the language they use every day. They launch campaigns against target demographics. In order to achieve market penetration, they send flights of messages that might as well be missiles. Because what they're trying to do, they're trying to find impressions in our brain. They're trying to achieve little dents of memory so that we will remember that they exist so that the next time we go to a store, we'll buy them, not their competitor. They pay bounties to other companies for hot leads. Their favorite markets are captive markets. Here are ads on the trade table on your airplane. Many of you have probably experienced video ads in elevators. Those places where you don't want to make eye contact with other people. The name of this company? Yup, Captivate Networks. They have us surrounded. They're able to put media on just about everything except for cities that start to narrow it down. And they put media on every single device, including little clever ads like this bus strap that looks like a watch you can try on. When they're not going to war with us, they're busy branding us or rounding us up like cattle. This idea of driving traffic to websites is equally bad. So some ads are beautiful and funny and rye or informative or have a social message like the lion with a rifle on the lower right. There's a long and beautiful tradition of beautiful ads. Some of my favorite old antique ads come from Capiello and Belanger, who did the first two on this page. But if you want to see where this thing is going, I recommend rewatching Pixar's movie WALL-E, which is a genius rendition of where this is all headed. Let me remind you with this little clip. It's not a big reach to think about a world where, by and large, tells us everything we need, everything we do, and we just lay back in our screens, tap buttons to change our preferences, buy, buy, buy, eat, eat, eat, and lose our skeletons. So in this world, if companies are doing all these things that are really not just trustworthy, but in fact, breaches of trust assaults on our senses just to be remembered, why should we trust them? My assumption is that companies want to be trusted. They don't just want to sell more stuff. They want to be trusted. Yet, the media, the means, the methods that they use today that we all take for granted are in fact not trustworthy. They create untrustworthy relationships. I'm Jerry Mikulski. Thanks for watching this Rexcast. There is more good stuff at the links on this page.