Is All Advertising Spam?

From Bob Garfield's blog:

"...Up until today, we imagined this to be a process somehow unique to the Internet, especially since the FTC cracked down on telemarketing. But then, in a seminar given by Wunderman's Simon Silvester and Shawn Burns, the scales were scraped from our eyes.

TV commercials, print ads, outdoor, banners -- in Silvester's view -- are all spam, because they all arrive unsolicited, begging for our attention.

Alas, there are no spam filters for media advertising. Whether it's a 90-second cinema ad or a cigarette-butt trap in a urinal, whatever the message is we're pretty much stuck with.

There are but two filtration mechanisms:

#1 our contempt

#2 the genius of the ad makers to overide #1. "

Read the whole thing here.