Protecting yourself from TV ads

Commercial breaks on live TV. Some of us dismiss them as necessary evil and tune them out; others switch the channel. In this article I argue that neither of these methods are actually good for you as they are just an illusory escape.

I was lucky (or unlucky) to grow up during late socialism in a country of the Eastern Bloc and was exposed to much smaller amount of advertisement all around, but especially on television. I moved to the west (USA) on my 21st birthday and for many years felt overwhelmed by the onslaught of advertisement virtually everywhere. I felt that the loud (I would even say abrasive) commercials had a very negative effect on my psyche and overall mental well-being.

But the worst part came when I observed someone I really cared for ( an elderly person in their seventies ) not detect the beginning of a commercial break in the middle of a TV show. My friend kept staring at the TV set and said "it just flows into it", but nothing could be further from the truth. The scene was cut abruptly, the volume increased, the frequency of the cut takes rose sharply and there was nothing in common between the show we were enjoying and the sudden commercial break. I realized that my friend had been profoundly damaged by the conditioning and wondered what the effects on his attention span must have been. So I made it my mission to not allow this to happen to myself.

First steps - just count

The first thing I decided to do is to see if I can keep a simple count of how many individual commercials were there during an ad break. I am embarrassed to say I did very poorly at first: I would lose count around four or five, would catch myself repeating a number more than once, and sometimes reverse the count by two or more. I wondered why this was the case...

Upon further investigation I came to the conclusion that it was my deliberate or maybe instinctive attempt to "tune out" the advertisement that was causing me to lose the count. I don't know enough about cognitive science but I'm guessing that it's either the suppression of the stimula that takes too much energy or it's the fact that cognitive processes need to be suppressed that causes ripple effects.

Clearly if I tuned out the ads completely I couldn't complete my task. So, as a first step I tried to program myself to detect just the beginning of a new commercial within the block. This turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected, but it wasn't too bad because the background music and overall rhythm of the commercials oftentimes vary greatly. With a little experimentation I arrived at an optimal level of attention that I had to pay so that I could maintain an accurate count without being overwhelmed.

Here is the system I devised: I would remember the actual number of the ads I had seen so far only if they were a prime number - i.e. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, etc. while for all numbers in between I would perform a quick arithmetic in my head. For example, instead of remembering that I'm watching advertisement number 10 I would remember that I'm watching advertisement 5 * 2, instead of number 8 it would be 2 cubed and so on. Using this system I was able to accurately count up to 27 ads within a single commercial break.

Raising the difficulty - categorization

I've yet to reach my ultimate goal of remembering all ads and the order in which they are presented, but by applying a method similar to the one described above I was able to categorize with high accuracy the ads within blocks of up to 23 ads. To do so, I had to force myself to pay attention to each individual ad at least as far as I would be able to see the product and assign it to a category.

Or at least that's what I thought would be needed, but sadly it turned out that the act of stopping to pay attention mid-ad would throw a wrench into the categorization process. It was as if the moment I would say to myself "Ok, this is an ad for a car, I don't have to pay attention to it anymore" my brain would discard the counts of all other categories so far. Therefore it became necessary to pay attention to every ad in its entirety, something I found to be a torture.

(For the sake of completeness - and this speaks volumes about the culture of the country I reside in - on one of the leading TV channels out of 23 adverts within a block about 9 were for medicines, 3 or 4 for cars, 2 or 3 for banks and the rest mostly for big box stores.)

Even harder - ordering and accuracy

I'm still working on this final stage in my self-assigned task, and so far I have mixed results: I have been able to accurately reproduce the order of six or seven out of nine adverts on the radio. Bear in mind those are much easier to keep track of as they engage only the parts of the brain dealing with sound.

The method I use is an evolutionary step up from the one described in the previous two sections - listen to the entire advertisement, perform simple computation and repeat the name of the product in my head. In addition, I found it necessary to perform occasional "refresh" of the information I've had stored so far. However, this refresh didn't work very well if I started it from the ad at position 1; I found that it works best when trying to recall (i.e. "poll") a random sample of three or four previous adverts on each refresh cycle. I'm not sure why this is, but I think it is very interesting.

Facing the pain - a caution against switching channels

If you have gotten this far in the article it should come as no surprise that I oppose switching channels. It does no good to your attention span, and if you were watching something interesting enough to be worth watching then you're practically throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Conclusion - do not allow yourself to be mesmerized

In one of the books by Carlos Castaneda - "The Second Ring Of Power" the protagonist is invited to a house where the floor has a very intricate design. The hostess is a "bruja" and her intention is to let the design mesmerise Carlos and subdue him so that she can achieve some nefarious goal. However, probably being too naive, Carlos finds the pattern on the floor very interesting and studies it closely, thus defeating its purpose.

Patterns that mesmerize you are not your friends.

(At least not when they're trying to sell you stuff.)