Well, here in the good ol’ USA, there are 300+million people. If each of them need to buy four beds in a lifetime, that’s about 1.2billion beds needed in (let’s assume that there’s a 100 year difference between the newest and oldest members of society) 100 years, so that’s 120 million beds/year. That’s 328,000ish beds per day. That’s one in a thousand people, or slightly less than half my neighborhood looking for beds in Chicago on any given day.
I bought my queen size matress for $400ish so if that’s the average (for argument’s sake), there’s $131,000,000 of beds being bought every day in the US.
Makes sense to run ads, no?
Although I have to admit, I’m also perplexed by the sheer number of bed stores.
I’ve been reading some “new marketing” (AFACT, my term) blogs recently out of a morbid sense of…I dunno, I think I just hate myself, but obvoiusly, they’re looking for, and finding, better ways of selling crap to us.
I was going to put in a quote from one of my favorite bands (wherein the singer is an ex-marketing type) regarding marketing, but perhaps that would be in poor taste.
Adbreaks on TV? Mute button, cup of tea, toilet break. Or mute button, then make up the conversation the plonkers on the ad must be having…
“Yes. I drive a Shitsubishi because I am a Collossal Wanker with a Tiny pair of gonads…Thats why I’m smiling like a Brainless Smarmy Git…”
I just routinely turn up to the movie theatre 10 minutes or so later than the advertised “start” time… these days it’s running close to 30 minutes later by the time the film actually begins, though… :mad:
There is a TV channel in Australia that routinely squeezes yet more ads onto the screen when credits are rolling for a program, thereby making the credits themselves so small as to be unreadable. Too bad if you want to know who the actors were! Does this happen elsewhere?
My personal favorite ads are the ones you’re subjected to here in the US when you try to talk to your credit card company. I got a replacement card today and had to call a number to activate it. At least this time they congratulated me on my new buying power before they proceeded to the ad. (Other times, I’ve had to stay on the line to confirm that my card was activated.) I hung up during the ad - hope my card still works. If not, they’re going to get some rather irate correspondence, because ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS ACTIVATE MY CARD!!!
Got the same thing from the phone company when I changed my long distance service (at least I was changing to a long distance company that I only interact with online). On the plus side, I was actually speaking to a human being I could tell to stop selling me things and move on. On the minus side, she had the unmitigated gall to attempt a defense of the ads. I pretty much hung up on her.
This is true. We just record everything when it plays in the late afternoon and then watch it in the evening (like, we just finished watching Stargate, which we taped at 5. It was on while we were watching the recording, too). We just have it set to tape all our favorite shows, and then we can watch them whenever we want. The little’uns have no concept of “time for their favorite show.”
We’ve found it kind of cuts down on our total TV time, because if we don’t have something to watch, channel-surfing is too annoying–it’s full of ads. We read more now.
