With These Words I Can Sell You Something

By the time a kid hits high school, they will have spent 11,000 hours in classrooms and 15,000 hours watching television, during which time they will have seen as many as 350,000 advertisements on television....This little fact alone is startling.  Advertising is a large part of our lives, because its surrounds us everywhere we go.  The T.V., billboards, product placement, the radio...We are all just part of one big project for companies to take advantage of.  Hour long television shows are really almost about 45 minutes, the rest of the time we are stuck trying to be brainwashed to buy certain services or products.  Events like the superbowl is beautiful thing for advertising companies.  Everyone knows the superbowl is known for amazing commercials.  Millions of dollars are spent for 30 or 60 second time slots, just to show a unique commercial.  Seeing these commercials advertise "new and improved" products that do something amazing for you is just the tip of the iceberg.  How well is it actually improved? How can it be new when there are 5 other competing brands at your local store (different product, same function).  We are all just lab mice for these companies.  What can they say to lure us in? What kind of product could they possibly have that will have us going nuts for?  It's up to us to decode what these commercials say, and how they wrap lies around their claims.  Can this product really do that? Well of course, to a certain extent...We need to do what we can to avoid crappy advertising, and to pick out the real truth behind these claims.  Its all a business, and we are not the investors, just simply the consumer.