Used.

That ugly rectangle with the hideous photograph of an ancient man wearing ancient clothing sitting in an ancient chair is what us old-timers in the ad business used to call an "ad." This ad, and ads like it ran in things we used to call magazines.

A magazine was made of paper, often glossy, and stapled together. It had a variety of words and pictures put into a form we called "articles," or "news items," or "stories," or "reporting." It also had dozens of ads in dozens of different sizes. If you wanted more impact, you bought more ads and bigger ones.

People paid for these things we used to call magazines. They either signed up for a subscription, in which case the magazine would be sent to them whenever it was published (printed) or they walked to a store or a kiosk we used to call a "newsstand." On that newsstand, there were dozens of magazines and newspapers. You could put money on the counter and buy them. More newspapers and magazines came in every day, and many things we used to call people (not users) would visit often and buy them.

People would keep magazines for a while. Sometimes a week or longer. Once-in-a-while, they'd read an article they liked and they'd clip it out, or Xerox it, or give the magazine to a friend and say, "you might want to read the story by Ray Bradbury on page 71."

As I said above all that is quaint and outdated now.

We have no more magazines, we have sites. We have no more articles. We have content. We have no more ads. We have banners. We have no more time because there are so many sites and so much content and such an onslaught of banners, that we ignore virtually all of it.

As Neal Postman wrote in 1985 (before you were born) in "Amusing Ourselves to Death,"

All that brings me back to the top of this post and to the copy in the aforementioned ugly rectangle:

I don’t know who you are.

I don’t know your company.

I don’t know your company’s product.

I don’t know what your company stands for.

I don’t know your company’s customers.

I don’t know your company’s record.

I don’t know company’s reputation.

Now—what was it you wanted to sell me?

When I was a boy in the ad business, until the time the ad business deemed me obsolete for making it too much money, most of the ads I worked on tried to answer the "I don't knows" above.

Most of us didn't go to ad schools back then. I didn't know anyone who did post-graduate work in advertising. And I'm not even sure if I knew one account person in all my years who had an MBA. Also, decks were usually typewritten, not 144-page powerpoints. 

Today, though I make more money than ever before in my life, have more disposable income and am statistically in the top one-percent of American income-earners, there's scarcely a brand or a product that tells me anything I feel I need to know about themselves. 

I love cars and I'd be damned if I could tell you a material difference between a Nissan, Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, VW, Ford, Chrysler, GM product other than people seem to have orgasms when they hear about Apple Car Play and hands-free parking. The same holds true for just about everything in every store. Oh, and there's never any traffic, people buy cars because of balloons in showrooms, and the apotheosis of life is driving your kids to soccer.

No one answers the "I don't knows." They don't even realize they exist. (That would be harkening back.)

As a consequence, I no longer buy anything. I don't know what I'm buying anymore or why it's better or why I should care.

That's progress!

When advertising stopped caring about me

I stopped caring about it.

When advertising stopped saying what I needed to hear, 

I stopped listening to what it was saying.

The end.