Do advertisements actually work on people? I wonder at the psychology behind constant advertising sometimes. I am not sure how much I buy off of a super enthusiastic bad actor selling me a product on TV. In fact, I am more likely to buy something because someone I know or someone I like/trust tells me that something will do wonders for my hair/toilet paper experience/shower hour.

Which is why I am really stating to resent advertisers everywhere. Starting with YouTube, when they ruin a perfectly good playlist, to Netflix, advertising their own shows during a show that’s playing. I specifically watch Paid TV BECAUSE there are no annoying ads. Over here, the ads take up about 10 minutes of the actual showtime, because they’re literal productions with a story line, cast and location changes. You have time to go for a walk, get the mail, have a relationship and end it and write a book about the breakup in the period of time that these hows take to sell you something you know for sure you don’t want. Call it Watch Walk Love.

Even more annoying? The Facebook video ones. There you are, happily watching a super interesting horse meets human wearing horse head costume video and suddenly – bam. Your mind is now supposed to concentrate on a sit for dating white men and/or an anti-aging cream. I blame this on the inefficiency of Cambridge Analytica. Anti-aging? I’m black. Hello. Do the research, damnit. The biggest irony here, of course, is that I work predominantly online, and online people are paid from the ads et al from offline ones. Entire industries that I benefit from have been built on the back of subtle or not so subtle persuasion. There has to be a better and more organic way to influence people outside of paying people with bought followers to send out a tweet. Actually, I lie – the biggest irony is that instead of ads turning you on to something, they’re actually turning you off. Like Kenya Power. Or militant feminists.