One Redditor recently shared an image captured in Wales with the r/ABoringDystopia subreddit, a forum "for chronicling how Advanced Capitalist Society is not only dystopic, but also incredibly boring."
The image shows a pair of "iWalkers/AdWalkers," two people who are ostensibly being paid some amount of money to walk around with digital billboards strapped to their upper bodies.
As advertising grows more and more pervasive and difficult to avoid, plastered on basically everything you might come across, it logically follows that human beings would end up as walking billboards. That does not, of course, make it any less depressing.
"This is embarrassing for everyone," wrote one commenter.
"Great, another fresh new Hell," wrote another.
"I wouldn't care what it was advertising I'd make a point to avoid any products or services advertised in this manner," another chimed in.
Another commenter linked to the website of a company, CNS Media, that advertises its "Adwalkers" services. Although it's not clear from the photo posted on Reddit that these Adwalkers are from CNS, it is clearly the same or a similar service.
Other recent examples of advertising cropping up in unwanted places include trucks with digital billboards that drive around flashing bright lights at all hours of day and night, floating billboards at beaches disrupting peoples' views of nature, a large digital billboard on the side of an historic Italian cathedral, and more.
Others have noted locations, such as one Australian transportation terminal, covered with fully unavoidable floor-to-ceiling advertisements.
There is evidence that this constant bombardment of ads is more than just annoying — it is an active detriment to peoples' mental health.
"When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier — and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant — there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there," said Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick, who authored one such study.
Further, while any one ad is not itself a problem, an extreme pervasiveness of ads encourages consumption and materialism, and resources are spent in all cases that can contribute to the production of carbon that ends up stuck in our atmosphere, helping to hold in heat.
According to one Forbes article, digital marketing experts estimate that the average American is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads every single day, or over two ads per minute.
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