I use adsense on individual blog post pages – two ads at the top, two at the bottom. At one point I used them on the main blog page and on the main cartoonchurch.com site, but decided to remove them for various reasons that aren’t that interesting.

I’m trying to teach my kids that ads can be fun and clever, even entertaining, but that they are not a reliable source of info and that we need to keep a sense of proportion – I figure that’s the best I can do.

Anne

However, a valuation of $10bn on Facebook does tell us a lot about how some people value the potential of advertising. Ironically they are more suckered by advertising than the customers themselves!

this also got me onto thinking about what is a greater evil or lesser evil – in the vein of ‘joggling the seat in front’ – the other day I was in a ‘coffee house’ type place, it was full of lounge type chairs and sofas. I ‘lounged’ and I put my feet up on the low coffee table, wooden, in front of me. After I had finished my coffee and was reading the magazine I had brought in, the serving lady asked me to put my feet down, as ‘a customer had complained’. I briefly wondered what would happen if I said ‘I am a customer also, and I will complain if I cannot put my feet in a loungy position on the low down coffee table that is simply asking for feet.’ – then I remembered I was a Christian and politely removed my feet.

What did slightly disturb me was that she said it was fine if I wanted to put my feet up on the sofa. Something which I thought a slightly bizarre thing.

sorry for the ramble – I don’t ramble that much so I’m taking the opportunity now.

As a Christian working in advertising, I do get fed up with the knee jerk reaction of other Christians and the church in general, that positions advertising as the source of all that is wrong with the world (somewhere below people trafficing on the list of acceptable jobs to do). And by implication suggesting that everyone who works in advertising is destined for some lower pit of hell alongside Hitler and Stalin.

Get some perspective guys. Yes, there’s bad ads, misleading ads, dishonest ads, annoying ads, inappropriate ads, ads that appear at the wrong times and in the wrong places etc. And I do often struggle with my chosen career (equally, because it’s a difficult environment in which to be a Christian, you don’t half stand out – missionary fields and all that).

But this is true of pretty much EVERYTHING in the Western world we live in (yes, I know, be salt and light, don’t follow the world’s rules etc. etc.). Try replacing ‘ads’ with ‘sermon’ or ‘evangelistic outreach event’ or ‘worship song/hymn (delete as appropriate)’…or maybe ‘green grocers’ and ‘plumbers’…in the above sentance and see what I mean.

The fact is that ‘advertising’ is not a stand alone ‘thing’ that somehow exists separate from the rest of the world, and can therefore be rejected as such. It is but a servant of the companies which produce the products and offer the service that we enjoy on a day to day basis.

So if we want to diss and reject advertising, we pretty much have to do the same for anyone who makes/sells anything. Unless of course we want to return to an artisan bartering economy (which I guess has its appeal).

No advertising means no iPod, car, TV, newspaper, chocolate, beer, PC, blog (please insert all those things you can’t live without here). And not because we only buy these things BECAUSE of advertising. But because they are all part and parcel of the same world of production, marketing and sales. If we want ‘stuff’, advertising is the price we pay.

And I would close by saying that, in my experience, most of the Christians who moan about advertising are happy to be buy ‘stuff’ themselves – hmmm, maybe it’s only ‘other people’ that advertising leads astray (in good Christian partonising fashion). And often these people have jobs that are contributing to the consumerist society they reject just as much as I am (albeit in a less public fashion).

Actually, to really close, I will just add that if advertising did wield as much power as people think it does (as maybe this was the case back in the 1950s) it would make my job a whole lot easier – I wouldn’t have to spend quite so long debating with clients over whether they’ve wasted their money or not. And I would probably be a multi, multi millionaire (which I’m not!)

Thanks for listening