Ad Creep

Americans feel assaulted by ads. There are ads in schools, airport lounges, doctors offices, movie theaters, hospitals, gas stations, elevators, convenience stores, on the Internet, on fruit, on ATM's, on garbage cans and countless other places. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls.

"I don't know if anything is sacred anymore," Mike Swanson, who directs ad placement for the ad agency Carmichael Lynch, told the Associated Press.

This assault intensifies virtually every day. With ad budgets skyrocketing, advertising techniques inevitably become more invasive and coercive. Advertisers are engaged in a relentless battle to claim every waking moment, and what one executive called, with chilling candor,mind share.