I hate advertising. With few exceptions, it is intrusive, ugly, and annoying, and I go out of my way to avoid it. I gleefully block online ads using the old Mozilla and the handy ; I take a seam ripper to any visible branding on my clothes (to the exasperation of my sister who simply cannot understand why her weird brother does such things); and, like almost everyone, I easily tune out TV commercials.
However, even with my aversion to advertising in general, I enjoy finding old magazine ads for things that I own or already enjoy. Last year, for instance, I mentioned buying two 1990 Celica GT-S ads on Ebay. More recently, I came across my old collection of gaming magazines while cleaning my bookshelf over break. They dated from around 1993 to 1995 when the Super Nintendo was in its heyday and the Nintendo 64 was barely a prototype called the Nintendo Ultra 64. Inside I found a two-page Super Metroid ad, a unique Street Fighter II Turbo ad with my name printed on it, one of the then-ubiquitous "Mortal Monday" Mortal Kombat ads, and a handful of other interesting articles and ads.
Inspired, I then leafed through some of my newer, non-gaming magazines from right around the peak of the internet bubble. In them I found an IBM ad for Linux consisting of a screaming '60s girl with the caption "Linux is so totally dreamy"; an Olympus ad hawking the early predecessor to my camera; and an ad for a show called "" which was about two computer geeks who created a beautiful woman genie from their PC— the dream of every male computer science student. I cut out each of the ads and brought them back to campus to decorate the wall next to my desk.
Michael doesn't understand it, but I think the ads have a certain irony to them. Their reason for being was to convince people to buy something, but now that their subject matter is outdated, they have no "power" whatsoever. Even back when they were current they had little to no effect on my purchases because I just glossed over those pages like I do now with TV commercials. My interest in the ads came only after I already owned the product they were trying to sell. The product made me interested in the ad rather than vice-versa.
