Re-dic-u-lous!

So, an article in the New York Times this morning explained a new phenomenon in car paint jobs: preserving them by having your car wrapped with advertisements.

Sure, $500 to $800 a month sounds great, but I can't believe anyone would want to be a moving advertisement for any company.

You don't just have your car wrapped with the advertisement--you also have to abide by a code of conduct, limit where you shop and answer questions from people who see you in your advertisement-mobile.

The article also mentioned that advertisers see car-wrapping as a way to get within the confines of a target audience's social circle--to gain acceptance from the group you want to buy your product because so-and-so has it plastered all over his or her car.

I think such a blatant show of "buyer-loyalty" (if you can call it that in this society of money-grubbers) would turn me off to wanting to talk to that person. But, again, maybe that's just because I hate commercial advertising campaigns, advertisers who use normal people to do the work for them, and people who are big enough to suckers to do the work for those advertisers.

It stinks to me of an answer to the problems advertisers are encountering with social media. Rather than enter the network online and allow millions of MySpace and Facebook users access to the company's soft underbelly--**gasp! potentially leaving nasty criticism or sarcasm on the site/profile/comments area**--just make it so they can't help but gawk at the Tide detergent advertisement-encrusted Hummer or PT Cruiser driving down the street.

Maybe I'm just very anti-advertising in general, and that I have learned to ignore all visual and aural forms of advertisement, but this sounds like one of the most idiotic things I've heard of Americans doing yet. Can they top it? I'm sure they can. I just can't believe it's come to this level of advertising idiocy/desperation already.