Magid: What’s next? Ads on the inside of our eyelids?

Far be it for me to complain about advertising. As a newspaper columnist and broadcaster, it’s what feeds my family. But I must still ask about whether or not advertising is becoming a bit too pervasive in our lives.

Forget TV and the Internet for a moment. You can’t go anywhere without seeing ads. Bus stop benches have long displayed them, but now they’re on the sides of buses. In London you see an ad on every step each time you go underground to board the “tube.”

The recently deceased Lady Bird Johnson nearly rid our highways of ugly billboards decades ago, but they’re back and now they’re electronic – flashing video as you drive by at 65 mph. I sometimes wonder if anyone thinks of the safety implications of some of the ones with tiny type that you have to squint at or scantily clad models that, for some of us at least, can be a major distraction.

TV networks and sponsors are having to rethink their advertising policies thanks to TiVo and other personal video recorders. Thanks to PVRs, I can watch 60 Minutes in 48 minutes by skipping commercials, which is not good news for advertisers. The result is many entertainment programs now have ads embedded into the programming along with those infamous product placements where advertising executives – not directors and writers – get to decide which type of soda a character will drink or what type of laptop will show up on a desk. Based on what I see in TV and movies, I’d swear Apple had a 90 percent share of the PC market.

And then there are those “guests” who are really pitchmen. The View, an ABC daytime talk show whose executive producer and chief host, Barbara Walters, is widely regarded as a journalist, features regular segments by “Dr. Gadget” Dave Dettman, who enthusiastically shows off all sorts of products. The show’s co-hosts practically salivate over the goods, but if you don’t watch the credits at the end, you might not know there is a “promotional consideration provided to Dr. Gadget” from at least some of the companies whose products are featured.

Of course we’re accustomed to Internet ads, which have been with us since the ’90s. Some companies, like AOL and MySpace, insist on putting them in your face. Others like Google and Facebook have found more subtle – dare I say, more respectful? – ways of displaying ads so they don’t get in the way of the content.

I’m mildly annoyed at editorial sites that force you to close an ad to see content and really irritated by those that have an ad move across the screen to cover content while you’re reading it. And those dreaded pop-up ads, while less prevalent than a few years ago, are still with us, though modern browsers give users the option to block them.

Now we’re seeing ads inside commercial software. Microsoft subsidiary Massive is in the business of embedding ads in video games, including its parent company’s own Microsoft Game studio along with other publishers, such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. What bothers me about this is that a lot of games are played by children, and there is the danger that kids’ brains will process ads as if they are content. Of course, that’s been true for a long time with children’s TV, but because games are more engaging, these messages are likely to be absorbed even more thoroughly.

And now Microsoft says it plans to embed ads in productivity software. The company plans to test installing “free” copies of Microsoft Works on PCs in exchange for the user looking at ads when they run the software. Like Google’s Gmail, the ads displayed will vary depending on what you’re doing with the program. Let’s hope that Microsoft is at least as subtle as Google, whose ads on e-mail messages appear on the side of the screen and are easy to ignore.

Fortunately there are some alternatives. Most open source programs, including some very good free software such as Sun’s Open Office, don’t come with ads. And of course there are many Web sites that are either ad free or whose ads are well behaved, clearly delineated from content and not in your face.

So, for the sake of my children’s college fund and our ability to continue to get free broadcast TV and Web sites along with free or inexpensive newspapers and magazines, keep the ads flowing. But please give us a break once in awhile. And, ladies, here’s something you might not know – there are establishments around town where men have to look at ads while, well, doing something that we do standing up and you do sitting down. Sheesh.