I had a strange experience this week. A dustbin recommended a film. I can't remember the name of the film but the dustbin was just outside St Paul's Cathedral and I wasn't drunk or imagining it. It's great to see dustbins returning to London streets – for years they were banned because of fears of terrorism – but the new models have digital side panels and it occurs to me that we're being bombarded by advertisements in all sorts of new and novel ways. There's a sort of cat-and-mouse game going on. We don't want to see the ads, thanks very much. But the advertisers are becoming ever more cunning in the way they get their claws into us.
My computer urges me to watch Mr Selfridge on ITV, to order a new credit card and to renew my television licence NOW, which I can't do, actually, because I'm writing this. At Tube stations, ads don't just sit on the wall any more. They flicker and change and follow me up the escalators. Bus stops and billboards are using computer-generated images ever more frequently. I've even been dazzled by the displays on the sides of buses. THERE DEFINITELY IS A GOD one caption read, which is probably just as well because I almost crashed into it. There are screens inside buses too and in taxis for that matter. We can't be that many years away from the sci-fi film Minority Report where advertisements actually work out who you are and address you personally as you walk by.
Ads now permeate television in a way they never used to. An hour of Mr Selfridge, since I mentioned it, will only last around 47 minutes, with no fewer than four breaks in the drama. Even the BBC seems to carry more and more advertisements despite having only one product: itself. When you flick through the 70-odd channels on your television, is it actually possible to find a programme? I find it an intensely frustrating experience. You're much more likely to hit a meerkat or that inane price comparison website who have finally replaced that Italian tenor.
Curiously, even as they continue the onslaught, television companies are wising up to the fact that our love-hate relationship with advertising is rapidly shifting towards the hate side of the balance sheet. We have the technology to fast-forward and we're using it. We can buy DVD box sets. There's the wonderful Netflix. One way they've responded is to make product placement legal, so soon there'll be no escape.
We're already getting used to it in films. Did you notice the scene in Skyfall where Bond was chased through a rather odd Underground station? Every single poster was advertising the same beer, by coincidence the same brand Bond had been drinking earlier in the film. And I've lost count of the number of advertisements I carry around with me. The Oyster card I use on the Tube, bright yellow, screams flat-pack furniture. My clothes are emblazoned with the names of the companies that made them.
How dare supermarkets charge me for shopping bags when, like an unpaid sandwich-board man, I walk great stretches of London displaying their name? If anything, it should be the other way around.
I have nothing against advertising, by the way. This website probably wouldn't exist without it and, as it happens, I began my career as a not terribly good copywriter in the agency McCann Erickson. It's a matter of some sadness to me that some writers have managed to create famous lines – most notably Salman Rushdie ("Naughty but nice" – for cream cakes) and Fay Weldon ("Go to work on an egg") whereas all I ever managed was: "Townsend Thoresen Ferries – 10 per cent off if you book now!" which hasn't quite made it into the annals of fame. At its best, advertising adds much to the gaiety of the nation and characters like the mashed-potato-eating Martians, that improbable ambassador with his chocolates and the guy stripping off in the launderette are hot-wired into our culture. If you want to see sheer comic genius in 20 seconds, check out the ads for a South American cheese spread called Panda on YouTube.
I do sometimes wonder if anyone ever buys anything as a result of all this activity. I can't say I've ever rushed out in the middle of a show to buy car insurance. Even so, the ads are everywhere, all around us. I know we live in a consumer society but sometimes it feels like we're the ones being consumed.
