Is it just me or is that blasted GoCompare advert getting on anyone else’s nerves?

Once again, I woke up this morning to the fat opera singer, belting out that annoying jingle. The wife’s insistence on watching Sky News, at an inhumanly early hour, means I’m bombarded with ads before I’ve even had a cup of tea!

So instead of getting mad, I’m going to exact social-media-revenge on the insurance price comparison site by telling you that I was thanking my unlucky stars the last time I went to GoCompare.com.

The insurance firm that appeared at the top of their results page reneged on the quote that got them there, then hassled me by phone with hard sell. Ah – now that feels much better. So, on to the main point of this blog. I wonder how many of us after the World Cup, will be driving a Hyundai, drinking Lucozade or Castrol GTX for that matter, or flying Emirates this summer?

More generally, I don’t have a cat or eat dog food and I don’t wear nappies. I seldom purchase female hygiene products and, being follically challenged, have absolutely no use for shampoo, however life enhancing it appears to be.

Don’t these brands know they are wasting their money selling to me?

More importantly don’t they know I’m not alone?

Don’ t they know we are living in the Post Advertising age?

Or the Post-Interruptive advertising age at least, where people consume media at a time and place of their choosing and filter out TV adverts both mentally and physically via DVRs and on-demand services.

Perhaps that’s why the brands that still have budgets to waste on TV are clamouring for world cup slots, as live TV events are the last bastion of this old fashioned, poorly targeted advertising model. But, given the modern consumer is a more critical, cynical and in my case irritable audience, the potential to damage a brand by annoying them has never been more real.

I, like most, would rather have seen Stevie-G’s goal against the USA than the Hyundai ad ITV-HD decided to broadcast on Saturday and will now never ever buy one. And carpet bombing news channels with a jiggle more annoying than a stadium full of vuvuzelas is never going to turn me into an advocate.