I am the proud owner of a little bundle of joy named XM Satellite Radio. This small, awkward device sits on the dashboard of my car, wires spilling out of it and into various grooves surrounding my radio. It’s hideous, a complete eyesore literally glued to my dash, but I love it because it provides me with hundreds of music and talk and sports channels. It’s not perfect, as we occasionally have fits of intense fighting over areas of California where reception mysteriously drops. But, for the most part, it is a holy thing for me, an alter that I pray at for most of my day as I run packages around Northern Los Angeles.
While it is true that all the music stations of XM Radio are commercial free, the talk channels are littered with advertising. It’s pretty annoying, if only to point out how little talk radio hosts actually talk (I say 40 to 50% of any given hour on a talk channel is devoted to commercials or XM “updates” giving you the news, the weather, or what the hell Bob Dylan is rambling incoherently about on his show this afternoon).
Many of these commercials you would never hear anywhere else. They’re truly random, appealing to no specific demographic or age group, and they almost never feature big name brands or products. You will hear commercials proclaiming the genius of so-and-so who has written a book about the real estate market. You will hear commercials for a new kind of cream that helps your butt feel smooth (I’m not joking). And you will hear ads for gold.
I’ve seen ads for gold on television. I’ve seen billboards for it. And I hear them on the radio. They’re not all over the place. They appear out of the darkness catching you off guard, usually hanging in corners near alleways or on television late at night. They’re poorly made, poorly designed, and feel about on par with the production quality of infomercials selling the latest kitchen gadget that no one needs.
Does anyone else not find it weird that people are advertising gold? Not gold necklaces or gold jewely. Gold bars (or, actually, investments into gold). There is no other form of metal that gets airtime like this. In fact, most markets and investments are not advertised traditionally. Investment firms are advertised, yes, and mutual fund companies, but not the investments and mutual funds themselves (at least, from what I can tell… I don’t watch a lot of CNBC where these ads are probably all over the place).
A quick Google check of the words “invest in gold” reveal the site Invest.Gold.org, which should come as no surprise, is a website clad in gold banners and lettering.
To quote the website:
For thousands of years, gold has been valued as a global currency, a commodity, an investment and simply an object of beauty. As financial markets developed rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s, gold receded into the background and many investors lost touch with this asset of last resort. Recent years have seen a striking increase in investor interest in gold.
Gold is, in itself (and excuse the use of this phrase) retarded. It’s a mostly useless metal, too weak and feeble to perform any task other than coating electrical circuits, foil on space shuttles, and the tips of audio cables. I heard once that you can only stack so many gold bars on top of each other before the weight literally crushes the bars on the bottom of the stack. Dreams of warehouses filled with endlessly tall towers of gold can only be dreams. A building made of gold would collapse in a second.
Invest.Gold.org, by the way, is run by the World Gold Council, an “international not-for-profit organisation” (misspelling, theirs). Excuse me? A non-profit organization? Devoted to gold research? A substance that has no real value to the human race than to be shiny and used as a standard of currency for the purpose of wealth, i.e., profit? And you claim to have no interest in making money off it?
Whaaaaaa?
Granted, I’m a complete novice to the world of economic investment, so maybe I don’t fully understand the system in place here. But you need to listen to these commercials blaring themselves across the radio. “There has never been a better time to invest in gold.” Really? Right now, as the global economy is going sour, I should be putting my paycheck into bricks of gold? It also doesn’t comfort me that I’ve been hearing this SAME exact commercial on the radio for at least five years now. Apparently, the time to invest in gold only gets better and better with each passing day.
The commercial announcer then yields the floor to a gold “expert” who has appeared to have “called in” to the commercial, as his voice is distorted like someone calling into a radio program. This guy must not have much to do, seeing how he’s calling into the same commercial every half hour for five years. That or it’s a HORRIBLE, DISGUSTING LIE and previously recorded to fool me.
I’m sure someone somewhere will pipe in here and inform me how much of a sweeeeeeet butter investment gold really is, that it holds up the economy and it’s a perfectly sane choice for an investor’s dollar.
And if that’s the case, tell me then oh-gold-soothsayer, why the hell is your commercial so bad, and so five years old?
Get with it, gold. I’m not going to buy you. And get someone who can spell to write your website.
1 Comment
October 24, 2008 at 10:52 pm
So who decided that precious metals are “precious” anyway? I can’t eat them, they don’t provide a roof over my head and I don’t really care for shiney things. I don’t get it, never have, never will.