Reflections | As advertising blitz in my social media feeds put me off them, a reminder of a fake ad 2,700 years ago in China

I am reducing the amount of time I spend on social media simply because I am sick and tired of the ad blitz whenever I log on.

More than half of my feeds are advertisements, which interestingly, always feature products or services that I had just bought or searched for online.

The “hide ad” features on these platforms do not work in the way I like them to work. Even though I always flag “irrelevant” as the reason for not wishing to see the ads, with the hope that the algorithms will ease up on, or even stop, its onslaught of similar sponsored messages, I continue to get repetitive paid content for coffee and dental clinics, to give a couple of recent examples.

I believe myself to be immune to the tactics of advertising. Of course, I avail myself of the essential product information contained in advertisements, but I think I am sufficiently distrustful of unverifiable product claims, or cynical attempts to appeal to my emotions or aspirations.

But such is the insidious nature of advertisements that even the bad ones, or should we say, especially the bad ones, live on in our subconscious, ever ready to rear their ugly heads whenever we find ourselves in need of a caffeine fix or a root canal, for example.

The earliest mention of a rudimentary form of advertising in China is a story set in the state of Qi (present-day Shandong) about 2,700 years ago, where a butcher hung a cow’s head at his shopfront to advertise the beef he presumably sold, but he was in fact selling horse meat.

The story inspired the saying, “hanging a goat’s head but selling dog meat”, referring to false advertising or an action not being what it purports to be.