It’s the early hours of Wednesday morning here. I am sitting up late to write this post because the internet was terrible for most of the day. There are so many extra people who are visiting here or are home for the holidays using the internet that the service has slowed to a crawl and at times there is no service at all. I had to wait until everyone else had gone to bed.

Di is temporarily hosting Truthful Tuesday while PCGuyIV takes a break. Here is the question:

Are you influenced by adverts for holidays or anything else for that matter.

My answer to this is yes, and no.

We don’t have free to air TV as I’m told that a normal antenna would not provide very good coverage as we are surrounded by hills and trees. We’d have to get a satellite dish. Neither of us watch that much FTA TV so it’s not a priority. We just stream everything.

Of course these days even those channels that you pay for have ads. Mostly I can skip them or use the time to make a cuppa or go to the loo. Isn’t that what we all do?

However, I do see some ads. YouTube forces you to watch at least 30 seconds of an ad before you can skip while some of the catch up channels for the FTA stations you can’t skip ads at all.

On the internet of course it’s all targeted advertising especially on social media so the ads I see do reflect my interests somewhat. I have followed up on ads for products and services I’ve seen sometimes but only if it is something that I was interested in anyway. I get lots of ads for bras in my social media feed and I have followed up on these because I’m having a hard time finding a really comfortable bra that I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for. Naturally the more of these websites I visit the more of these ads show up in my feed. I can block the ones I don’t want though so it’s not a big deal.

So yes, if it’s clothing I need, a good deal on a cruise or a train journey or something else that I might need to know about I am influenced by ads. I do my research as well but an informative ad can sway me.

On the other hand advertising will not persuade me to buy something I have no interest in and I would never make a major purchase on the strength of an ad. I would read reviews and ask people I know for their opinions.