I was reading Vox this morning, and they had the linked article on Wayfair.
Apparently this is an online home furnishing retailer.
Apparently they have a jingle, that is an earworm.
And apparently the jingle is unavoidable. It's everywhere.
But I, who practically LIVE on the internet, cannot recall ever seeing the name "Wayfair" before. I had no idea they existed until I read this article.
And that got me thinking...
I don't see ads on TV, because I do not watch TV. I watch Netflix and Amazon Prime and my friend's pirate Plex server.
I don't get ads on Facebook or Instagram for anything other than motorcycle gear, and the International Association of Scientists. (I have HEAVILY interacted with their ad system, to whittle down the ads I see to an extremely narrow band of products/companies.)
On all the news sites I read, the ads are just stuff I don't look at. Sites with interruptive ads, I close immediately and read my news elsewhere. Never return.
Even when ads autoplay, I never have the sound turned on for my devices. Phone, iPad, laptop. The sound is ALWAYS off, unless I specifically want to listen to something.
I'm kinda surprised this has worked so well.
I'd thought the interruptive nature of advertising, the "everything's free, if we show ads" business model, and the ubiquity of social media in everyday life, would mean I was always seeing/consuming advertising everywhere. That my attention was indefensible, and a victim of the modern internet.
Apparently, I am wrong.
Ikea is alive and well in the USA with some 50 warehouses. Many of them are second generation at this point; I know only my local area but both the Burbank and Seattle Ikeas, which originally opened in the early '90s, have recently re-opened at double the area. Ikea, however, is geographically-based. They want you to go there, wander their maze, eat their meatballs and leave with a $40 end-table you didn't know you needed. Wayfair wants to sell you the same products but they want you to buy it from your couch. They have no brick-and-mortar presence. They also aren't interested in pursuing a unitary design theory; Ikea's website returns 394 examples of "lamp" and 98 examples of "table lamp" while Wayfair will not give you a granular answer on "lamp" and returns 22,693 examples of "table lamp."
Wayfair is a drop-shipper. Consider Wayfair to be an American skin for AliExpress and you aren't far off. The birth center has probably $2500 worth of shit in it from Wayfair; take Ikea, vary the designs substantially, make the instructions more byzantine and you have Wayfair. Their model isn't far off AliExpress either. They offer discounts to businesses and your discounts increase with your volume. Our $2500 of Wayfair means we pay about 20% less on Wayfair than you do. And since they're big enough to be able to get containers launched every day, the turnaround on Wayfair products is about three weeks shorter than the turnaround on AliExpress. Joybird is basically a higher-end Wayfair. Still Chinese crap, still largely un-testable until that couch shows up on your porch. There is a Joybird showcase in Orange County which is why we don't have Joybird furniture. Their shit is aggressively uncomfortable. We were presented with an opportunity to purchase more Wayfair recently. We did not because their response to the recent ICE controversy was "eat a dick, proles." However, the nine items we were thinking of buying from Wayfair were all demonstrably available directly from Amazon under other names at lower prices than we could get from Wayfair even with our "discount." I have purchased things from Wayfair for three years and I've never heard their jingle. Keep in mind: Vox is garbage and you can generally discount anything they say (for example, this whole article is basically a thousand word elaboration on "wayfair is a dropshipper"). Vox is also a ready conduit for PR blasts (you are reading this article because Wayfair wants you to be aware of Wayfair - you can pretend you're immune to marketing but here you are, sharing them on social media). You're not immune to advertising. You just don't recognize it anymore.