Marketers Take Note - Teens Hate Everything YOu're Doing

by Olivia Collins

Like I mentioned in my previous post, advertising to teenagers is extremely difficult. 

There is nothing more annoying than feeling like ads are being crammed into everything we do.  

Ads that we feel like we can't ignore are the worst kind. 

In my opinion, the most annoying platform for advertisements is YouTube. There's nothing more annoying than having to sit through a thirty second ad to watch a two minute video. I've actually made it a point not to buy products advertised on YouTube – not that I could afford the same Lincoln Matthew McConaughey drives, but you get the point. The majority of the ads can be skipped after five seconds, but that's five seconds too long. The reason we hate them so much is because they're totally forced upon us. YouTube is pretty much unavoidable, which makes these ads unavoidable as well.

Another social network with annoying advertising is Instagram. I don't mean stores having Instagram pages (that's totally acceptable), I'm talking advertisements on your feed. Instagram is generally good with letting you express that you don't like what they're advertising, however it's annoying nonetheless. I think it's because we went so long being used to Instagram having no ads. It was really disappointing when they changed that.

Advertising on Twitter is also obnoxious. We already have to deal with countless stupid retweets from the people we follow, the last thing we want are actual advertisements on top of that.  It feels like the majority of my Twitter feed has turned into advertisements. Between accounts promoting other accounts to the actual ads, there's no catching a break.

Feeling like every time I open social media I'm being pressured to buy something is the worst. I'm sure most teens would agree that the constant advertising we face is getting really old. Teenagers like making their own decisions and forced advertising is a total turnoff because of this.

Chime in, fellow teens. Do you agree? What advertising makes YOU crazy?