Sometimes, the night is just perfect. A romantic, moonlit dinner after a movie that isn’t based on a Hasbro toy line from the 1980s, all topped off with great wine and a high-caloric dessert.

Everything is working out beautifully, it’s just you and your date; it’s almost as if you’re miles away from civilization, in your own little romantic bubble.

Until, of course, the salesman interrupts your heart-felt speech/proposal/apology and bursts said romantic bubble by trying to hawk his latest wares to you and your unsuspecting date.

“Would the lady like a rose/song on the violin/Whopper?”

But you, all you’re thinking is, a) “What awful timing”; and b) “Who tries to sell someone a Whopper after they’ve already eaten?”
Okay, we (you or your client’s customers) all get it by now – everyone is vying for that last slice of unmarketed territory, competing to put their logo on whatever last slice of life is left that hasn’t already been branded.

The trouble is, we see right through your tactics for what they are: a desperate attempt to interrupt our lives in hopes of selling us something (the layman’s definition of ‘advertising’).

So, not only are advertisements thrust upon us before we watch our movie at the theater (Hasbro toy-based or otherwise), we have to fend off such unwanted advances at the way to the restaurant (distracting billboards and branded busses), and even while at the restaurant.
And it’s this last place that really makes you look skeevy. From urinal cakes to bathroom mirrors, everything has been taken over by marketers.
So, to be less skeevy, try to place yourself in your customers’ shoes, and think about when not to advertise. If you wouldn’t want your number one interrupted by an ad for Chanel No. 5, your customers wouldn’t, either.

And that’s something even a clueless Whopper/violin/rose peddler understands.