My New Sauna…And All The Bullshit That Came After I Bought It.

About a month ago, it was time for me to settle on a sauna for my new house.

It kind of had to be one of the last things we did because we really needed to figure where everything else would ultimately go in the basement before we decided.

Decisions on stuff like saunas depend on a couple of things, the main one being size. The secondary decision, of course was what kind of sauna to get.

There are basically two kinds of saunas…the Swedish or Finnish kind which generate heat from electric heaters that are filled with rocks. The rocks heat up and you pour water on them to create a steamy heat, that can burn you if you’re not careful.

These saunas use a lot of electricity and you actually have to, in most cases, upgrade the power in your house to accommodate them, which adds another 5 or 6 hundred clams to the price.

The other kind is an infra-red sauna, which is a much more passive and drier heat that’s kind of like being surrounded by a bunch of heating pads turned on high.

The heat comes virtually from every direction but the top, and it heats you slowly and uniformly, so that when you start to sweat, it’s pretty much out of every available pore in your body.

The other big advantage with the infra-red saunas is that the heat is so dry that it will not melt the glue in any book you might want to read in there, and your IPad will not get appreciably warmer so you can keep yourself entertained while you are sweating out all those pesky toxins.

Decisions. Decisions

I have had four Swedish saunas. But I was curious about the infra-red. So I did a bunch of reading about them on line and eventually decided to go with one.

I have had the sauna for about a month now and am enjoying it immensely, if that’s the right way to describe my enjoyment.

I bought a floor model from Sundance Spas here in St Catharines and saved about $2800, versus the cost of a similar Swedish/Finnish sauna.

The Attack Of The On Line Ads

A lot of the articles I read on line were accessed through beBee, LI, Facebook and Twitter, and honestly, literally before I knew it, there was nowhere on line that carried advertising that I could go without seeing ads for saunas, or stock libraries, because I had recently purchased a stock shot for one of my clients.

There is a genuine insidiousness about online advertising. I find it really irritating but I’m not an on-line shopper, so I can only imagine all the crap people get exposed to if they do even a little on line shopping.

This Sucks For A Lot Of Reasons

The invasiveness of this online advertising sucks, mainly because it’s become ubiquitous and when that happens a lot of the sheeple out there just heave sigh and accept it.

And I suppose that you really can’t do anything about it. Because it’s all part of the huge Monitization of the Internet, that is making both the digital marketing community and a few million web sites lots and lots of money.

And I get that my search info is how these geniuses, or should I say their algorithms, determine when to plaster me with ads. And I suppose that’s sorta helpful when you are actually looking for something.

But it’s been 5 weeks since I bought my sauna. I even posted a fucking picture of it on Facebook and Twitter with the naive idea that these assholes would catch on and move on to someone who actually needed one.

I do a fair bit of searching, for restaurants and different types of products that we need. But I have not been invaded by any of them.

Overkill Frequency Versus Underkill Reach

From a client point of view, I have become convinced that a lot of them are being milked to death by this algorithmic-based targeted advertising, which goes on ad nauseam, and for which they are paying, often times, a premium price.

If I was one of these sauna companies I would be insisting on some sort of limit to the amount of time they spend getting in my face with their shitty little ads that I mostly have conditioned myself to ignore, as I am sure millions of other have.

Maybe if they just looked at some purchase cycles and decision making time specs they would realize that people don’t dick around forever, and especially, I would argue, when making a mid-level purchase.

I did a certain amount of research, but I was essentially a fairly knowledgeable consumer of saunas, since this was my fourth.

Now, all of this advertising overkill that I have been inundated with has two major consequences for the advertiser.

Major Consequence #1 – My personal irritation and resentment. Which I will happily direct towards them.

Major Consequence #2 – Reinforcement of my theory that digital advertising is really an uncontrolled medium despite all the bullshit that digital marketers spin about it.

It will be interesting to see just how long all this sauna advertising will go on.

It would also be interesting to calculate, if it’s even possible, the amount of money that advertisers are wasting on ads that are both completely useless and irritating to those being advertised to.

I’m pretty sure that this little protest is tantamount to a fart in a windstorm. But I just wanted to put it out there. Hey, why not?

jim out

In addition to being a beBee Brand Ambassador, Jim Murray is a blogger, marketer and creative professional.

His partner, Charlene Norman is business strategist and operations tactician. Their collaboration, Bullet Proof Consulting, specializes in strategically focused brand engineering: Helping companies achieve, greater operational efficiency and productivity, more effective branding, stronger reputation management and ultimately, increased profitability.

In short, Bullet Proof helps companies of all sizes change their thinking to adapt to a constantly changing world. Find out more at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca