Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it’s those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was ‘ok to call someone queer’. This didn’t sound like your average get-rich-quick scam – in fact it didn’t sound like an advertisement at all.
Turns out Google had interrupted my morning routine not to sell me life insurance but to ‘educate’ me about the importance of identity and ‘Allyship’.
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