Making sense of the 'ad'

Log on to Facebook, you see a video that your friend has posted which already has a lot of 'shares' and 'likes', you want to check it out for yourself, you click 'play' and instead of the video, an advertisement begins....and you have to wait another minute before your video begins.....sounds familiar?
Advertisements, or ads, are found all over the internet today. As part of videos posted on the internet, flashing and distracting internet users by flanking both the sides of most of the pages on the internet.....it is very common to see these commercials, so common that nobody finds it annoying anymore. (Some advertisements, though, have a 'close' button so that you can skip watching the ad altogether......but the ads are there all the same.

Advertisement is a very smart industry which tries to capture the maximum attention that it can, through the most effective means available. Ads mean wide reach, ads mean varied consumer base, ads mean an effective means of reaching out your product to an unknown, unseen and unlimited target base......but more to the point, ads mean revenue, plain and simple. Television, radio, newspapers, billboards, every advertisement costs money to those who wish to advertise their products/services; and earns money for those who display them. And like in every money making enterprise, there is no getting enough of it.  On TV, more time is devoted to ads than for actual programmes, on radio, there are more ads than songs, in newspapers, there are entire pages devoted to ads, especially come festivals and holidays....
These ads are of different types too. Most show happy smiling families with no worries living in big houses, some show good looking people working in offices and looking fresher at the end of the day than a person would normally look even in the morning, some show college-student lookalike moms who are always smiling at their children, some feature children (this latest trend is getting more and more successful day by day), and then there are others, they show explicit content like bathing scenes or intimate scenes between a couple, these may or may not have any connection to the actual product but are meant to 'catch your eye' through their explicit content.
True, this effective means of mass targeting is essential, both for advertisers as well as those who earn through it; but which ads should be shown where is important to be determined because not all types of ads are suitable for all audiences. For example, when I recently played a video of a nursery rhyme on the internet, I had to first go through a commercial for a deodorant depicting an intimate scene! This was too much! Why should a toddler see this? Isn't there anybody anywhere watching what goes where on the internet?
Our Communications Minister is making news currently, urging the social networking and interactive sites to vet the content appearing on their websites......well there is a far greater need to decide which commercial appears on which sites or as part of what videos......