Ads are Evil

-Rev Melissa Fain-

Today I'm going to use Ready Player One as an example, but there are NO SPOILERS in this meditation.

Last Saturday we went to see Ready Player One as a family. My husband, son and myself had all read the book to varying amounts of enjoyment, so we were curious what Steven Spielberg would do in adaptation. A scene stuck out to me. IOI was wanting to know what they would do with control of the Oasis, or internet. Their solution? Sell add space.

Ready Player One aside, a couple of years ago on the show Survivor, Jeff Probst actually had to make a statement about in game ads. (Certain challenges or buildings are named after products.) He very bluntly told the fans, ads are how one gets a free product.

Then don't get me started on the gaming culture. I truly believe phone games intentionally make the ads annoying so you will pay $2.99 to get rid of them. The PC and console gaming can't put ads into their products because consumers bought the game first. Instead, they try to equal out with loot boxes, or in game content. I bet, if they began giving the option for in game commercials for new content, users would take it over paying $10-$20 for the new level.

Then we get to church. While we will live with ads in our games, movies, and television- most if not all will draw the line at our church. Why?

• Our Online Space Is Seen as a Space of Worship- I often wonder what flipping digital tables looks like, but I'd imagine Jesus would be doing it in some cases. Ads are created to take you somewhere else. They are advertising on your site so they can pull someone from your site to their product. One cannot focus on God with ads. Would you put ads in your physical worship? (I believe I saw a congregation unknowingly put an ad in their worship, so I'm not going to assume every church knows better, but every church should know better.) If you see how tacky it is to put an ad in your physical worship, don't do it online.
• The purpose of your site gets muddied with ads- If a YouTuber were to explain why they were adding ad revenue to their video, I'd buy almost anything they would potentially say. They are people in a for profit business, where their income doesn't involve buying an actual product. They are asking me to sit through an ad as payment for their hard work and talent. Sure, that's the least I can do. The situation changes when the YouTuber is switched for a church, or a Christian site. Am I clicking on your link because you are evangelizing to the world, or because you are trying to gain clicks for ad revenue? Yeah, you can be one of the many churches dying right now, and you see absolutely no way to pay the bills except through ads on your website. That's not the point. The point is, the general culture sees your purpose as two-faced the moment you add even a single ad to your site or your videos. We are not here to save a building; we are here to spread the Good News. It's too important a job to muddy the message.
• We are the product being sold- Doritos were all over Ready Player One. It was so clear they were a buy-in for the movie. Meanwhile, if you were to go to the Frito-Lay site and check out the Doritos, you wouldn't see a speck of ad space. Why would they? They are the product being sold. If they can't make a product without selling ad space, they need to sell out or go bankrupt. The church is the product being sold. We should be all over the place outside our doors. On people's t-shirts, on the back of cars; spoken on the lips of congregants. We should be purchasing other site's ad space, not the other way around.

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Ads are not evil, but they are surely not good in a church environment. Fig Tree doesn't do ads. That's why there wasn't an app last Advent. There was no way to do it without ads, so it was dropped. The website has NEVER EVER had ads. Sharing the content here will not put a cent in anyone's pocket. Fig Tree is about the message; not the bottom line.