By Rieley McDonnell, Staff Writer

Commercials do not hit the same way they did back in the 2010s.

The 2000s-2010s were a golden age of commercials. Think back to Zoopals, Danimals, Goldfish, Chef Boyardee and Wubble Bubble Ball, these commercials invoke nostalgia in a whole generation.

Now nostalgia is a factor at work in why these commercials were so good. Seeing a Goldfish play around with his other Goldfish buddies evokes a longing for the simpler times of childhood.

While nostalgia is a player in this game, it is not the only one. The way that the public encounters commercials has significantly changed.

Generation Z stopped watching cable and television as they grew older. Their parents were the ones who brought them to the world of TV. The commercials of the 2000s-2010s were aimed at Gen Z so that their older generation parents would buy them what was advertised.

As Gen Z aged they stopped watching cable and TV and migrated towards YouTube and streaming services. In the beginning of both of the aforementioned mediums, there were no ads.

YouTube began to platform ads to make more money for the company and to begin paying its creators. At first these ads were similar to the advertisements on cable, but they were no longer thought of as commercials, but rather ads.

What made the ads not as egregious as the ones on TV were that they were skippable. A person could play five seconds of the ad, hit a skip button and then get right to their video.

Streaming services promised the elimination of all ads and on-demand access to all of the media on the platform. They were cheaper than cable, had instant access and most importantly no unskippable commercials.

Soon, companies recognized that they were losing money by not putting ads on their platforms. They first increased the price of their services, and those hooked on streaming paid the new premium fee.

Then companies added tier levels to their service. The base models would have ads before a show and mid-roll ads – that being ads that play in the middle of a person’s show. Customers would now have to pay an even higher price to access the ad-free tier.

The lower base models of streaming services operate functionally like a standard TV channel. However, instead of commercials being a small but accepted inconvenience in the middle of a show, they became ads which people wanted to skip and were accustomed to skipping.

Ads are an inconvenience; commercials were a break. Ads are a boring waste of time; commercials brought a world of joy and consumerism to children. Ads are uninspired; commercials were artfully crafted to try and get children to convince their parents to buy them things.

Since people no longer wish to engage in commercials or ads, companies have started to slip in their making of said ads. They are not as inspired because they do not need to be.

 People no longer accept commercials as a minor break in the middle of their show; they see something they wish to get rid of. Commercials do not hit the same anymore because society has changed the way that they interact with them.