Mark Morford has a great column on "TTA:"

Friday, December 12, 2003 (SF Gate)
Fly The Friendly Ad Sluts/Because there really is absolutely nowhere that marketing schmucks will not stick a logo
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Just when you think it can't possibly get any more mutated and underhanded
and insulting and oh my god when will it stop.

Just when you think it's all been done and they can't possibly dream up
one more inane gimmick or obnoxious trick or devious smirking ploy to slap
yet another corporate logo or SUV advertisement in front of your singed
eyeballs, along comes . . . tray-table advertising.

Yes. Tray tables. On airplanes. Right there.

[...]

Tray-table advertising is the latest thing. TTA is beginning with America
West Airlines and will almost certainly be coming to a flight near you.
Why? Because Madison Avenue apparently has yet to exploit and abuse every
possible inch of space in the public sphere.

Because it's not enough that they put little ads on ATM machines and on
the little separator bars at the grocery-store checkout and on the insides
of the restroom-stall doors and on paper coffee-cup holders and in the
previews at the movie theater and in that goddamn pop-up window in your
browser right now, stopping just short of breaking into your home at night
and drugging you up and tattooing a Coke logo onto the underside of your
eyelids.

Because they are shameless and whorelike and borderline insane, and on a
long flight you are a miserable and deliciously captive audience.

This is what the marketing people love the most about TTA. You cannot
escape. You cannot get off the plane. Your only option to avoid tainting
your soul is to flip your tray table back up (or down, depending on where
they stick the ad) and try to ignore it entirely.

Which is no solution at all, given how four inches away is another seat
with another person whose tray table has the exact same ad, and you can
only sigh in realization that you are, in fact, utterly surrounded with
the dumb porn of relentless marketing, again.

And all you can really do is pop the Valium and put on the headphones and
close your eyes and drift off into the nice reverie featuring open fields
and beautiful oceans and happy woodland creatures as yet unstamped with a
ConAgra hormone-injected toxic brand of inedibility.

Oh hell. It's not really a big deal. It's just another dumb ad in a vast
teeming unrelenting sea of dumb ads. Right? Of course it is.

But is there no threshold? This is the question. Is there no point when we
all collectively recoil at the savage parade of schlock and awe, and we
all raise our hands to the sky and scream our collective agony just before
slumping down on the couch for 19 minutes of beer commercials interspersed
with 11 minutes of "Frasier?"

You'd think we'd have reached saturation. You'd think that there simply
cannot be a single person existing in modern American popular culture
today who has not been so inundated, so completely drenched and hammered
and pulverized since birth by the never-ending jackhammer of brands and
logos and slogans, that therefore there is simply no way they would be
open to any "new" attempt to sucker punch their last unsuspecting synapse.

You are, apparently, wrong. There are more ways. There are always more
ways.

It is all in the name of helping the consumer, they claim, and the airline
says the ads can help keep ticket prices lower and, hey, that can only be
a good thing and therefore no one will complain because, as the cancer of
Wal-Mart has proven, America values nothing, absolutely nothing, more than a bargain.

We will sacrifice our integrity for it. We will sacrifice our rational
thought, our sense of decency, our sense of fair play. We will gladly hand
over, in the case of cheap-ass garbage food, our own health, and our
children's health, and the decent functionality of our hearts and sex organs and arteries.

We will sacrifice American jobs. We will gladly let the plant down the
road shut down and fire 5,000 employees because they had to ship all
manufacturing to overseas sweatshops in order to be able to sell their wares to Wal-Mart.

We will sacrifice our planet. Gladly, every day, every corner, every
possible resource. Noise pollution and air pollution and light pollution
and corporate pollution. We do not care. So long as it results in lower
prices on the 30,000 brands of corn flakes or a free barrel of oil for the Expedition, we're there.

Tray-table ads are a tiny speck, the latest infinitesimal blow to the
integrity of the human animal. They are, of course, no big deal and in a
few years when all jetliners look like the inside of city buses, plastered
all over with ads for Heineken and Xanax, we will think nothing of it and
think this is how it has always been and always will be and oh well might
as well just shut up and get used to it.

Because if we have learned anything, it is not so much that we are a
free-wheelin' capitalist society and therefore you just gotta deal with
the ugly and invasive consequences, the snarling sloganeering and
incessant little cries of consume, consume, consume.

Rather, we have learned that the demons of that capitalist pantheon will,
in fact, stop at absolutely nothing to market you to death so they may
finally stick you in a nice $2,000 coffin -- which you can, of course, buy
right now at Costco for only $1,499, while supplies last.

Just when you think it's all been done and they can't possibly dream up
one more inane gimmick or obnoxious trick or devious smirking ploy to slap
yet another corporate logo or SUV advertisement in front of your singed
eyeballs, along comes . . . tray-table advertising.

Yes. Tray tables. On airplanes. Right there.

So now, after you suffer an hour of interminable security checks and the
removal of your shoes and your belt and your pants and your nipple ring
only to wait in line C at the airline counter for 117 minutes just to get
stuck in the middle seat on that four-hour flight to Chicago . . .

And you sit down and squeeze in your arms to your sides and make yourself
very small and start breathing that toxic recycled bone-dry pressurized
air and realize that every single flight exposes your id to this warped
artificial canned surreality that simply cannot be good for your karmic
complexion . . .

And after the flight attendant ambles by with drinks and you flip down the
tray table to receive your requisite 2.7 ounces of refreshing canned
heavily sugared beverage in a plastic nonrecycled cup, you will see, right
there on the tray, a large unavoidable advertisement for, say, Bank of
America. Or Amex. Or Mercedes. Staring right back at you. For the entire
flight. Joy.

Tray-table advertising is the latest thing. TTA is beginning with America
West Airlines and will almost certainly be coming to a flight near you.
Why? Because Madison Avenue apparently has yet to exploit and abuse every
possible inch of space in the public sphere.

Because it's not enough that they put little ads on ATM machines and on
the little separator bars at the grocery-store checkout and on the insides
of the restroom-stall doors and on paper coffee-cup holders and in the
previews at the movie theater and in that goddamn pop-up window in your
browser right now, stopping just short of breaking into your home at night
and drugging you up and tattooing a Coke logo onto the underside of your
eyelids.

Because they are shameless and whorelike and borderline insane, and on a
long flight you are a miserable and deliciously captive audience.

This is what the marketing people love the most about TTA. You cannot
escape. You cannot get off the plane. Your only option to avoid tainting
your soul is to flip your tray table back up (or down, depending on where
they stick the ad) and try to ignore it entirely.

Which is no solution at all, given how four inches away is another seat
with another person whose tray table has the exact same ad, and you can
only sigh in realization that you are, in fact, utterly surrounded with
the dumb porn of relentless marketing, again.

And all you can really do is pop the Valium and put on the headphones and
close your eyes and drift off into the nice reverie featuring open fields
and beautiful oceans and happy woodland creatures as yet unstamped with a
ConAgra hormone-injected toxic brand of inedibility.

Oh hell. It's not really a big deal. It's just another dumb ad in a vast
teeming unrelenting sea of dumb ads. Right? Of course it is.

But is there no threshold? This is the question. Is there no point when we
all collectively recoil at the savage parade of schlock and awe, and we
all raise our hands to the sky and scream our collective agony just before
slumping down on the couch for 19 minutes of beer commercials interspersed
with 11 minutes of "Frasier?"

You'd think we'd have reached saturation. You'd think that there simply
cannot be a single person existing in modern American popular culture
today who has not been so inundated, so completely drenched and hammered
and pulverized since birth by the never-ending jackhammer of brands and
logos and slogans, that therefore there is simply no way they would be
open to any "new" attempt to sucker punch their last unsuspecting synapse.

You are, apparently, wrong. There are more ways. There are always more
ways.

It is all in the name of helping the consumer, they claim, and the airline
says the ads can help keep ticket prices lower and, hey, that can only be
a good thing and therefore no one will complain because, as the cancer of
Wal-Mart has proven, America values nothing, absolutely nothing, more than a bargain.

We will sacrifice our integrity for it. We will sacrifice our rational
thought, our sense of decency, our sense of fair play. We will gladly hand
over, in the case of cheap-ass garbage food, our own health, and our
children's health, and the decent functionality of our hearts and sex organs and arteries.

We will sacrifice American jobs. We will gladly let the plant down the
road shut down and fire 5,000 employees because they had to ship all
manufacturing to overseas sweatshops in order to be able to sell their wares to Wal-Mart.

We will sacrifice our planet. Gladly, every day, every corner, every
possible resource. Noise pollution and air pollution and light pollution
and corporate pollution. We do not care. So long as it results in lower
prices on the 30,000 brands of corn flakes or a free barrel of oil for the Expedition, we're there.

Tray-table ads are a tiny speck, the latest infinitesimal blow to the
integrity of the human animal. They are, of course, no big deal and in a
few years when all jetliners look like the inside of city buses, plastered
all over with ads for Heineken and Xanax, we will think nothing of it and
think this is how it has always been and always will be and oh well might
as well just shut up and get used to it.

Because if we have learned anything, it is not so much that we are a
free-wheelin' capitalist society and therefore you just gotta deal with
the ugly and invasive consequences, the snarling sloganeering and
incessant little cries of consume, consume, consume.

Rather, we have learned that the demons of that capitalist pantheon will,
in fact, stop at absolutely nothing to market you to death so they may
finally stick you in a nice $2,000 coffin -- which you can, of course, buy
right now at Costco for only $1,499, while supplies last.

I'm waiting for the Federal Reserve to set aside ad space on our cash.