Let me set the stage for you. You sit down in your English class, and you know that today you are going to be watching some videos about the topic you have been learning recently: the Holocaust. You have read a book about a survivor’s experience, and now you are going to watch some clips from movies such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Schindler’s List, two of the most famous movies about the Holocaust ever made.
The Holocaust refers to the persecution and murder of six million Jewish people, along with millions of others, under Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945. Beginning in 1933 with the election of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, it started with laws that excluded Jewish people from public beaches, parks and bathrooms, preventing them from buying houses, opening bank accounts and also stopping people of Jewish ancestry from immigrating to Germany.
These videos were going to be dark, solemn and definitely not an easy watch. You sit down in the front of the room so that you can better see the screen instead of the backs of your classmates’ heads, and the videos begin to play—but it is not the video about Anne Frank or Oskar Schindler. It was an ad for Modelo, the beer company. The slogan “The Mark of a Fighter” flashes across the screen. Ironic, a beer is the mark of a fighter, as we are about to watch a video about people’s fights against the Nazis. The section of The Diary of Anne Frank begins to play. You watch the scenes of the sorting of men and women into separate buildings, their processing into the concentration camps, which includes getting assigned a new name made up of letters and numbers, sort of a human barcode. You watch the mothers get separated from their children, people’s humanity being stripped away from them and then the screen pauses and flashes to another video. A VRBO ad that is advertising the perfect family vacation, now for less money than before. Beach umbrellas, the mother reclining in a chaise lounge, children playing in the sand, and then the family going to a nice dinner with the parents cheering their glasses of champagne while the sun sets behind them.
You hear your classmates’ reactions, a combination of “Bro” and “That’s not cool”, and you cannot help but think the same things. The horrific irony of watching families being torn apart, people being treated like animals, starving and without the necessities of human dignity, being interrupted by ‘Family fun for much less!’. How could this be allowed, you ask yourself, but you know that it is the basic algorithm of a YouTube video and that without subscribing to premium, every video would have these interruptions. I cannot help but think that there needs to be a change in this system of advertising, that maybe somebody else would think that certain videos should maybe ‘qualify’ as not being interrupted by ads.
People should be able to watch these representations of real stories without being interrupted. The point of these videos, movie clips and documentaries is to inform people about what happened in these important historical events. While I understand that companies must use ads to gather revenue, and that it is a normal way of advertising, there is a time and place to talk about family fun in the sun. YouTube should re-think their advertising system to create more appropriate environments for certain videos.
