What you need are better solutions. One good approach would be a feature that lets anyone flag an Ad as "offensive, explicit, or otherwise obnoxious" and let people filter out any ads which the community objectively *hates*. (You could even let people star ads which are especially appealing and give that feedback to the advertisers.) I know what you're thinking, "oh my god! our MONEY!! how can we maximize profit without spamming children with irritating content? We need to drive people to our subscription services by being as loud and irritating as possible between quiet songs." But you don't need that. People actually appreciate good quality ads. And advertisers appreciate feedback that helps them to produce and reach people with good quality ads. It is not that difficult to promote ads that are informative, useful, pleasant, and memorable. The problem is that advertisers don't get feedback from real end users, only from the people selling them airtime, so they make ads that suck, and they lose out on business because of it. So-called explicit content buried in songs is not similar to highly audible obnoxious content in ads. Using one filter for both is nonsense. You know as well as we do that some of your ads totally suck and are never going to inspire anyone to buy the product. But there are plenty of products and services we'd be perfectly happy to learn about, just don't shout them at us at four times the music volume and don't be gross about it. Try forwarding our requests to your software engineers rather than your business & PR teams, and you may find people more able to think in terms of improved solutions rather than excuses. This has been an issue forever, you've had plenty of time to make more sincere efforts to improve ad quality and benefit your advertisers. (I literally committed to NOT buy a Nissan Rogue last year because I got so sick of their ads and had no way to shut them off! I bought a Honda CR-V this year. I'm not 100% sure I remember correctly but I think Honda had a notably peaceful ad a couple of years ago (on pandora) that I wished I could have told them I appreciated. Good quality and treating customers with respect works!!)
... View more