A Blurb Worm™ is a must-have item. Feed it on newspaper clippings and logos and pretty soon it’ll turn in to a Flier™, winging its way across the city to advertise your existence. Even primary school kids are media-savvy enough to know that without a flock of Fliers™ you’ll be lucky if so much as a handful of people remember your name or recognise your face. And you can forget landing an appearance on any daytime chat shows.

This is Jeff Noon’s vision of the future of advertising in his book ‘Pixel Juice’. Though we’re a way off from breeding insects purely to advertise things, the lengths companies are willing to go in order to get their message across are becoming more and more extravagant.

Firstly there’s the sheer number of adverts we’re exposed to on a daily basis. On my way in to work, from East Croydon to Brixton, I counted almost four hundred. They’re everywhere: on posters, leaflets, buses, trams, walls, floors, ceilings, electronic displays, bags, backs of receipts, sides of coffee cups, ticket barriers…and so on and so forth.

But with the rise of the Internet, and things like TiVo meaning that you can skip the ads between programmes, companies are looking for new ways to get you to notice their products. They’ve come up with some pretty ingenious methods as well. Some companies have lobbied to have their brands put on the sides of space shuttles and satellites. A Japanese telecommunications company has created a projector that can beam holographic logos straight on to your palm when you’re out walking. The development of Bluetooth means ads can be sent straight to your phone, and in Toronto in 2004 Apple took over an entire subway and covered it in ads for the iPod.

And it doesn’t stop there. It’s already possible to advertise on practically any surface available as long as you can get the consent of whoever owns said surface. But how about…advertising on another human being? Think of it: a human billboard! Of course, we’ve already seen the guys hanging out on the street with sandwich boards around their necks, or dressed up as chickens handing out flyers for KFC. The Hard Rock Hotel paid a model to walk around a park in Chicago wearing a dressing gown, asking passers by if they knew the way back to the hotel. But how about directly on a person? Karl Fischer cashed in on this niche in the market by auctioning off space on his forehead. The highest bid was $37,375. The winner got their company logo temporarily tattooed there for thirty days, and Fischer used the money to fund his college education.

“I doubt there will ever be a day when every forehead is used as ad space,” says Fischer. “However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this in the future. The media loves the idea, and so does the general public.”

Outlandish forms of advertising don’t always go as planned though. The Boston bomb scare in February 2007 came after light boards advertising the Adult Swim cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force were mistaken as suspect devices. The thirty eight boards that were scattered around in various places caused about $1 million worth of damage after the city was effectively shut down to deal with them. When the press questioned the two men responsible for setting them up, they refused to talk about anything aside from hair (notably: how exactly did the Beatles-type hairdo evolve in to the ‘big hair’ of the 80s?)

But what effect does this constant bombardment of messages have on us? Adbusters magazine thinks that the number of adverts we encounter per day is damaging, and that they’re a key reason as to why we’re becoming increasingly stressed out. They describe this as ‘mental pollution’.

“Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water,” says Editor Kalle Lasn. “We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions in to it, much the same way we lobbied for non-smoking areas ten years ago.”

However, it’s increasingly difficult to block the ads out. Especially when we’re not always aware we’re being advertised to. Things like product placements in films aren’t instantly noticeable. But Nokia will pay to have Tom Cruise use one of their phones in Minority Report, and Converse will pay to have Will Smith wear a pair of their sneakers in I, Robot.

Dealing with adverts has become part of our routine. We learn to tune them out when it suits us. But with the companies reaching further and further in to our everyday lives, it looks like soon we’ll have to learn how to say ‘no more’. Maybe we should be questioning why we’re being encouraged to consume when the state of our planet isn’t looking too good.

“It’s a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of our planet isn’t enough to break it.” Kalle Lasn says.