So… I buy a lot of stuff. I spend more than I should on shiny things. I make decent money for the part of the country I live in. I travel for business and leisure. I am married, and we have two kids living at home. Nice house in the suburbs. Two cars.

All-in-all, I’m a marketers wet dream. The perfect target for your pitch.

So, listen up marketers–here are a few things I’m not doing:

1. Listening to radio.

Radio sucks, and everyone knows it. 5 minutes of songs to 10 minutes of commercials, it seems. And the morning zoo routine? Ugh. Tired. I’ve been listening exclusively to my iPod now during both ways of my commute for years. I get music I love and podcast content targeted just for my interests, uninterrupted by DJ blather and ads upon ads. Who’s listening anymore? I mean, really. Really? People are still listening to the radio? All those ways to jack in your iPod to a car stereo on sale for an entire aisle at Target, and folks are still listening to broadcast radio? Really?

2. Watching commercials on television.

TiVo screwed you guys royally, didn’t it? Used to be, watching TV with me was like staring into a strobe light. As soon as a commercial came on, I was on to another channel. Nowadays, I just hit the fast forward button on TiVo and skip the ads and get back to the show I sat down for. And since TiVo, and other DVR technology, makes it so easy to find content I’m interested in, I watch less TV. Gasp! Product placement might be your only hope here. And by the way…the Coca-Cola cups on the judge’s desk on American Idol. Not working. Diet Pepsi drinker here.

And while we’re on the topic, I’ve almost abandoned some shows altogether (I’m talking to you, Saturday Night Live). I wait until a friend or coworker mentions something particularly funny that they saw on TV, then I search for it on YouTube (like this clip).

3. Reading newspapers.

Ah, newspapers. All the kids are going crazy for the newspapers these days. I walk around the mall, all I see are kids walking around and reading the paper.

If there’s something the Internet has killed, it’s the newspaper. But not the news. Not by a long shot. People love the news online. Myself, I read it all damn day. News, news, news. I loves me some online news. It’s the finger-staining, recycle bin-filling, hard-to-read-in-a-tight-space newspaper that sucks. But newspaper web sites? I’m there. I worked at one long enough. And I left to work for a company that I didn’t have to convince putting news online was the right thing to do.

The newspaper Readership Institute showed a few years ago that newspaper reading habits for someone are solidified sometime in high school usually. So, the frequency that you consume the newspaper doesn’t really change as you get older. The old hope among circulation executives was that when someone settled down…got married…bought a house and had kids, they’d subscribe to the newspaper, and would take it for the rest of their life. The Readership Institute showed that wasn’t necessarily true.

And why would I subscribe to the newspaper when I can just read online for free? I mean, really. You guys put it out there for free. And there’s just the regular online banner display advertising I’ve trained myself to ignore over time to put up with.

And when are you guys going to admit that Craigslist has pwned newspaper classifieds? Really. You guys still selling those things? Really?

4. Reading spam (via the US Post Office or via email)

I have a pretty inflexible filter set up for processing the deluge of junk mail that gets hand delivered to my curbside mailbox each day. If it’s pizza coupons, it gets by. Victoria’s Secret catalog? Yes. If it’s an idea for something that might be fun to do with my family, then it might have a chance. Otherwise, it’s put in the garbage in the garage on the way back into the house.

And while my email filtering isn’t entirely ironclad (who’s is?), as soon as an offer makes it’s way into my inbox, it’s marked as junk mail. I’d rather risk missing something, than being annoyed with that crap.

Email marketers? I got three words for you: R. S. S. Start getting folks to subscribe to an RSS feed of your material, and if we’re interested, we’ll review it on our own time. Don’t interrupt our increasingly tenuous relationship with email, please.