Turns out our kids are victims of The Great Aussie Ad Exodus

No Spotify ad will ever hit like "not happy, Jan!" 

Once upon a time, Aussie kids didn’t race to skip the ads. We quoted them at recess and hummed them in the backseat of the Holden. 

Childhood looks different now.

And nothing says it more than the quiet disappearance of the Aussie ad. 

Today’s Netflix babies won’t know the joy of yelling “Not happy, Jan!” at the TV.

You couldn't imagine Aussie life without some of the iconic catchphrases ads gave us.

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We miss the jingles that stuck!

The days of belting out the Tooheys jingle, laughing at Mortein flies with a death wish, and declaring “Marge, the rains are here!” with Oscar-worthy drama have quietly vanished.

Now, ads sneak in through iPhone games and interrupt Bluey on YouTube.

They’re often unskippable, unmemorable, and definitely not the kind you quote with your cousins at Christmas lunch. 

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Peak jingle era

The ones that pop up mid Candy Crush? Just low-budget teasers for other apps your kids will download and use to devour your storage space.

The contrast between screen time then and now is crystal clear when you think back to the golden years, the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Peak jingle era.

Back then, we’d get theme songs lodged in our heads after our nightly rotation of The Simpsons, Neighbours and Home and Away.

Screen time was scheduled. Ads were little time capsules of who we were. And they were a shared experience, the whole house tuned in, together.

It was a thrilling race from the couch, to the loo, to the freezer for vanilla ice cream and Milo, then back again all to the sound of “I Still Call Australia Home” playing from the Qantas ad like it was our unofficial anthem.

Now it’s ad-free Netflix, overstimulating mobile games, and irritating YouTube pre-rolls.

These kids get the interruption. Not the culture.

We’re fast approaching a generation who’ve never heard the Happy Little Vegemites song on prime-time TV. 

They'll ever know why the numbers 1300655506 or 133032 are so significant! 

They don’t know the terror of "you'd never steal a car." DVDs are practically antique now. 

"Don't cut the dinosaur, Daddy" 

I remember when ads brought families together.

We’d swap stories about our favourites at dinner.

They became inside jokes, schoolyard references. Aussie rites of passage.

We were way too invested in the tropical holiday Rhonda took.

You know, the one that was hot… like a sunrise.

We knew better than to cut the dinosaur.

We knew the Great Wall of China was built “to keep the rabbits out.”

We were emotionally attached to Gary quitting cigarettes. (Nooooo Gary!) 

Rhonda and Ketut. The greatest Aussie love story ever told.

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It's an unskippable joy

They were weird, iconic, and proudly Aussie.

And somehow, even though they were technically selling us things, they still managed to give us something in return: moments of connection. Shared memory. Laughter we didn’t realise we were all having together.

It’s not that we want our kids craving VB at age eight, but there was something magic about a jingle that stuck like glue.

That stickiness, that shared experience, is a quiet casualty of the digital age.

A tiny, overlooked reminder that as tech advances, some of the best parts of growing up, the silly, shouty, communal bits, fade out with it.

We’ve gained convenience. But maybe we’ve lost a bit of character.

These days, kids stream alone, skip with instinct, scroll without memory.

We might not have Aussie ads anymore, but we shouldn’t lose the togetherness they brought.

So skip the ads, Gen Alpha.

But just know: you’ll never understand the joy of shouting “I like Aeroplane Jelly” into the void and hearing half the country shout it back.

Originally published as Turns out our kids are victims of The Great Aussie Ad Exodus