You wanna see effective advertising? Catch a Sydney bus. Maybe it's the captivity of the audience, or perhaps the marketing graduates who specialise in road-bound public transport are of a uniformly genius level, but the posters plastered all round the walls above the windows are like some kind of hypnotic suggestion.

First there are the ads for the new edition of Trivial Pursuit. They ask a question, like "Who was framed by Judge Doom?", on a brightly coloured background but offer no answer. Despite having not thought about the game for years, I was compelled to carry a copy of the latest version to a price scanner in Target.

I didn't buy it, but I very well could have. Oh, and the answer's Roger Rabbit, if you aren't as clever as me.

The second effective bus ad was for the Chaser War On Terror DVDs. As soon as I saw it, I sent an email to Chaser HQ and requested free copies. Had I been an ordinary member of the public like you, instead of a Wikipedia-banned, respected journalist, I might've purchased volumes one and two that very day.

Finally, the most influential advertisement caught my eye early last week. There are two versions, but the one that got me - that caused me to renounce a life thus far spent in the pursuit of momentary happiness at the expense of other beings - was a full-colour photo of the most adorable piglet I've ever seen, having its eyeteeth ripped out with pliers.

Now, I'm not naïve enough to think I can give up meat entirely. It's just too fucking delicious, and Sam Neill ensures me it's responsible for my evolutionary development.

But from that day forth, I said farewell to the wonders of porcine flesh - even when I realised that wasn't just goodbye to pork, bacon and ham, but also salami, pepperoni and all those other delights of carnivorous deliciousness.

The picture was the bit that did me in, but the beauty of a bus ad is you can include a fair bit of text. Commuters stuck next to sweaty corporate dorks aren't going anywhere, and once they get sick of reading Piers Akerman's latest rant over a co-passenger's shoulder there's very little to look at besides roadworks, urban decay and depictions of tortured mammals.

So after the initial horror of the screaming piglet, which I might've been able to remove from my mind the next time I ordered sweet and sour pork, I read the accompanying words.

That's where phrases like "60cm wide metal cages", "curious as young children" and "barely move or even turn her head" burned themselves indelibly on my brain, alongside memories of Pooh telling his mate to "Be brave, little Piglet", that Babe movie I vowed never to see after my friend Mat admitted he cried while watching it, and the cover of Animal Farm.

Not since I was forced to choose between a variety of shampoos that each referred to my hair with a negative adjective has an commercial engendered such self-loathing in me. That's why I promised myself two things - I'll stop eating pigs and from now on I'm taking a book on the bus.

I don't wanna hear about what happens to cows, sheep or squid at the hands of sadistic, factory-farming, curly tail-docking dentist wannabes.