Why is it that all of a sudden, on the TV, a load of adverts for many different companies who do the same thing starts to appear.

I noticed this a few years ago. All of a sudden, we had numerous adverts for online bingo.

Then it was price comparison websites. Suddenly, there were about 4 or 5 different price comparison websites advertising on the TV (and these are still here, so they must be popular).

Now there are a load of companies advertising to buy unwanted gold for cash. I just watched an old episode of Heartbeat on ITV3 and during the ad breaks there were three different companies all saying that you can send your gold to them in the post and they will send you cash in return. This is in addition to the two or three gold adverts that I have seen on ITV1.