I’ve been reading more articles on why advertisers want to start changing the rules on their systems as a result of the rise of ad blockers. While most people get the idea from a high level, the real issue is that the advertisements themselves suck, the way they display suck and most are fucking irrelevant. I’m going to hit up each point in this post and hopefully people will start thinking about how the end users feel rather than trying to shovel shit down our throats.
Let me preface this post by saying that I’m not 100% against advertisement. I get why it exist and I’ve worked at a few places that did advertisement. I understand the difficulty of creating a good ad, the systems that are required to display the ads and the need for awareness for companies and individuals with products and services to get out there. That said, the current landscape is gruesome and has made me cynical, paranoid and vengeful against many companies that are in this field.
First, let’s talk about the first point in how the advertisement itself blows. Ever go to a site where you do not have an adblocker enabled (or where AdBlock was bribed by said system/advertiser) and you get this annoying video with the volume pumped up to deafening levels? Who in the fuck’s right mind would ever enjoy such a thing? How would you feel if you’re put in a room where a thousand 100 Watt Marshall amplifiers surround you, cranked up to 11 and playing Slayer’s Raining Blood without warning and no escape?
That’s exactly what happens in many of these cases. You get some obnoxious ad that is vying for the user’s attention. Instead of getting the user’s attention, you turn them off completely. In fact, you not only turn them off, but you piss them off so that they never view the site again. Or in my case, I’ll do my best to individually block every single URL that loads the ad just so I can view the clickbait in piece.
Next, let’s talk about how they’re displayed. This is the worst part of everything. More than anything, the how part is where I flip my shit and start going on a murderous witch hunt for all URLs that are external, have some form of javascript or appear to be connected to a tracker. But the thing is that no one likes reading part of an article only to have it blocked with a sudden email subscription form. Or what about some other hovering element that just inhibits the natural use of the page. And there’s far worse things that happen like attempting to trap a user within a site or falsely sending a user to other sites for a commission from the click.
All of these are just plain wrong methods. Most of all, you’ll end up losing the trust of a consumer. Once you remove a consumer’s trust, you’ll have an impossible time regaining that without ample dick sucking. If you forcefully try to annoy a person to get their attention, you’re just plain doing something wrong with your lives. You’re like a fly buzzing around about to be swatted or sprayed.
Lastly, let’s talk about relevance. Considering how much fucking information people collect with all these so-called trackers, why do I continue to get the lamest, boring ads? Is it because, oh I don’t know, some asshole marketing group paid top dollar to shove them in my face? I’m just going to do whatever possible to hose their pretty little campaign. I simply don’t care what the issue is if I don’t care about it. You can’t do a damn thing about that.
Take Twitter as a prime example. I have zero connections when it comes to babies. Why the hell would a Gerber ad show up with a toddler? You know what I did? I reported the ad as being offensive/sexist and blocked the account. That’s how mad I get. Considering all the accounts I follow and the stuff I tweet, wouldn’t you think Twitter with all their so-called brilliant world class engineers determine with some of that meta data that I have zero interest in kids? Apparently not.
So the whole bid for a higher ranking in the ad world is just horse shit. It worked to make companies like Overture/GoTo/Yahoo Search Marketing/Google etc. a ton of money. But that’s only when it comes to search results. Contextualized ads are complete shit because apparently, every site I go to where I might even be remotely interested in a topic still shows me garbage, turns me off and makes me add a few hundred more URLs to my blacklist.
The thing is that I have zero issues with being advertised to. In fact, I would love to see when there’s a 20% Lego offer at Target, or a discount on some game on GoG.com. Why don’t I ever get that stuff? Or maybe even being informed about all the coolest movies that I have some remote interest in. Why doesn’t any of this stuff pop up for me? That’s the stuff I want automated into my feeds rather than me having to hunt or find out from friends.
If you’re just trying to force people to click a button so you can make your commission, do the world a huge favor by flying to Japan, climbing Mount Fuji and depositing yourself asap. No one wants you around, no one will care when you perish and the quicker you get rid of yourself or allow yourself to be an organ donor (minus the heart because clearly you don’t have one of those), the better this world will be.