On A Friday: Um, no I won’t click that

Day after day we are bombarded with commercial images trying to convince us to buy the latest and greatest product – be it whitegoods, technology, a political idea or spray on cheese. A lot of this advertising is mediocre, with vague attempts at appealing to our sense of modernism, however there has been some truly great advertising.

An example of one such piece of excellent marketing is the “low fat, no fat”  ad for Pauls’ Smarter White milk which has fully infiltrated Australian society.

There are some sad, sad cases though. The internet is a really easy place to find poor advertising due to its relative cheapness – especially if you are advertising your own products on your own website.

Last month I found the ad below on the Gigabyte website.

[Ad reads “Booktop (tm). The thrill comes after you insert it.” Images: Laptop on dock and man picking his nose]

Yes it does grab your attention, but there is little appeal in clicking an ad with a picture of a man picking his nose as the main focal point when it is not entirely clear what the product is. In this case you have to be tech savvy to notice the laptop dock which is the real purpose of the ad. This uncertainty cuts out some groups of potential customers.

There have also been some poor attempts at public relations stunts. I found the hidden tile pictured below in Microsoft’s Bing search engine some time ago.

[click image for larger screenshot. Tile reads “Almost every animal is insanely cute when it’s a baby. This is also true for hippos »”]

I understand what happened to the advertising gurus when they were writing this one – the craze of insanely cute pictures of kittens and puppies that have been getting millions of hits finally brainwashed these poor people at Microsoft into distastefully getting them more visitors to further their grip on the world’s chain messages. It’s a sad day when your search engine attempts to distract you from researching a world war with the promise of cute hippos.

In a time where there is vast unemployment around the world, surely Gigabyte and Microsoft must be able to find better public relations personnel than those who wrote these!