What a splendid pie

I find there is a very clear difference between advertising on the Internet and more traditional methods. While normal adverts may try being clever, memorable or just strange to catch the watcher's attention, Internet adverts seem to rely purely on the stupidity of the user to get them to follow their unwelcome links.

In the example to the left (which is slightly edited), needless to say, the radio buttons were just simulated and clicking anywhere on the advert to select an option (as an inexperienced user may do) will follow the link. In a similar way, many dating sites will show selection boxes defaulting to the user's gender being "Female". As I suspect most Internet users are male - although it can't be by many now - this would prompt more people to click the fake box and be whisked away to the far corners of the Internet, if such places exist.

It isn't necessary to make it that complex, though. Sometimes an advert will be in the form of a fake window announcing new messages for the user. Another example is to make up a convincing error message window and use it as the advert - one of them, which scares the life out of me every time it comes up, informs the user that their computer has severe security risks and advises downloading a "repair" file. The window looks pretty convincing as something an anti-virus program might throw up - complete with title bar at the top, even though it's already got a title bar as it's in a window. Idiots.

One of the more extreme examples of this was a box that simply asked "Are you an idiot?" and gave the options "Yes" and "No". Whichever you might click, I don't think there are any winners there.

I can't recall ever seeing an advert on the Internet that made me actually want to click on it. Actually, there was just one - soon after I got this computer I downloaded a demo of a game called "Painkiller" that I'd seen an advert for on GameFAQs. I only really got it because the prospect of having a computer that could run anything more demanding than Commander Keen was a novelty to me at the time. Unfortunately it turned out to be a bit rubbish and I deleted it soon afterwards.

Thankfully the days of popup windows are largely behind us, but there now seem to be some methods of getting around Firefox's blocker. Getting an advert shoved in your face like this makes me want to investigate the product less rather than more.

Adverts may also try to appeal to a certain group of people even though they're really nothing to do with it. One of the more hilariously stupid adverts that I've seen recently came to my Hotmail inbox, which I'm trying to use a little less in favour of Gmail now. "Relieve your debt the Christian way!" it proclaimed. I would welcome ideas as to how this could be done. Possibly by stoning your creditors to death.

TV advertising isn't a huge amount better - DFS performs a miracle each time they come up with a new advert, because it's always even worse than their old one. They started off just being slightly annoying, then became more embarrassing from there, decided to do some sort of half-hearted Charlie's Angels thing, a conga line that I only vaguely remember, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, they started using Linda Barker.

But the adverts that I most dislike have to be for Lynx. I imagine that personal hygiene products must be difficult to market, so they decided to run a campaign of absolute fear that you're a worthless being unless you use their one. The entirety of the speech from one advert from a couple of years ago was "Men's sweat only attracts other men. Wear Lynx, attract women." In more simple terms: "Use Lynx or you're gay."

The one that's appearing in just about every bus stop in Aberdeen just now is "Spray more, get more". I don't quite know how to express how I feel about that, but it seems to me to simplify things so far that the pursuit of women as objects becomes the objective. (Let me say now that I'm no hero myself, I'm a regular visitor to the VCL and various other sites that don't have cryptic initials.) Apart from that, I dislike the suggested idea that this product can suddenly solve all your problems, it sounds rather too aggressive to me.

I can't help but feel that this entire article's completely incoherent because I've basically been making it up as I go along, but there it is anyway.