Friday 13th June 2003: A Winner Is You
This fair internet of ours has been struck down by a plague most terrible, and most surprising. Not the wave of pornography that was expected to eventually overwhelm the flood barriers and engulf Geocities, nor the creeping tide of AOL users’ homepages that will someday surely replace all scientific content with pages that proclaim that "tHIS iS MY FIRST internet Page!!!!!". No, I refer to this little fucker:
Maybe it’s just me, but every single site on this paltry internet of ours seems to have signed advertising deals with these guys in the last week. I’m starting to think it’s some sort of takeover move; some sort of digital entropy, destined to overwhelm all the useful information we possess as a species with the notion that we may have won! And there are unbeatable prizes on offer!! We can get something for nothing!! And you’ve only got THREE MINUTES TO CLAIM!!!
Honestly, if I didn’t think this thing was designed by a rogue iMac that got hold of a copy of Paint Shop Pro by whoring itself to the 386s lying around at a landfill, I’d swear it was some sort of clever social commentary. I mean, look at the thing.
1. It lies and cheats to get you to click. Whilst I admit we’ve yet to see "Volkswagen not only gets you there, but also ENLARGES YOUR PENIS!!", we can’t be that far off, and certainly on the internet I’ve never yet seen an advert that made me think it might actually be telling the truth. You’ve probably caught yourself in the past thinking "who the hell clicks on these things?" Well, that leads me onto my next point:
2. It preys on the ignorant. That’s who! Since anybody who’s used the internet, or indeed a computer, for more than three days will know that message boxes should neither flash nor vibrate in an alarming manner, one must assume that the creators of said ad were gunning for those internet users who’re still trying to work out which way up the doodad in their right hand is supposed to go and still ask serious questions about who the VibroMax Marketing Department are, and how they got their email addresses. Thankfully, this is a filthsome behaviour that has, like the above, as yet failed to penetrate into real-world advertising. I mean, for example, in my nightmare world, there’d be financial services corporations who’d hawk unaffordable personal loans to those too desperate to do anything but accept and pay the consequences later. Ho ho, such a thought. Oh, wait.
3. Three minutes to claim!! This is a send-no-money-now offer!! Buy now! Don’t delay! Call now! Pick up the phone now! I have to feed a family too, you unhelpful bastard! I’m sorry for everything I’ve done in the past, just pick up the phone! CALL ME! You can have everything now, without effort, without cost, without thought or fulfilment. I’ll come back and bite you in the ass later, but don’t worry, that’s beyond your attention span!
4. Quality? Wh-where? If you’ll rotate your eyeballs downwards, you’ll see my handy comparison chart that enables you to differentiate sneaky adverts from genuine messages.
It would be easy to mock the clear differences between the reality and the fiction were this not such a widespread practice in the advertising industry. I refer less to over-funded TV ads here, and more to the ten-a-penny radio ads that I must assume sell things in some cases, since they still exist. You know the ones:
GENERIC MAN 1: I would like to buy a product.
GENERIC MAN 2: I have a product!
GENERIC MAN 1: Please, tell me of its features, I’m fit to bust.
GENERIC MAN 2: Why certainly, old chap! It’s cheap and festooned with sales promotions!
GENERIC MAN 1: Good enough for me.
So there you go. Human society in a nutshell, as expressed by a flashing exclamation mark. If only there were a Voyager III, we could attach this ad to the hull to summarise our species as a whole.
Approximately 3000 years later, we’d find a crude space probe in near-earth orbit, bearing the mysterious message ‘Return to Sender, Please Remove from Mailing List.’