#oneaday Day 7: Suggested Content

One of the “innovations” of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of “Suggestions”.

Don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what “Suggested Content” really means on websites and social media platforms (it’s advertising, in case you somehow weren’t savvy enough to know that by now) but I’m talking more in contexts where it’s not obviously advertising, or where it doesn’t make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.

Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of “Suggested” files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive “Suggested files” list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good “Recent” option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.

Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my “work” computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my “play” computer) appears to “suggest” applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.

Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a “suggestion” feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven’t enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone’s “Gallery” app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was “cute”, with the text “Feline footprints in Southampton”. The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I’m still quite upset about Meg’s passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I’m good and ready, thanks very much.

The push for “AI” in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these “Suggestion” features are going to be turned on by default.

What happens when your phone decides to “suggest” a photo of something you’d rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we’ve made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don’t want is my phone going “HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN’T I SMART?”

There’s a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we’re going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don’t seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.

“Suggested Content” can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I’m browsing the Web, I know what I’m looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I’m going to be left in peace these days.

If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2429: Ads Ruin Everything

(This was supposed to post last night but didn’t for some reason.)

If anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scumbags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

– Bill Hicks

It makes me feel a little bit sick inside to recall that when I was a child, I used to actually enjoy the advert breaks on commercial TV. There were ads I used to look forward to seeing, and ads that I still remember today that, to my knowledge, I only ever saw broadcast once.

The reason this memory makes me feel a bit sick is because I look around today and look at all the damage advertising has done to so many aspects of modern life, and I’m disgusted and ashamed.

Mobile phone games, once thought to be a true competitor to home computers and consoles, have been ruined by advertising. Creative work has been devalued to such a degree that it’s now a significant risk for a developer to release anything at a price point above “free” (with in-app purchases of up to £80 a time, mind you), with ads punctuating every aspect of the game experience — or, in the worst-designed cases, actively getting in the way of what you want to do.

Games journalism has been ruined by advertising. Earlier today I saw a link to a “review in progress” of a soccer game. The “review in progress” format is usually reserved for games that it is impossible to review based on a launch-day experience — things like MMOs or multiplayer-centric titles. But it’s increasingly being used by publishers to stake a claim on all-important search engine optimisation terms and ad revenue by posting an article that includes both the game name and the word “review” in its URL — thereby attracting anyone casually Googling “[game name] review” — without having to actually do a full job of reviewing a game in the traditional sense, and lapping up the ad revenue in the process. Not only that, we have sites spamming articles about the latest, most popular games — even if the sites’ verdict on said game was that it wasn’t very good, as has happened with Rock, Paper, Shotgun and divisive space sim No Man’s Sky — and pulling in those precious ad revenue clicks by anyone Googling the game in question.

Online video streaming has been ruined by advertising. Earlier I was attempting to watch an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown — hardly the most thrilling or cerebral viewing, but I was enjoying it at the time as an accompaniment to dinner — and the ad break halfway through the programme crashed. When this happens, there is no way to skip the “broken” ad because oh no, you have to watch five minutes of adverts before you can see the rest of the programme, and if you can’t watch those five minutes of ads, well then, you’re not seeing the rest of the programme.

The Internet in general has been ruined by advertising. I can’t think of many sites I’ve been to recently that haven’t had some sort of obtrusive background, auto-playing video trailer or worse, complete page takeover making the browsing experience actively unpleasant. One of the worst offenders is one of the most useful sites on the Web: Wikia, which allows users to create wikis for any topic under the sun, but which makes the site practically unusable on mobile by first loading the page in, then loading a full-page pop-over ad a couple of seconds later which you inevitably click on when you’re trying to simply follow a link in the text.

Computer software has been ruined by advertising. Whether it’s Windows bugging you to upgrade or anti-virus software promising you a “free gift” that is actually just the ability to subscribe to its premium service for the same price it always is, not even in the world of productivity can you escape someone, somewhere trying to extract money from you.

I hate, loathe and despise it, particularly when I see how demoralised it makes people who want so desperately to do things ethically, but who inevitably find themselves trampled underfoot by people with fewer scruples.

I think I hate it most of all for what it’s done to something I love, though: writing about games. There’s little to no room for passion in the commercial games press today; instead, it’s all “you must have [x] articles about [insert popular game name here] up by the end of the week”. It does the wonderful diversity of the medium an incredible disservice, and I feel sorry for those people who, like me, are genuinely passionate about the things they enjoy, but who struggle to get heard and can’t even think about making a living from what they love.

Unfortunately, it’s the world we live in now. I’m kinda with Mr. Hicks on this one.

1550: Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave

It’s been a while since I talked about how shit adverts are, so let’s talk about how shit adverts are. Or, more accurately, how shit those annoying “bumpers” or whatever they’re called before and after every ad break on a particular channel are.

I’m thinking of two specific examples here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good one, even thinking years back. Remember the annoying girls frantically scrabbling around with a hammer and a bowl of popcorn before Friends came on? I don’t think I can ever remember what that was fo– wait, Wella Experience, so I guess it did its job to a certain extent. Or did it? Annoying girls frantically scrabbling around with a hammer and a bowl of popcorn before Friends came on didn’t make me want to purchase any of Wella’s Experience products, whatever the hell they were. No; it made me irritable, and it made me fast-forward the moment the screen faded for the ads whenever I watched the episodes on video, which is how I typically ended up watching Friends.

The two specific examples I’m thinking of from 2014 are both from the channel Dave, it of the perpetual Top Gear, QI and Mock the Week reruns. The first is for Admiral multi-car insurance, and the second is for Alpen.

They’re both shit, and not just because they’re repetitive — although by God they’re both repetitive as fuck when they’re repeated a considerable number of times every evening — and they’re both shit for the same reason: they don’t make any sense whatsoever.

Take the Admiral ones. Here’s one. (Actually, these are a little different from the ones that air on TV, but these are the ones that Admiral has inexplicably chosen to upload to their YouTube account.)

And another.

They appear to be attempting to make a catchphrase out of “ooh, that’s primetime!” because, you see, they accompany “primetime” shows on Dave. Trouble is, that doesn’t make any sense. “That’s primetime!” isn’t something people say, and it’s not something you can force people to say. Not to mention the fact that the ads don’t have anything whatsoever to do with what they’re supposedly advertising — multi-car insurance. And no, saying the words “multi-car insurance!” during the advert when something completely incongruous is going on is not advertising multi-car insurance. Like the annoying Wella girls, these ads make me less inclined to ever make use of Admiral’s services.

Then comes Alpen, who have much the same problem. Alpen, as the campaign goes, sponsors “characters on Dave”, or in other words, the shows that are on in the mid-to-late evening and typically involve recognisable, well-known comedians.

A month or so ago, Alpen’s campaign made a reasonable amount of sense. There was a dude tramping around his alpine apartment eating porridge. Geoffrey Palmer said “porridge full of character”, then there was a close-up of the porridge. Fair enough.

Now, however, there’s a bearded bloke who waffles on some idiotic nonsense about what he thinks characters “are” (“Characters have eyes in the back of their head! Hello, mountains!” — he’s standing in front of a window with a view over some mountains), then Geoffrey Palmer says “Alpen sponsors characters on Dave” with a rather worn-out voice, as if he knows what he’s being asked to do is utterly stupid. And no porridge, full of character or no. (Unfortunately there’s no videos of these sequences easily available. Sort it out, YouTube!)

I just don’t understand why or how someone signed off on these. Both the Admiral and the Alpen ads are clearly supposed to be funny, but they’re also obviously composed by people who have absolutely no idea how to write comedy and thus have absolutely no business whatever writing comedy. Or attempting to, anyway.

Anyway, yes. That’s what I’ve been thinking about this evening. What a happy and exciting life I lead, no?

1432: They Don’t Look Like That Any More

Hello.

Video games today look like this:

Or this:

Or, indeed, many other things besides.

So why, then, any time some switched-on young advertising executive wants to, for some inexplicable reason, make use of the idea of “video games” to advertise something completely different — like, say, shoes — it ends up looking like this?

I have… quite a few issues with this campaign. First of all, why the hell does it even exist? It sort of looks cool, I guess, but it has nothing to do with Schuh’s stock in trade which is, unsurprisingly, shoes. I get the impression that someone just thought “hey! Video games are cool and popular! Let’s do something with them to advertise our product!”

Actually, having inadvertently stumbled across the agency that came up with this bizarre marketing effort, it seems that, unless “Isobel” isn’t telling us something, that pretty much is all there was to it.

“Schuh’s ‘Start Xmas’ Christmas campaign was inspired by the retro theme of 1st Generation arcade games,” Isobel explains. “We won the creative pitch against several other agencies earlier in the year.”

Um. Well done? As I say, it looks cool but has absolutely fuck all to do with shoes. The main concept appears to be the word “start”, which is a button commonly found on video game controllers and arcade machines, and then they’ve just gone and run with it. “Start” Xmas. Geddit?

The problem is, though, that as I mentioned at the beginning, video games don’t look like that any more, with the exception of some indie games that are deliberately channelling the super-pixelated styles of yore. This style of video game is not something that is massively culturally relevant to the sort of person who would fall for a marketing campaign based around video games — namely, a young and rather stupid person. A young and rather stupid person who likes video games probably plays stuff like Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty or FIFA — no judgement on older, wiser people who also play those games, naturally — and not Space Invaders.

Ultimately the whole thing comes off as a bit desperate. It caught my eye when I walked past the store earlier today, but it certainly didn’t make me want to buy shoes. It did, however, make me want to write this blog post, so well done for that. It also made me feel that the people from “Planarama” behind the campaign haven’t actually played a video game ever. Can you name any games that actually say “game on” when you start them — even games from the ’80s? I can’t.

I guess it’s sort of cool that video games have reached a sufficient degree of cultural penetration for a mainstream shop like Schuh to attempt to use them to peddle their wares, but it’s also indicative of the fact that the average person in the street likely has very little clue that video games have advanced significantly in the last 30 years — to such a degree that they’d be all but unrecognisable to someone from the ’80s.

Still, I guess the super-pixelated art style is a convenient shorthand for “video games” but that doesn’t really address the core problem I have with this campaign: it’s for a shoe shop’s Christmas sale. No amount of pixelated Christmas puddings or aliens in Santa hats will hide the fact that it’s a campaign completely irrelevant to the product it’s trying to sell, and just, in fact, looks rather foolish.

On the other hand, it compelled me to talk about it and mention Schuh several times, so perhaps it is doing its job after all.

1358: The Bits You Fast-Forward Through

I’m struggling to remember the last time an advert actually had its intended effect on me — that is to say, I can’t really remember the last time I actually bought something or made use of a service based on an advert.

The reason for this is that advertising appears to be getting increasingly infuriating and lazy as time goes on. TV ads these days are actively irritating rather than positive in promoting things, Internet ads are seemingly designed to be as obtrusive and distracting as possible, and print ads barely exist any more.

Consider TV ads, if you will. There seems to be an increasing number of people writing TV ads who seem to think that doing the whole thing as a rhyme is a good idea. No. This is never a good idea, because poetry sounds pretentious and arty-farty even when it’s good; get someone without a literary bone in their body to write some sort of rhyme about yogurt or nappies or haemorrhoid cream or something and the result is just embarrassing, like the sort of shit children come out with for the usually short-lived “poetry” project they inevitably do as part of “literacy” lessons in primary school.

Then there’s the ads that take a well-known song and “hilariously” change the lyrics to something to do with insurance or plasters or credit cards. Inevitably, the songs chosen are the most horrendously overplayed, clichéd shit that everyone is already sick of, and similarly, the ad itself is inevitably edited by someone who has no clue about musical structure or indeed how the original song actually went, leaving the whole thing feeling like a band of year 9 music students who think they’re really good but actually keep forgetting the lines.

Worst of all, I think, are the ones that actively try to “go viral” or become a meme. This is always painful to watch, because it’s something you can’t force. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that anything that has tried to deliberately “go viral” since the dawn of the Internet has spectacularly failed (is anyone following O2’s advice to “be more dog”? Didn’t think so.) while anything which did successfully permeate popular culture (“you’ve been Tango’d”, say) did so largely through word of mouth rather than a group of marketing executives specifically trying to make people say things.

I think my least favourite ads in the world are “interactive” Web ads, though. They’ll start as a postage stamp-sized version of a TV ad, and then those infuriating words “Get ready to interact!” will appear on the screen. Rather arrogantly, the people behind the ad then expect you to indulge in all the fun of, say, hoovering a carpet or wiping a dirty toilet seat, with your reward being the helpful information that you can buy the product you’ve just been “using” at all good supermarkets.

I should probably just use an adblocker if all this infuriates me so much, but unfortunately I’m all too painfully aware how much of the Internet is reliant on these stupid ads, and there’s relatively little I can do about TV ads aside from not watch TV, which I don’t really do that much anyway.

Anyhow. Bollocks, piss and fart. I am grumpy so I am going to bed.

1200: It Was Just a Joke

Playing Robot Unicorn Attack 2 on the toilet earlier, a question came to me. It’s been lingering in my mind for a few days, actually, but as I was there attempting to better my score and ensure supremacy for Team Rainbow in the twilight hours of the second of May, 2013 — Team Inferno probably have it in the bag, sadly — it struck me that perhaps Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is taking itself a bit too seriously.

And then this, naturally, led my mind on to ponder “how far is too far?” for things that are, essentially, jokes, memes, gags, whatever you want to call them. Because that’s what the original Robot Unicorn Attack was — a joke. An immensely popular joke, yes — one million plays within a week of its release, apparently, and plenty more since then — but still a joke. This much is probably self-evident from its title. It is a game called Robot Unicorn Attack. No-one has called a video game something quite so literal and ridiculous and meant it since the 1980s.

And yet here we are in 2013 with Robot Unicorn Attack 2, a surprisingly well fleshed-out expansion of the original’s “endless runner” gameplay that features online asynchronous cooperative “community” goals, an upgradeable unicorn, a levelling system, downloadable content, a bonus level unlockable if you either progress far enough in the game or stump up enough in-game currency, and all manner of other things. It’s not the deepest game in the world, but it is a mobile phone game — and, more to the point, it is a mobile phone game that understands the sort of experience that is sensible and practical to put on a mobile phone. (It’s also one of the less offensive examples of the “freemium” model I’ve seen recently, though the pop-up adverts are a bit gross.)

It’s hard to explain, but it just feels a bit “wrong”. It feels like it’s not a joke any more. I hesitate to use the words “sold out” but… well, yes, it’s sold out. It’s Robot Unicorn Attack, but monetised out the wazoo to be profitable, whereas the original was a freeware Flash game that anyone could play without having to pay a penny.

I think that “monetisation” part is the key defining characteristic that determines “how far is too far” when it comes to jokes — particularly ones which started on the Internet. By the time money gets involved — i.e. it gets incorporated into something which is sold, or used to advertise something else for profit — it is probably already well past its sell-by date.

I can think of a number of examples where this has happened in advertising in particular. Take the advertisements for the price comparison website Go Compare, for example. For quite a while, these featured an irritating moustachio’d arsehole singing the service’s jingle over and over again in various different styles. Everyone got immensely irritated with it. So, naturally, what the “clever” marketers did was leverage the fact that everyone was irritated with the “Go Compare Man” and put out some ads in which he was subjected to various indignities. But by that point, everyone had already pretty much just moved on to wanting to fire everyone involved with Go Compare into the sun and never hearing of their stupid company ever again. (Any time I need insurance, I will not go to their stupid site on principle any more.)

See also: the number of pointless mobile apps that have attempted to incorporate any combination of Nyan Cat, Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake or any other “viral” sensation out there. Viral sensations are a marketer’s dream — they provide a ready-made audience, so long as you can inextricably link one annoying thing with a specific brand. The audience doesn’t even have to like the annoying thing — they just have to start thinking of these things not as “Gangnam Style” but as “that music off the [Brand X] advert”.

I often wonder how a lot of marketers sleep at night knowing that their career is, essentially, to irritate people as much as possible. It surely can’t be satisfying to flick on the TV, see a Go Compare advert and think “I did that.”

Still, I guess they’d probably say the same about a games journalist’s output. Oh well. Each to their own, I guess.

1185: Top Ten Panty Shots in Video Games

I’m not normally a big fan of Ben Kuchera’s work (for reasons I won’t go into right now because they’re not relevant to what I want to talk about) but he’s bang on the money (no pun intended) with this piece.

I shan’t reiterate Kuchera’s points here — read the feckin’ article! — but I will say that on this note, I do agree with him.

The Internet’s (and tech in general’s) reliance on advertising has to end. It’s not sustainable. It simply isn’t. And in the meantime, all it’s doing is devaluing content, pissing people off and causing us to continually circle the plughole, drawing ever closer to being sucked into oblivion forever, or at the very least into that weird, disgusting black smelly goo we found in the end of the pipe the last time our sink got blocked.

Whenever a site like, say, Kotaku (who are usually the ones who get picked on for this sort of thing, but they’re far from the only offenders) posts some bullshit story that gets everyone riled up about how irrelevant/pointless/offensive it is, the war cry that goes up is that they’re doing it “for the hits”. More accurately, as Kuchera says, they’re doing it for the pageviews, because like it or not, the bullshit stories that make everyone angry are the ones that lots of people take a look at “just to see what the fuss is about”. The Daily Mail makes a living from posting this sort of garbage on a daily basis; Kotaku at least punctuates its rubbish with some interesting and thought-provoking pieces, while the Mail is just uninterrupted crap. As Kuchera notes, though, the bullshit more often than not pays for the interesting and thought-provoking pieces.

It’s not just professionally-written content that suffers from this problem, though. Look at Facebook and the idiotic, illiterate ads that festoon its sidebar on every page. Look at Facebook (again) and its obnoxious, obtrusive “Sponsored Posts” thrusting themselves in your face uninvited. Look at Twitter and its “Promoted Tweets” that you don’t want to see. Look at whatever bullshit ad WordPress has decided to serve up underneath my writing on this site (although only on the mobile site, seemingly) Look at the mobile app I reviewed today, which rammed two full-screen ads down my throat before I could even open the main menu, and two more when I started picking a photo from my device’s photo library to manipulate. (I was not kind to said app in the review.) Look at the ads you get for casinos and shady-sounding “download services” any time you browse for porn or torrents or anything else you wouldn’t admit to looking for in polite company, but which we all know everyone looks for. (Yes, even you, you pervert.)

Internet advertising isn’t positive or helpful. It is, for the most part, shady, misleading, obnoxious and obtrusive. Which is, of course, why it’s so understandable that so many people — particularly the tech-savvy among us — run ad-blockers and thus deprive many sites of what little revenue they are scraping in from these revolting blights on the otherwise awesome nature of the Internet’s global community.

I don’t run ad-blockers. Honestly, this isn’t for any particularly noble reason — I simply haven’t set one up. But knowing what I know of the online publishing industry from the inside, I don’t intend to run one, either. Those “One Weird Tip to Peel Your Skin Off and Whiten Your Teeth in the Casino that One Weird Old Florida Mum Found While Downloading Now!!” ads are many sites’ main means of income. This isn’t the magazine industry — there’s no “cover price”; no newsagent looking over your shoulder and asking rather bluntly “you gonna buy that, mate?” (The magazine industry is, of course, in decline, meaning its model isn’t necessarily particularly desirable either — but what do you think damaged it beyond repair in the first place?)

It’s clear that this situation has to change. But it’s not going to be an easy process. Readers used to consuming content for free and blocking ads are going to have to suck it up and start paying for their content. Content creators need to be confident enough in their work to make it worth paying for. And those responsible for the sort of bullshit ads you see on the Internet every single day… well, frankly they need to find a new career, because they’ve done more than enough damage to the media biz already.

If things don’t change, there are going to be big problems down the line. Whether these problems take the form of the entire “new media” industry turning into the most stupid parts of your Facebook News Feed over and over again or the business collapsing entirely remains to be seen — but I’d rather not see either of those things happen if at all possible.

1058: Badvertising Revisited

[Preamble: I know I said comics would be back, but I realise this was a rather foolish promise to make given that I am in the process of moving house and my Mac (which holds the Comic Life software I use to produce them) is now packed up. So you can live without them for a little while, I’m sure — at least until the chaos of the next couple of weeks is resolved!]

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can’t quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there’s a touch of both, because there’s a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let’s consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it’s a “good” way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I’ll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I’d have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it’s broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

Making noise without me telling them to
Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I’m trying to do
Urging me to “interact” with them
Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it’s usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it’s entirely possible that several times in a session you’ll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being “stuck in bad odours” or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I’ve seen is on GameFAQs’ mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You’ll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to “swipe”. “Fuck off,” you’ll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can’t do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you’re stuck in a stupid interactive “experience” about a phone you probably don’t give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? “Get ready to interact!” they’ll say. “Get ready to fuck off!” I’ll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I’ve lost count of the number of adverts I’ve seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don’t know why, well, I don’t think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I’m happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don’t use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I’m trying to do, that’s when I start thinking about installing one. And that’s not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I’m not going to see it at all.

#oneaday Day 885: Foul-Smelling Vagina

There, that got your attention, didn’t it? Mention a stinky faff in your headline and everyone suddenly takes note. I’ll remember that for the future.

Anyway, I do actually sort of want to talk about fragrant fannies today, but not in quite the way you might be expecting. I am instead referring to the social media backlash which “intimate hygiene” product line Femfresh encountered today on its Facebook page.

There were a number of reasons that Femfresh drew the ire of the Internet community today, but one of the most common complaints was its cover photo. Here it is:

Apparently, it seems a lot of ladies find the company’s seeming inability to use “adult” words for their respective minges somewhat patronising — and before I go any further, I will point out that my use of various offensive euphemisms throughout this post is purely for facetious comedy value (and variety) rather than any ulterior motive — and thus took umbrage with Femfresh’s page as soon as they saw the top of it. (Quite what they were doing on it in the first place is their business and their business alone.)

Not only that, but it seems that on the whole (shush!) women are, in fact, rather well-educated about what is and isn’t appropriate to smear over or stick up their flange. “Bacterial vaginosis” is the result of using the wrong things, it seems, and no, I haven’t Googled that because I don’t want to. Don’t let me stop you from doing so, however, if you’re curious. Just don’t come crying to me if Google Images decides to serve you up some tasty treats.

Anyway. Here are a few choice comments from the public:

“I call it a vagina because I’m not 12 years old and because I love it I’ll go nowhere near this vile ‘care range. Cheers.”
— Holly Rae Smith.

“Are you kidding me? Trivialising something innately precious by calling it something so thoroughly ridiculous offends me and, believe it or not, all the posters on this page. Did you not perform any market research on this area and then develop a communication and marketing strategy? It appears not otherwise you wouldn’t have received such an insane backlash on your attempts to flog a thoroughly unnecessary and damaging product…”
— Helen T

“Just to clarify, is Femfresh for vaginas or vulvas? Because your ad says vagina, which implies your product is a douche, in which case you’re advertising a harmful product. If it’s for vulvas only, change the words you’re using to make it clear.”
— Kirsten Hey

I shan’t talk any more about the science of quim because I’m not a gynaecologist (I can, however, spell gynaecologist without using spellcheck) but I will focus on the larger issue here, which is that social media advertising campaigns can and will go very, very wrong if they’re not thought out effectively. Instead of simply advertising their (apparently controversial) product, Femfresh made the mistake of attempting to engage with their “fans” when there was really no need to. By actively encouraging people to comment on their posts (and by posting vapid, patronising nonsense) they essentially brought about their own downfall. Everyone has been talking about Femfresh today, and they haven’t come off too well. “All publicity is good publicity” doesn’t really apply when the vast majority of those “publicising” your product are pointing out proven health risks.

The broader issue here is that social advertising should not be “essential” as so many advertisers seem to believe it to be. On Facebook, you can “Like” everything from HP sauce to a favourite video game. Doing so used to simply be a means of self-expression — quite literally, demonstrating that you liked something. Now, publicly “Liking” something is inviting the brand in question to bombard you with crap, ask you asinine questions at all hours of the day in an attempt to “build a community” around things that really don’t need a community built around them. If people honestly think that their lives are going to be enriched when they click “Like” on the page of a thing that they’re quite fond of, they are sorely mistaken.

Those who have “Liked” (or at least come across) Femfresh have taken a stand against this sort of pointless nonsense that is infesting social media like, well, bacterial vaginosis. In this case, it’s because the advertising was both patronising and inaccurate. For less contentious products, it’s going to be harder to train people to not be corporate shills — the last post on Pepsi’s Facebook page has 1,094 “likes” and 74 comments, for example, none of which say anything remotely meaningful — but it seems we’re starting to see a backlash of people who are no longer willing to be an unpaid part of a product’s promotional team. I’ve certainly started “unliking” pages on Facebook that post nothing but pointless questions or fill-in-the-blank exercises rather than useful information (although seriously, what “useful information” could the official social media presence of HP Sauce ever really give you?) and I’d encourage others to do so too. This form of social advertising adds nothing of worth to society and, as Femfresh have seen today, can be completely counter-productive for the brand in question. (I guess there’s an argument for the fact that today’s debacle may have educated some women about bacterial vaginosis, but still.)

I’ll leave you with this:

#oneaday Day 836: Brandwatch

So, at the time of writing, the No. 1 free iPad app and No. 2 free iPhone app is this game. A quiz. About logos.

This seems to be something of a craze at the moment, as it’s far from the only title like this available in the App Store, and doubtless there are similar offerings on Android that I can’t be arsed to look up right now.

This is what we’re reduced to for entertainment now? Seeing how deep the brainwashing of advertising has burrowed into our skulls? I’d argue that scoring highly on one of these quizzes is not anything that we should particularly be proud of, as all it simply proves is that advertising has successfully drilled its way into your subconscious.

The same goes for anyone who uses the word “simples”, describes anyone as being “so Money Supermarket” non-ironically or sings that bloody “Go Compare” advert. (If you do the latter, I will likely punch you in the face. If you do the “so Money Supermarket” one, whether or not you get punched in the face will depend entirely on how good your Patrick Stewart impression is.)

The counter-argument to this, of course, is that many of these brands, logos and slogans have transcended their original meanings and become pop culture phenomenons or memes in their own right. And to an extent that’s true, but I can’t shake off the feeling that these things have been forced into the public consciousness, while true phenomena and memes should grow organically, naturally and without marketing spend. In many cases, they do, of course — look at the Know Your Meme page for Katawa Shoujo or the astonishing popularity of My Little Pony among people that it wasn’t originally intended for, for example. But I think we can all agree that anyone who takes an opportunity to sing the Go Compare song is a grade-A arsehole of the highest order.

Perhaps I’m just being grouchy. Or perhaps I’m just fed up with feeling like I can’t escape advertising any more. It seems to encroach on my time more and more. It’s all over the Internet. I get text messages from lawyers inviting me to seek compensation for the accident I supposedly had (funny, I don’t remember it). I get phone calls from twats trying to sell me shit even though I’m registered with the TPS. (Note: this is the main reason I never answer my landline. Call my mobile if you need to speak with me.) I get people knocking on my door trying to sell me double glazing or get me to switch energy suppliers. It’s plastered over certain games. It’s smeared all over Facebook like festering shit. It encroaches on Twitter occasionally in the form of “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Users” — though these are, thankfully, easy to ignore. I even had to remove a Chrome extension yesterday because it was inserting an ad at the bottom of every page I viewed.

Ads allow things to be put out there for free, of course, and without them we’d be having to pay a lot more money for the things that we do, so I guess we should sort of be grateful for them. That said, it doesn’t excuse the sleaziness of some ads, particularly on the Internet — take the large “Download” links on software sites, for example, or the “You Have 1 New Message/Virus/Picture” banners you get on mobile apps. Or indeed the “lose 3 tons of belly fat with one weird old tip” thing. (Spoilers: you probably won’t, otherwise the world would be talking about it.)

You know what? Thinking about it, I’d actually be happy to pay for more things and have them advertising-free. I pay for Spotify premium and don’t have ads. I’ll happily pay to remove ads in iOS games I intend to play for more than five minutes. I pay for Netflix and get movies and TV shows without ad breaks. I’d even happily hand over some money to WordPress if it became a premium-only service, such is the excellent use I’ve got out of it for free over the years.

In short, provide me with a quality product and the means to not be battered around the face with people trying to sell me shit I don’t want, and I’ll happily hand over some money. Yell “Buy! Buy! Buy!” repeatedly at me with no means of respite and I will, yes, punch you in the face.