Something surprised me as I was clearing out my Gmail spam box today:
Look a bit closer.
Lovely Spam, wonderful Spam…
Oddly enough, when I’m making sure that the heuristics have correctly sifted the penis enlargements and Nigerian scams from emails from my mother, the furthest thing from my mind is a attempting to make reconstituted meat seem appetising.
In fact, I’d make the extraordinary claim that no-one in the history of electronic communication has been in the mood for a Spamwich recipe when they’ve been dealing with unsollicited communication.
I like the idea of AdSense – it is a bridge over some of the many ills of the advertising trade. Ads for me fall down in several important ways:
Who, me?
Ads which specify a non-me audience. Waste of everybody’s time: “Don’t you hate it when your pet poodle has erectile dysfunction brought on by non-organic all-in-one shampoo and conditioner?”
ADD
Ads designed to annoy you into paying attention with shouting, flashing, or silly voices. I use Adblock, so if one of these gets my attention, I commit genocide on it and all its kin. Harder to do on TV, but everyone knows what the remote’s for.
Syllogism, Testimonial
Anyone selling a product on the strength that it improved someone’s life has an enormous burden of proof to shift. Anyone trying to make that claim while pretending that it’s unscripted and sponntaneous is never going to shift it.
Lying
Popular with governments, news organisations, companies big enough to bribe the other two, and sue anything else out of existence. Cigarettes are not good for you. Neither is sugar coated in vitamins, no matter how much of your RDI they make up.
Psychology
Trying to use the insecure bits of my brain as a double agent against me doesn’t work. No matter how many breasts you show me, I will not buy your tooth whitener. I will not buy your two-seater flat-four coupe. I will not buy your sunglasses. I will not buy your wrinkle cream. I will not buy your lifestyle soda, your leather furniture, your alcoholic beverage, television, automotive glazing, zit remedy, ceramic paver, mascara, term depost, deodorant,underpants, mobile telephone, prefabricated dwelling, or external digital storage posthumously designed by Ferdinand Porsche.
I am probably unusually contrary, but corporate slaves trying to enclose sales pitches in what they probably refer to as ’saying it in their language’ feels suspiciously like condescention. At best, it is a sad sort of imitation: the forty year old trying to be fly, widdit, tight. The rest of these errors are the result of generalisations about the audience which aren’t going to pay off if there’s any level of sophistication out there.
AdSense at least makes a decent effort to select ads relevant to what a person’s actively pursuing, which deals with a couple of these shortcomings. Using the content someone’s reading (presumably) voluntarily and spontaneously is a far better driver for finding out what they’re interested in than the crass assumptions that TV and press advertisers make: that the audience of a TV show is more likely to respond to ads for their ultra-shiny triple-turbomatic v12 or low-brow beer because the show is about building things with bricks. It’s the same kind of approach as when you’re browsing Web pages which sell space to a major-but-dumb agent like Fastclick, and find yourself looking at offers to 3NLARGE your P4NIS when trying to find the lyrics to that Beatles song. Perhaps the reader indeed would like a bigger p4nis – I’m sure it’s a common enough wish – but my feeling is the reader wants those lyrics and will look for 3nlargements somewhere else.
AdSense, despite having the advantage of not being a complete stab in the dark, has obviously got into the moisturised hands of the same bunch who would advertise anywhere it will attract an eyeball. Putting context-sensitive ads on a page which is by definition full of unwanted content gives you by-definition unwanted ads: an efficient way to Kovco the advertising message.
