Bad, bad aesthetics!
14 July 2007 3 Comments
Some months ago, maybe even a year ago, a new “generation” of banner ads was born. These ultra-tacky and annoying ads employ small characters doing a two second dance that repeats itself. This alien
cluttered up a Hotmail page, underneath an ad announcing that “Mortgage rates drop again in Arkansas.” Oddvertising is one thing — done well it’s entertaining and can establish a brand — but these dancers are completely irrelevant to the products being pushed. I’m guessing said products are borderline scams anyway, and I don’t know, after all of the recent news coverage of housing foreclosures, how many people would give such an ad the time of day.
More recent iterations actually use three or four second videos of people dancing. These dancing cartoons and people serve only to stand out on static web pages. Such a strategy isn’t bad in and of itself, but these poorly done ads are on the same level of horribly annoying local TV commercials for things like car lots, with their meaningless antics and yelling personalities.
I’m slowly switching from Hotmail to Gmail anyway, so in the somewhat distant future won’t suffer the affliction of such gaudy images.
I hate those, too. The small, black silhouettes of people dancing are the worst. They leave me with the impression I’ve just seen an injured cockroach, but also with the irritation of knowing that the slightly “sexy” movements of the silhouettes are trying to appeal to something in me. Something that I throw up so much resistance to that, well, I end up HATING those silhouettes. One of them is a couple; I hate the guy because he has an attitude, even as a silhouette. Most guys aren’t smooth dancers, so you know he has to be self-proud. I hate the woman because she is overweight, yet dances as if she is perfect. Again, too much confidence, just dancing uninvited on my screen. (Shades of your post from a couple months ago with the video about female perfection and fatness, only I’m on the politically incorrect side, at least reflexively.)
Sometimes I put my hand OVER the dancing people so I can read other stuff without seeing them out of the corner of my eye (the cockroach thing again).
I am convinced that the origin of these things goes back to the infamous “dancing baby” on Ally McBeal. There was no reason for the baby to be dancing, and yet he did. Many people commented on it. I am sure more than one person has written a PAPER about it! The alien is a lot more like the baby; he’s not sexy, but he is confident and pointlessly so.
I could go on and on. But I won’t.
I agree, I cannot stand those ads. The alien would be my number 1. Number 2 is most definitely the black lady sitting at her computer then getting up with a complete look of shock on her face. What I would like to see is her face in 3 years when the ARM she signed up for skyrockets forcing her into foreclosure.
On a side note, your Adsense up top brought up LowerMyBills.com which is the company responsible for these annoying ads. Don’t feed the beast
Adsense? There aren’t any ads on my blog that I know about! Are you using a free wireless service somewhere that might serve up ads occassionally at the top of a page? I ran into this recently.