Nobody wants to look at your boobs: Snapchat gets ads 'that interest you' Snapchat has begun serving up adverts to its naked selfie despatching users in the USA. The company said in a blog post on Friday that ads would debut for State-side netizens from today. The messaging service was understood to be something of a haven for supposedly self-destructing naked selfies – until that is when around …
Yes, they said fun! If they would of let it at that, I could agree. However, they also mentioned "informative". The ads that seemed to go over the best for the mass populous (regardless if I liked them), where NOT informative. Here in the U.S.A., here are a few successful ads that had absolutely nothing informative about them...
-Coca Cola's CGI Polar bear commercial.
-Grey Poupon's road drive
-Energizer's "It keeps going, and going and going, and..."
-Camel cigarettes "Camel Joe", Marlboro's "Marlboro Man"
-*LifeCall's "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"
None of these have anything informative about the product. I think the idea of successful advertising is to advertise not what your selling, but something that people will remember.
*LifeCall !! I actually had to look that up because I had no idea the name of the product...the commercial was that informative!
So, which is it?
"The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you," Snapchat said."
or
"We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted."
It can't be both. Hulu's system is very targeted; it eventually figured out I liked car ads but *not* Hondas. The ads I get on there are actually ones I enjoy watching. I don't have the cash to buy a car but the other ads it picks are stuff I have some chance of actually buying.
On the other hand, general (untargeted) US ads are dreary. They have the attitude that "these 5 minutes of ads" (OK, 15 or 30 seconds online) are here in the middle of thoe show, so you must watch it, no need to make it good (they seem to ignore the existance of DVRs). One has people shrieking so shrilly they break the glasses around them in the ad; some are just dead silent and expect you'll stare at the screen (which I don't). Feminine hygiene ads. Ads for random medicines that you need to go to a doctor to get anyway. Right now, endless political ads and yes that includes online; no useful information, they pick a 5 second quote and distort it to make the politician look like a dirtbag (the main-party candidates *are* dirtbags and the Libertarian candidate died in a plane crash, but still these ads are annoying while also being completely uninformative...)
Banner ads (with no targeting) are a little better, but not much! You'll end up with constant ads for casino apps, and apps that imply they'll have nudity (which they won't because Google Play store doesn't allow that.) Ads that just claim "your phone is slow!! Speed it up!!!" or for battery-saver apps, or for antivirus products. And political ads. And maybe 10% ads for physical products and services.
Skip the pornography, or rather the only soft- and hard- that gets my attention is -ware, not -core. It only took TV-Guide something like ten years to figure that out. Got my first VMWare banner-ad yesterday. Either that or they finally paid the Google toll on my Google tracking cookie.
After "The Fappening" and now "The Snappening" am I the only one to read the banner as: "Flesh fapping, image zapping ...?" (And I'm thoroughly corrupting my spell-chucker no end through all this <sigh>)
"The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you,"
Either the best ads are word of mouth, ones that get caught by adblock (unbeatable for the satisfaction), or those very rare genuine visual masterpieces that pop up every now and again (Shellgrip from the 80s, the BA ad from a couple of years ago) but are invariably for something you probably wouldn't buy anyway.
Ads have very few parallels in the absolute gulf of opinion that separates those who pimp them and those who loathe them; probably only Tony Blair, US government policy and things that don't include bacon come close.
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