“Ashlee Simpson is so profoundly dumb that, if for some unfortunate reason you ever find yourself in a hotel room with her, and you’re on the 40th floor, and she grabbed a handful of quarters and said she was going to the vending machine, you should fully expect her to come back 2 minutes later soaking wet and covered in graffiti, naked except for the lower half of a horse costume. She may or may not have her hair standing on end with smoke coming from it and black powder all over her face. I’m guessing that, yes, she will.”

His sense of humor is also highly irreverent, which I love.  For instance, a woman committed suicide and he made fun of the situation.  Naturally, readers called him cold and heartless, and he responded by saying:

“Like 8000 angry emails came in yesterday saying I was insensitive to Goodspeed taking her own life but you have to keep in mind that I don’t care. At all. So when you look at it like that, I think you’ll agree your anger was misplaced. In a sense, I’m the real victim in all this.”

I preface my criticism of WWTDD with those passages because I actually appreciate this author’s writing.  He writes about idiot celebrities that he hates almost 10 times a day, 5 days a week… and he’s been doing it for years!  I don’t care who you are — that’s got to get old.

Anyways, he let his page turn into an ad the other day.  Luckily, the insanely large banner ad at the top has been removed.  But a few days ago, it was one of the worst commercial transformations I had ever seen, and it was completely incongruous with what the site is about: hating on Hollywood’s B.S.  Even the copy was an ad, which was the most disappointing part.  The author hates Dane Cook, so it’s extremely transparent that the author was being paid to not make fun of him.  All of his readers were very aware that he’d sold out.

Don’t let this happen to your site. After years of building up his reputation, Brendon let himself slip when he was offered a substantial paycheck.  He allowed the entire site to be turned into an advertisement.  He could have accepted less money and made the ads much more discrete, which would have been less offensive for his readers.  Unfortunately, he decided not to do that.

Do you want to make cash or do you want to have credibility?  One is a short-term decision, the other pays off for years to come.

Awesome job, morons.  Yea, I’m sure the panoramic feature is really going to get people to believe in Vista.  That’s a HUGE selling point.  I can just imagine all the people who are running out to Best Buy to get a copy of your $130 software, just so they can put all their pictures together into one giant poster.  I mean, that’s the reason people buy computers!  By the way, have you had a chance to develop a stable, intuitive OS that doesn’t make people pull their hair out yet?  Oh, you’re still working on that.

I never understood why companies do these commercials with disclaimers that say “Real people. Not actors.”  It’s a TV ad!  Why would you try to deliver a genuine message on the medium that’s known for distorting reality?  Besides, you edited out everything you didn’t want people to see, so it’s inherently biased anyways.  It doesn’t matter that they’re not actors — we’re still not going to trust your commercial.

Microsoft does not have a marketing budget; they have an advertising budget.  And there’s a huge difference between the two.

Advertising is what you tell people to think about your company.  Marketing, on the other hand, is what you get people to think about your company on their own. So when you tell me your software is great in an ad on TV, that’s advertising.  When I find out that your software actually sucks after installing it and I complain on a message board about it, that’s marketing.

If you don’t have great content, you’re standing on a very weak foundation.  Scrap your advertising budget and put all your money into finding a way to get your product to market itself.

In exchange for letting me watch high-quality, streamed episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” for free, I’m required to sit through one short commercial (between 5 and 30 seconds) during every regular commercial-slot interval.  There’s no way to skip through them.

I’m not annoyed by this at all.  In fact, I’ll gladly watch these commercials just because I think Hulu’s service is great.

What’s awesome for the advertisers on Hulu is that if someone watches multiple episodes of a show, they’re going to see the same commercials over and over and be obligated to watch them.  Frequency is an advertiser’s best friend.  And the commercials are so brief that the viewer doesn’t have time to go make a sandwich or anything, so they’re going to see them.

In spite of Hulu making things better for both the viewer and the advertiser, they are still doing it all wrong. Why?  Because Hulu is playing by the old rules.

Traditionally, ads on TV take the shotgun approach.  Ad companies fire tons of marketing bullets at a big crowd without taking proper aim, and hope their message sticks with a few people.  This is wildly inaccurate, hardly measurable, and a HUGE waste of money.

Hulu is only mildly improving this approach.  The commercials they run are not competing with tons of other messages or being ignored in the clutter.  So what’s the big deal?  Hulu has screwed up because they treat the viewer like they’re watching the show on TV, instead of online. As a result, if you see an interesting ad by “Now what?” and you want to visit their site, you have to click out of the show you’re watching, open a new tab, then manually type in “nowwhat.com.”  That’s too many unnecessary steps, which means the viewer is less likely to do it.

A simple partnership with Involver would fix this problem.  Then user’s could click on the ad and go straight to the advertiser’s website, or do whatever the call-to-action is in the ad.

Another problem with treating Hulu like it’s using TV as its medium is that they’re ignoring the potential for permission marketing.  Why not offer the member a chance to cut their commercials in half if they take a monthly survey?  Find out their specific interests and then deliver more relevant ads to them in the future.

I know Hulu is young and still in the “we’ll take whatever advertising dollars we can get” phase, but they need to start taking advantage of the medium they’re on.

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself…

No really, there’s no rationalization 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…

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.”…Goddamnit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

I was actually embarrassed the first time I heard that routine a few years ago. Obviously, there are immoral people in every occupation, but marketing seemed inherently immoral. I saw it as an unnecessary evil. I was upset that I’d chosen marketing as a major, because I thought it clashed with my ethics. Marketing, to me, was the way businesses manipulated the masses into buying things they didn’t need.

Luckily, that’s when I started reading Seth Godin’s work. All of his ideas made sense to me, and better yet, he emphasized treating consumers as people – nothing else. He stressed the importance of building a meaningful relationship with someone so that they’ll want to do business with you. Seth doesn’t want products to cater to the masses. He knows everyone is different, so a company should cater its services to the customers they’d choose (if they could choose their customers).

I’m really excited to be a part of Seth’s virtual intern group. I’ll be posting my thoughts on it periodically on here.