“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.

Dear Bonobos -

Thank you for presenting me with this picture of a man’s crotch.  I will now buy a pair of your pants.

Love,

Charlie — a heterosexual male

I’m leaning towards the latter…

(Why is it a recurring theme for small Facebook ads to be visually offensive?  Is this really one of the better ways to advertise on the site?)

Here are some of the gems:

“Banners. These type of product promotion is place on the top portion of a particular web page. It has the ability to attract customers because of its animation and noticeable way to get the attention of the people.  Catching the audience’s attention is the primary objective of an internet marketer. The persuasion skill should be honed if effective enough to win a large market. The more convincing power you have, the more profit enters a business.”

Really?  Catching the audience’s attention is the primary objective?  Well that free iPod nano lady must be a freaking jedi master at online marketing!  Banners are myopic and insanely ineffective.  It blows my mind that companies waste money on them.

“To begin practising your web marketing skills, how about you set up an internet society online that will enable members to post their tips on a particular topic. It does not need to sell products but you can start from simple ideas. For example, build a web page that will enable members to publish their poems and other kinds of literature.”

Awesome.  I’m sure TONS of people will come to my website to publish their poems.  They’ll ignore WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, and even Poetry.com.  Or I guess I could just start my own blog and gain a following with quality content… Nah, that’s too easy.

“Always be on the go and innovative. Updates via internet is totally fast!… To keep yourself in the warpath, you should not allow yourself to be left behind. You must always have fresh and new ideas to inject in promoting an item.”

Was this article intended for people who have no understanding of the internet?

“These are just tips that you can consider or not… Absorb these ideas and I am dead sure that you will be indeed, a great internet marketing guru!  Daegan Smith is the leader of the fastest growing team of successful home business enterpernuers on the net. ”

FAIL.  See how easy it is to b.s. online?  Anyone can do it!

This is painfully stupid.

“OHH!  I just had a great idea, gang: We make a TV commercial where we frame Holiday Inn customers as really smart people… smarter than doctors!  Then we twist it into a thinly-veiled joke that’s not really even funny to begin with!  And what the hell, we’re under budget so let’s throw some money at a celebrity endorsement!  How ’bout Cal Ripken, Jr.?!  He’s just irrelevant enough to distract the viewer from our core message, which is: we don’t know how to advertise!“

Not to mention the copy in the text screams SCAM.  But let’s not point out the obvious.

That commercial has been played ad nauseum for the last few weeks. It’s driving me insane for two reasons:

1. It contains the most annoying song I have EVER heard. I mute it or change the channel every time it comes on because it gets in my head and won’t leave for hours. I’ll take “Barbie Girl” by Aqua any day of the week over this.
2. The Truth campaign has repeatedly proved that they’re completely inept when it comes to marketing, and this “sunny side of truth” garbage is the pinnacle of their incompetence.

This anti-cigarette company throws away millions of dollars a year trying to prevent teenagers from smoking, get current smokers to quit, and persuade cigarette companies to be more open about the harm they’ve done. The problem is that their old formula of shocking the viewer with disturbing imagery (e.g. thousands of body bags in the street) got, well, old. So now they’re doing “the sunny side of truth.” These commercials consist of singing and dancing people alongside singing and dancing cartoon animals. To prevent you from smoking. Seriously.

The lyrics: “It must have been a typo, a typo, a typo.” You masterminds! You’re totally being sarcastic, aren’t you? Kids will totally relate to that, especially the Gen Y teenagers! And having cartoon typewriters behind the humans? A stroke of genius.

HOW DOES THIS COMMERCIAL GET APPROVED?! Is the company really this idiotic? Do they honestly believe their strategy is effective? It’s mind-boggling. These people know nothing about basic psychology, and it is very frustrating to watch the money they won in those lawsuits get pissed away in such an irritating fashion.

A company advertising on Facebook is the equivalent of a salesman peddling magazines at an actual high school reunion. No one’s going to buy from him because we’re not there to look for magazines. We’re there to connect with our friends. Ads are viewed as a necessary intrusion on our experience, so we don’t ever really focus on them.

That being said, some Facebook ads are better than others. The ad pictured above is one of the “others.”