Advertising.

It’s a multi-gazillion dollar-a-second industry. Think about all the money you have ever spent in your life. Drop in the bucket. It is big fucking business run by the biggest fucking smarty pants people in the world. People who in another time would have been referred to as propagandists – manipulators who understood the very human psyche on a level that allows them to exploit their fellow man. Advertisers get paid the big bucks because they have a unique skill to make money for the companies they market for.

So why are Facebook ads absolute shit? If you play games on Facebook or have games as an interest you probably get served some of the same ads I do, which are almost all eye raisingly stupid and usually condescending. Let’s have a look shall we?

This seems to be a pretty common thread with Facebook ads, having a picture that has nothing to do with the product you are selling or the copy in the ad. They tend to just show an image that is compelling or provocative to get your attention.

The other common thread with these ads seems to be that the image is almost always some goth/emo/punk chick. Nothing against them, I love me some punk girls, but it’s not every “gamer’s” wet dream to wind up with a girl with a facial tattoo of a safety pin in her cheek.

This is dumb because the advertiser is trying to be covert and stealthy, but ends up transparent and plain. It is the lowest level subliminal messaging, and does anyone honestly think there will be a cute girl on the other end of that link? Do other ads not on Facebook do this? If they did they would probably look like this:

On to the next ad!

Ok, so the annoying thing about this ad is not the fact that almost 50 million people have played FarmVille 2. It’s not the fact that it has a picture of a four-armed werewolf-demon-monkey on it with a picture of a happy chicken below it. It’s the fact that the ad trying to be witty.

The whole thing is just filled with catty double entendre that some copywriter somewhere spent hours writing and got paid top dollar to do so. Here is the conversation this copywriter had with themselves, out loud in a darkened office room one night:

“Meet Cute chicks? Oh cause we are appealing to guys who want to meet girls but also you raise chickens in the game. Since we already have a bird metaphor lets mention tweeting to tie it all back together. Lastly, lets inform the user to PLAY NOW. That’ll really get those last stragglers who are sitting on the fence about playing this games to jump in. It’s just too bad this unit did not have a button on it, because I most certainly would have written CLICK HERE on that to seal the goddamned deal!”

Also, when did Lycanthropy become a thing in FarmVille? Do they need to cash in on Twilight that bad?

Lastly, and I don’t think a lot of people caught this at first, saying that the game is filled with cute chicks and adorable animals that you will want to play with and then “tweet” is a veiled bestiality metaphor. I’m pretty sure the werewolf seals the deal on that thesis statement. NEXT!

Listen I know this is a gaming site (sort of) and this is not a gaming ad, but I keep getting served this and now I want to complain about it. Let’s dissect this.

Headline: Be an Addict’s Cure 1YR

Bi-line: Some bullshit URL that looks shady

So I don’t do drugs and I only drink to kill the pain of my shattered reality, so I don’t know why this is applicable to me, but it is a pretty serious thing, trying to help people out of their addictions. So did we really need the l33t speak 1YR (all caps) in the headline. Would it not have been just as powerful without that?

Image: 2 ears, or maybe just the same ear, with a tattoo of what appears to be a roll of fruit lifesavers. Or whatever. I don’t know, the picture is 10 pixels big.

What exactly is the implication of this picture in regards to the rest of the ad? That all drug addicts have ear tattoos? That tattoos lead to drugs, or that drugs lead to tattoos? That you can have an ear tattoo and still become a councilor?

COPY: LOVE METAL? Blah Blah Blah fart salary money make mucho $$$!

So Metal huh? Do you love Dio? Well then that is all the qualification I need to know, you should be teaching people how to not be trading iPods for bath salts! HOLY DIVER!

What kills me about these ads, besides knowing how much the person who wrote them probably got paid to do so, is that these are just one iteration of countless variations of them I have seen. They come off like they are one step above spam bot generated, yet there are real people in charge of these.

Anyone else have some bad ads to share? Post them in the comments, let’s see if there are any others that capture the advertising magic of these.

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