In Your Face

Imagine this: you're driving down a road. It can be any road, a narrow, pockmarked country highway, a major four lane highway where everyone's going at least twelve miles above the speed limit, a residental road crammed with workers on their lunch breaks or any other road you can think of! There you are, just driving along, perhaps listenign to the radio, shifting in your seat because you feel those three hours of straight driving settling against you like a lumpy leaden jacket, or maybe you're talking to someone, glancing between them and the road. Your eye catches a billboard alongside the road, advertising something awaiting you at the end of the next off-ramp, or in the next town, or next city or even the next state. Maybe it catches your eye like a child's finger lightly tugs your shirt as he goes by, curious eyes emploring your own. Or maybe it's merely a blur in your peripheral vision, your mind barely giving it attention like a thin-lipped man deeply engrossed in the stock market numbers, his eyes flicking over his daughter's proudly held drawing, a low grunt the only acknowledgement of her masterpiece.

Then suddenly that billboard, that obscure advertisement boasting the same product to passersby since perhaps the business itself has been in business, or since the road had been placed there...is on your windshield! Your mind is startled from its numbing laundry machine spin cycle, it's thrown off balance by what lies before it. You feel it bouncing around up there, struggling to make sense, taking in the obtrusive excalmation points, the pointed finger, the raised brows, the adnormal amount of teeth filling your vision like a picket fence descending into the horizon, never ending. You pump the gas but the car doesn't slow, was there a hairpin turn up ahead? A hill, the exit I needed? It's no use, you can't remember. All you can think about is that advertisement boldly stepping over that carefully guarded threshold and into your personal space. That hallowed, painstakingly kept space like that vaccumm-lined, impeccably dusted and arranged room in your grandparent's house you couldn't enter even under a blood oath until you were of age. You step back, stumble over things, unsure of what to make of this thing plastered before you, demanding your attention, sucking it away from all avenues with its brilliant, too-bright colors, its obnoxious screaming words that make the voice in your head want to burst with the force of each letter, each exclamation, each claim made again and again and again...

Do you ever feel like this when you encounter one of those annoying pop-up ads when perusing an Internet site? There you are logging into facebook, or checking on song lyrics when it centers itself conveniently over what you were reading or looking at, instantly casting everything in the background to shadow so it stands solely in the spotlight, like a greedy child pushing others away, then waltzing to center stage, planting herself beneath the light and letting a malicious grin eat up her face. I'm sure I can safely speak for everyone when I say no one likes pop-ads such as those. What's the point of them? As if we're not annoyed enough by the blinking, flashing, sparkling, jittering, fluttering, flying, animated, chirping, boasting, screaming, pointing, demanding, offending nature of online advertisements already. Then they have to literally come half an inch from your face when you're just trying to get things done? No, I don't think so. I don't want an advertisement blowing up in my face, usually framing some ridiculous new fad some crazy-haired, black, horn-rimmed glasses donning freak came up with in his basement while his body has molded itself to his chair and his brain has molded itself to his rotting skull.

Okay, okay. I'm being cynical now. But seriously? Who came up with advertisements such as those? And who can conoct exactly the right formula for them to make them the most abrasive and annoying little pop-ups and boxes we've ever seen? Do they sit there and poke, prod and test people all day to see what gets them angered the most? Now I don't want to come off as angry in this blog post, mainly because I don't want this to turn into one big, rambling rant. I'm simply just trying to state my opinion, and I guess if it comes off a little rant-like than I guess I can accept it! Because I'm sure there are plenty of us out there who feel the same way.

Take Facebook for example. Within the last few months I've noticed a blatant change in the way they post advertisements to their site. When I first created an account almost a year ago there were only little advertisements along the righthand side of any page you happened to be on. Not only could you specify to Facebook what exactly you were looking for where ads were concerned, but you could also delete the one's you found offensive or had showed up too many times. As I've found out, it was too good to be true. Now there are ads at least three or four times bigger than the one's mentioned before, and guess what? You can't delete them! And they have proven to be some of the most annoying and vexing ads I've ever encountered online. One of them happens to show what they deem to be effective weight loss by showing a rather chubby woman in nothing but a bra and underwear from a side view, and the wa-la! miraculously skinny woman - who is supposed to be the same woman - shows her wearing even less! Her arms are crossed over her chest and she's wearing a thong.

The first time I saw that ad I was obviously repulsed. First of all, we can tell when someone has lost weight without half - or less than half - of their clothes being off. And secondly, I think I can safely bet that any weightloss product advertised in such a matter isn't going to gain much trust or interest from anyone. It's going to offend people, to make them refresh the page to expunge it into eternity. But unfortunately it will return, just like the ads boasting the question Is It Real Or Fake? and then proceeds to assault you with an off-the-wall picture like the man-dog or a premature kitten fitting in the palm of your hand or even the world's longest eyelashes? which shows what is obviously hair glued to a woman's eyelids. Who the hell concots this stuff on the Internet? Where is there brain during all of this? People of all ages come onto Facebook to reconnect with family, friends, collegues and co-workers alike. They come to play games, to relax, to catch up on the lives of people who lives hundreds or even thousands of miles away from them. They don't come to partake in mindless trivia who's answer is to obvious the question seems pathetically pointless. Yet there they are, snagging our attention like a fish hook in our brains, tugging, demanding, sinking deeper, thickening our blood until we feel like pounding our laptop in frustration.

When did online ads become so obnoxious like this? Like I said earlier Facebook ads were never this offensive or utterly indestructable. We, the users, used to have control over not only what type of ads we choose to appear on our profiles, but also what we didn't want to see. Now it's like the Wizard of Oz, some greater force sitting behind that familiar white backdrop, snickering, drooling, barely able to stay seated as our anger seethes and we look away in disgust at the ads he posts to his ever-rising glee upon our pages. Okay, okay, the cynical side is taking over. I think I'll derail this Facebook rant now. :)

Like always, this week's blog post is terribly long, but I do hope you're taking something valuable away from it. But I'm not quite done talking about online ads just yet! I wanted to slip in another site I frequent alongside Facebook, Pandora.com. For those of you unfamiliar Pandora is an Internet radio site where you can tailor-make radio stations that fit your personal music-tastes and unlike traditional radio, when a song comes up you don't like, you can banish it! Ah, the freedom. But wait! That freedom - like every other freedom - comes with a price. That price being randomly placed ads that jolt you from your smooth-sailing music enjoyment and collide with your ship like that mysterious ice berg tearing into the site of the Titanic. I know when listening to Pandora I usually venture onto other sites, usually Facebook or Oldhouses.com to peruse other things, all with the blissful backdrop of my favorite songs. But then an ad that's unnecessarily three-times louder than the music interupts the flow of the tide onto the beach, and I shrink back, scurrying off my towel as ice cold water nips at my toes and sun-warmed skin. The sky clouds over, chasing away the sun like a mother scooting her son's curious stare away from a crab, his claws clicking rhymically. Okay, I'll admit, it's not that bad. But it's annoying nonetheless. What's more vexing than these less than a minute ads are the full-page ones that attempt to load before a different station you clicked on starts playing. Just like any YouTube video, they have to buffer before playing smoothly, but while I was listening to Pandora yesterday I figured out that rarely happens. So there I am on another site, waiting for my station to start playing and all I hear are fragments of a cheerful woman or falsely-portrayed family harking some toxic chemical that doctors have deemed family-safe all while music almost as abrasive as what you hear on the radio these days plays in the background. Or attempts to play I should say. Met with the claim that your music will start playing in four seconds after a minute had passed I was forced to refresh the page....three different times.

Now granted this could be avoided by upgrading to Pandora One, which eliminates commericals, but that freedom comes with a price as well. Thirty dollars I believe. So now us Pandora users have to literally pay out of our wallets for the priviledge of enjoying smooth, enjoyable music listening with the annoyance of buffering, chirpy commericals butting in like that scowling fat kid in the lunch line? It shouldn't have to be that way. Everyone should be granted that priviledge regardless. Now I understand Pandora has to make a profit somewhere, and ads do help pay the bills - as they graciously remind us users - but I'm sure another way around it could be found. But, I've talked about Pandora enough. So again I will derail this train, and perhaps skip along the tracks in search of another one.

Talking about Pandora reminds me of the animated ads on Facebook I've encountered as of recent. Once again I was just doing something else on the site, perhaps commenting on a friend's status, writing my own, or playing a game when an instantly bothersome advertisement began attempting to play on my homepage. At first I couldn't figure out where it was coming from but then there it was! Smack-dab in the middle of the page, playing out in fragments as if I'm supposed to care enough to put together all those pieces and figure out what they're trying to tell me. No, I don't think so. I turned off the sound on my laptop and continued doing what I was doing. What's even worse was that is was an interactive commerical. Now I just view those as those games the teachers force all the high school students to partake in on the first day of school. Those events where freshman are thrown in with seniors and all are expected to hug and back-slap like they have more common-ground than happening to attend the same school. Why would company's think we'd risk clicking on an ad when we know it's going to take us somewhere dark and mysterious, some place where viruses or all those extinct and faded exclamation points you'd been avoiding on peeling billboards and ads pasted in storefront windows for years are crouched in the corners, waiting to strike for a second time, to maybe draw some blood.

There's a lot more I could talk about, and perhaps you've garnered that from the length of today's post. But honestly? It feels good to finally say my piece about the growing number of online advertisements boldly stepping beyond that threshold and pointing a finger, pressing into us, making us stumble backward, wondering how the moat around our personal space dried up and the big-bad world of advertising knocked down the door and took over our castles. If you're a Facebook user and are as frustrated as I am about the nature of their recent shift in how they present their ads, feel free to say your piece as well. I'm here to listen as much as I am to bitch...I mean rant...I mean, well hell, I'll do it all! :)