Wipe Your Butt With Our New Poll

If you know me, you know how much I love polls/surveys. Not taking polls, but dissecting them. This one isn't even worth dissecting. It's idiotic on its face.

Polls are supposed to be information-gathering devices. This information can be used for marketing, customer service evaluation, testing political winds, etc. Sometimes a poll that's taken for a legitimate purpose is still illegitimate. Check these out if you want to know what I think about polls/surveys that do this.

But Charmin's poll is clearly not intended to gather useful information. It's only purpose is to get people who just love to have their opinions heard to click on an advertisement. It's so transparent that I can't imagine anyone clicking on it. I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many who saw the ad just couldn't resist pulling the trigger. And what they clicked. "Ooh, is Charmin extremely new and different or just very new and different? It wipes my butt in such new and different ways. But just how new and different? I'm torn."

That's Not What They Meant When They Said That Skin Sells

Advertisements must be viewed to be effective. On TV, they get the full 30 seconds with no competition. In print and on the web, they need to pull your focus away from the exciting content you are so lustily consuming and say "Hey, look at me! I'm so goddamn interesting you will never get to that article about the new Harry Potter movie. At least not until after you've clicked through to the product I'm selling."

There are a few ways to do this. First, and most obvious, is the "Look at my tits!" ploy. Men will never ever stop falling for this. No matter how crass we consider it when examining the ads intellectually, the inner 16-year-old screams "Look at her tits!" And we do.

Second, there are the usual bright shiny colors and exciting graphics. This can be enhanced with new-and-improved Flash animations that actually fly across the screen to more effectively obscure your originally desired content, sometimes even forcing you to click on the "X" to close the offending doodad before you can view anything it obscures. Annoying.

But here's my least favorite. I got this screen shot from today's online edition of the New York Times.

Did you see it? It's subtle, I know.

I'll say this for it, it certainly draws focus. Of course, now I'm not interested in breakfast. Or lunch. Ever.

But they aren't selling lunch. They're selling...what? I'm guessing some kind of cure for the horrible affliction visited upon the poor slob pictured, with his/her face mercifully cropped. Delightful.

I could find out if I really wanted to. There's a button that says "Click here to learn more". What I really want is the one that says "Click here to learn less" or, more to the point "Erase this ad from your memory". Only twenty dollars.

Great Moments in Advertising: Whiten Your Teeth with Photoshop

Check out this lame excuse for an ad. Apparently, these people have yellow teeth.



Okay, either these people are also afflicted with serious jaundice (in which case, their teeth are the least of their worries) or these images were tinted yellow. I'm guessing the latter.

Learn how to use Photoshop, people. You could have focused on just the teeth, if you'd just read a little teensy bit of the instructions. They're under "Help".

Oh, and I'm pretty sure the second photo is supposed to be white. (The teeth, that is.) It doesn't look all that different from the first one.