Whilst out walking, I spotted a coin on the street which didn't look local. Being curious, I picked it up. Turns out it was a shiny 10 pesos, which I took home to put in my coins collection.
I'm not sure how 10 pesos ended up on my street— I'm nowhere near Chile.
Vital stats:
Pesos: 10
Date: Today
Current Mood: Fried
Sleep Status: Pending
Word of the Day: Truncate
Country: Chile
My Country: Anglophone
Francophone?: Non
Bite the Wax Tadpole: I will take one of seven.
Vital stats: Truncated
Showing posts with label i'm not dead yet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label i'm not dead yet. Show all posts
Monday, March 9, 2015
Friday, January 18, 2013
Advice To Ad Agencies
In order to further transition ITIHAB into "Why Marketers Suck," here's a post containing some advice to them.
This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knows me in real life given that I'm perpetually broke, but I take market research surveys for money. This fact is also unsurprising to people who found my blog through some random Google search because they don't know or care about me, and it's not particularly surprising as far as facts go; if I had revealed I was secretly an alien, or the Queen, or that I had recently used the Book of Parallels that showed up in my postbox anonymously to retrieve a cure for cancer from an alternate universe, then that would be surprising but that I take market research surveys for money is generally more of a resident of the "meh" territory, like revealing I had a movie about aliens, or that I was a queen, or that I just made up the Book of Parallels and you shouldn't bother googling it because it's not a reference.
I typically can't share any juicy (or gruesome) details about experimental products because of confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements and most surveys not actually having any. However, I can share my comments from these surveys because they're, you know, mine.
One survey asked, on its final page, if I had any advice I'd liked to give to ad agencies and the people who make adverts in general. As it turned out, I did have some advice, and so I answered thus:
Oh, and happy new year and stuff I completely forgot to blog about at the time. Cheers!
This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knows me in real life given that I'm perpetually broke, but I take market research surveys for money. This fact is also unsurprising to people who found my blog through some random Google search because they don't know or care about me, and it's not particularly surprising as far as facts go; if I had revealed I was secretly an alien, or the Queen, or that I had recently used the Book of Parallels that showed up in my postbox anonymously to retrieve a cure for cancer from an alternate universe, then that would be surprising but that I take market research surveys for money is generally more of a resident of the "meh" territory, like revealing I had a movie about aliens, or that I was a queen, or that I just made up the Book of Parallels and you shouldn't bother googling it because it's not a reference.
I typically can't share any juicy (or gruesome) details about experimental products because of confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements and most surveys not actually having any. However, I can share my comments from these surveys because they're, you know, mine.
One survey asked, on its final page, if I had any advice I'd liked to give to ad agencies and the people who make adverts in general. As it turned out, I did have some advice, and so I answered thus:
On balance, an ad is a BAD THING. By definition. If it supports content, then "ad + content" might total out to a positive, but "ad" is ALWAYS negative. Nobody *wants* to see ads, so stop trying to pretend that you can make your ads "better" so people will enjoy them. So basically, telling us that an invasion of privacy is justified because it means you can show "more relevant" ads doesn't just insult our intelligence; it makes you look like some freakish alien that's doing a really poor job of trying to imitate human behaviour.
As for what will make your ads "work" (in the sense of actually driving traffic/sales/etc), I can't help you. My browser has an adblock, and my mind has an adblock as well, so I can't remember ads once I'm no longer looking at them. If a company advertises, I will interpret this to mean that their products are inferior or overpriced since they obviously can't rely on quality or price to drive sales. I have never clicked an online ad unless I was (1) paid to click on it or (2) clicking on it repeatedly because it was offensive and I enjoyed the prospect of making them pay for a dozen-odd clickthroughs for zero conversions. I have responded to direct mail adverts by filling business reply envelopes with various items including (1) rocks, (2) direct mail adverts that didn't come with prepaid reply envelopes, or (3) the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley and mailing them back at advertiser expense. And I don't watch TV so don't think you can advertise at me there either.
Oh, and happy new year and stuff I completely forgot to blog about at the time. Cheers!
Monday, June 11, 2012
Farmville Review
So with all the fuss about "FarmVille" being the big craze thing on Facebook, I decided to give it a try, partially out of morbid curiosity and partly because this blog has been languishing for a few months and an update might prevent Google deactivating it on the assumption that I'm legally dead.
So I decided to play Farmville. And review it.
Obviously, the first thing one needs for playing Farmville is a Facebook account, and as I value my privacy just a little bit more than the average lunkhead, I'm not on Facebook. I do, however, have several pseudonymous dummy accounts on Facebook that I use for various malevolent purposes, so I installed Farmville on one of them.
Before even installing, the app immediately demanded access to a truly inordinate number of privileges; before deeming me worthy of playing, it demanded to access my posts and track my current location, the right to extract my email address from my Facebook profile so it could spam me even after I delete the app (and Facebook account), and the right to post on my account whenever it jolly well wanted to. Obviously, no one who uses their real name and information on Facebook, and certainly no one who interacts on Facebook with people they know in real life would ever voluntarily hand over that sort of permission without a very good reason (such as at gunpoint), but I had no qualms about letting an app have access to a pseudonym, a throwaway hotmail address, and a fake birthday so I clicked "allow" and loaded the app.
Once the app was loaded, I had to click through about three or four screens soliciting money and one asking me to spam my friends with ads for Farmville before I could actually access the "game" part of the game, whereupon a helpful tutorial guided me through the process of harvesting crops, plowing fields, and planting new crops. Afterwards, I was left to my own devices where I quickly discovered that half of the clickable objects popped up solicitations for money when clicked. It took about five or six solicitations for money before I could figure out how to plow a new section of field and find some sort of slot machine thing to award items for planting or something. I also quickly discovered that attempting any action that I couldn't complete because the prerequisites had not been met would produce, you guessed it, a solicitation for money.
So my overall impression is that Farmville isn't so much a "game" as an aggressive panhandler. I'm not sure how anybody manages to withstand it long enough to develop the "addiction" it's supposedly known for.
So I decided to play Farmville. And review it.
Obviously, the first thing one needs for playing Farmville is a Facebook account, and as I value my privacy just a little bit more than the average lunkhead, I'm not on Facebook. I do, however, have several pseudonymous dummy accounts on Facebook that I use for various malevolent purposes, so I installed Farmville on one of them.
Before even installing, the app immediately demanded access to a truly inordinate number of privileges; before deeming me worthy of playing, it demanded to access my posts and track my current location, the right to extract my email address from my Facebook profile so it could spam me even after I delete the app (and Facebook account), and the right to post on my account whenever it jolly well wanted to. Obviously, no one who uses their real name and information on Facebook, and certainly no one who interacts on Facebook with people they know in real life would ever voluntarily hand over that sort of permission without a very good reason (such as at gunpoint), but I had no qualms about letting an app have access to a pseudonym, a throwaway hotmail address, and a fake birthday so I clicked "allow" and loaded the app.
Once the app was loaded, I had to click through about three or four screens soliciting money and one asking me to spam my friends with ads for Farmville before I could actually access the "game" part of the game, whereupon a helpful tutorial guided me through the process of harvesting crops, plowing fields, and planting new crops. Afterwards, I was left to my own devices where I quickly discovered that half of the clickable objects popped up solicitations for money when clicked. It took about five or six solicitations for money before I could figure out how to plow a new section of field and find some sort of slot machine thing to award items for planting or something. I also quickly discovered that attempting any action that I couldn't complete because the prerequisites had not been met would produce, you guessed it, a solicitation for money.
So my overall impression is that Farmville isn't so much a "game" as an aggressive panhandler. I'm not sure how anybody manages to withstand it long enough to develop the "addiction" it's supposedly known for.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Youtube Video Suggestions
I just watched one of Stuart Ashen's videos on Youtube. For those unfamiliar with Stuart Ashen, he has a series of videos called "Terrible Old Games You Probably Never Heard Of" and also reviews electronic tat dolled up to look like popular items.
As I watched said video, I took a look at the sidebar containing ostensibly related videos that Youtube's algorithm decided I might be interested in watching next. Can you spot the one that doesn't belong?
(Well the image file got et, probably when I killed my Yahoo account. I'll try to get around to re-uploading it if I can find it, but basically it was a long list of Ashen's other videos with a single incongruous My Little Pony vid wedged in the middle. The title text for the image was: "I think my little sister used my computer once and now my Google profile is permanently contaminated with whatever she looked at." Also, the alt text, which is meant to appear when the image can't load but appears on mouseover instead of the title text in Internet Exploder said: "Apparently, My Little Pony is now in some way related to electronic tat. And if this appeared when you pointed your cursor at the image, then upgrade to Firefox you wally.")
I knew you could!
As I watched said video, I took a look at the sidebar containing ostensibly related videos that Youtube's algorithm decided I might be interested in watching next. Can you spot the one that doesn't belong?
(Well the image file got et, probably when I killed my Yahoo account. I'll try to get around to re-uploading it if I can find it, but basically it was a long list of Ashen's other videos with a single incongruous My Little Pony vid wedged in the middle. The title text for the image was: "I think my little sister used my computer once and now my Google profile is permanently contaminated with whatever she looked at." Also, the alt text, which is meant to appear when the image can't load but appears on mouseover instead of the title text in Internet Exploder said: "Apparently, My Little Pony is now in some way related to electronic tat. And if this appeared when you pointed your cursor at the image, then upgrade to Firefox you wally.")
I knew you could!
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