In what was one of my favorites of the Super Bowl ads this year, a company I had never heard of, Squarespace, made a brilliant live action version of what it must be like to be Tron on the Internet. All of the annoying ads are there, as well as spam stuff, viral videos, memes, etc., literally personified as characters who are all vying for attention in a subjective camera shot that I'm guessing many gamers were wishing was a first person shooter video game. It was truly hilarious, and oh so sadly true of the internet experience these days.
And why is it like this to use the internet? Mostly it's bad, annoying, pointless advertising. In fact, almost all internet advertising just annoys people and makes the internet a miserable experience much of the time. Television advertising used to be like this, and over-repetitive playing of the same ads makes it so today to a certain extent, but TV ads nowadays are on the whole a lot better than they used to be, at least for the big name companies with decent ad budgets. Yes, I make fun of lots of them here, partly because I think many could be improved upon still, but they're a lot better than they were just a decade ago, in general.
Here's the ad that tries to show what it would be like to actually visit the internet in person:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lfZgM0xKM
The issue I have with this ad is that it doesn't really show us how their service is different from any other service of this nature. And that's important because the things that make the internet so annoying are also what drives revenue and makes the whole business of the internet possible: advertising. And so really this would have been a much better ad for an advertising agency that wants to improve online advertising and make it work positively, rather than just grind out obtrusive harassment and pretend it's successful advertising.
The point I'm making is that you can build a website any way you like and have it seem great, but if you need to place ads on it to help fund your efforts, most of what they bash in this ad will wind up on it anyway. So while the spot is great, it comes across as a bit disingenuous, because they cannot guarantee that the annoying ads won't wind up on sites built with their tools, now can they? (Or can they? If so, they don't make it clear in this ad.)
