December 14, 2004
Luncheon Meat
This is just one of the most depressing things I've ever read.
I mean, I'm all for being enthusiastic about things, and I'm all for creativity, but what kind of world is it where someone slaves away in his spare time for months over a labour of love -- and it's a fucking advert? And then others rush around to say this is the wave of the future?
VIRAL MARKETING? FUCK OFF!
This isn't art, it's spam. Our whole world is so saturated with the stuff that we don't even notice anymore, but that doesn't make it any less loathsome.
Advertising is toxic waste, poisoning everything it touches, turning every creative endeavour into some kind of hideously-deformed mutant slouching across a benighted landscape going "Grrr! Aargh!"
Scumbags like this make me want to puke. Advertising is evil. Advertisers must die.
Meanwhile, for most of today this particular little byway of the internet was turning away many would-be advertising comments every minute. Every email account I have is flooded. Even my gmail address, which never gets used and only four people officially know, is larded with the stuff. It's regularly SMS-ed to my mobile, autodialled to my landline. It's the fucking Black Death.
Bring out your dead!
George Masters? You sad, misguided, desperate moron. They'll eat you up and spit you out and even then you won't realise what a tragedy you are. And, frankly, you'll deserve it.
Evil.
Die.
Posted by matt at December 14, 2004 12:21 AM
Sing it!! Viral marketing / online advertising is something that I was a part of for a brief period of time, and I had a HUGE moral dilemma with it. There's nothing fulfilling about SPAM, no matter how pretty you make it.
A prime example of a company that profits off this garbage: www.neverbluemedia.com ... looks all flashy and smart, right?
It's just evil, database-harvesting SPAM with a lot of make-up on.
I have this relative. Let's call her Denise for the sake of argument.
She is, on the face of it, a perfectly pleasant individual: polite, solicitous, even generous. But she's not. She's astonishingly selfish, in the sense of thinking that everything is about her. It's not the arrogant selfishness of the bully, but the self-pitying selfishness of the pathetically fragile, the person who thinks everything is their fault even when they have nothing to do with it.
The thing is that we talk about her all the time, even though it is all of the "Can you believe that woman?" variety.
I cannot help equating spam to Denise. Even when it's not in evidence, it pollutes the intellectual environment because it's always what we end up talking about. That is one of the most dispiriting things.
I'd never seen, heard or read about this 'homegrown ad' until just now - you've given me all three, and I'll probably direct it to computery friends of my own.
Good job on the propagation front - you're just what they need ;)
[Stairs] We both are :(
[Dunx] Consider me chastised. I shall try to avoid the subject for as long as I can.
[Jason] Repent and be saved, brother.
Strictly speaking, we aren't, because I don't really meant to mention it at all ;) Of course, the more comments there are on this, the more high profile it becomes on Talky Walky.
Is it snowing down there?
That's nothing. There's also this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/magazine/05BUZZ.html
[matt] Oh, it wasn't meant as a telling off! Sorry.
I'm sure I will continue to bleat about it too. It's a significant subject. I just wanted to draw a parallel with talking about someone who you don't really want to talk about, but who would almost certainly draw pleasure from knowing that you were.
Matt,
http://www.pithrecords.com/articles/showarticle.php?articlenumber=165
Keith
Thanks for that. (Blimey, everyone turns up here in the end. For the uninitiated: Keith is someone else I used to work with, back in the glory days of HiScoreTV.)
Hicks was on the money. See also:
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising... kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: "There's gonna be a joke comin' up." There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something... rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.
He wasn't known for mincing his words, our Bill.
