Come on, Clickbait, are you even trying?

So I was browsing the Internet, you know, as normal people in the year 2016 do, and I came across another bizarre example of the Clickbait craft-



Great pitch, right? People love celebrities, and there's a compelling melancholy that comes from seeing beloved celebrities in the hours before their deaths, so vital, so unaware of the fate that's about to befall them... it's chilling and can be upsetting, but I understand why people would click on it. Provided the clickbait professionals choose the correct celebrity and photograph. So let's see the one they picked!

Click for Embiggination!

That's the whole ad, as originally served up to my browser. No, you're not seeing things, that's Kim Jong Il. A hundred years of photographs of dead 'celebrities' (in the modern sense) to draw from, and they went with Kim Jong Il, North Korea's Dear Leader.

Just in case you're unsure of my interpretation, here's a closeup of the image, in which you can see Kim Jong Un at the top-right of the frame.



I'm baffled, Clickbait professionals - was this an attempt at a joke? A protest against your own industry? If someone were to actually click on it, would it take them to a page berating them for participating in a corrupt practice?

Sadly, because of their choice of image, no one will ever know.

Oh, Clickbait, you don't know how English works, do you?

Clickbait - the art of combing an interesting bit of art with a catchy headline in the hopes of tricking the curious into heading over to some kind of an bloated content farm. Whether or not you acknowledge the crafting of clickbait as an art form in and of itself, clearly some effort is required to craft the perfect combination of grabby pic and tantalizing topic sentence. So if there are craftspeople out there, working day and night to craft clickbait, how do things like this happen?



What did the writer/artist/craftsperson think they were doing? What do they imagine that brackets mean?

I can tell them what they actually mean - they connote an aside/explanatory note/clarification designed to reveal a piece of information to the reader without needlessly complicating the sentence. In this case, however, the brackets exist only to negate the entire point of the sentence. If you were reading this title aloud, you would leave out any bracketed word, and wind up with the phrase '15 of the most family photos ever'.

Does 'most family' work as a description? Has anyone ever said 'That's the most family photo I've ever seen?'

I don't think so.

Take out the brackets, and you've got a clear sentence describing the series of pages designed to serve up the largest number of ads in the tiniest number of clicks possible. So why were they included?

Perhaps paying non-English speaking people minimum wage isn't the best way of  generating tempting internet content?

What the hell, internet ad?

So I've had more than a few problems with internet ads in the past - mostly those of credit agencies - what with them being completely inept at making their points. The other day I happened across one that leaped well beyond regular incompetence into the absurd-

Please tell me that someone just grabbed the wrong image when they were making the ad and there was no oversight before it went up. Please tell me that this wasn't an attempt to create some kind of a metaphoric relationship between debt and physical abuse.

Or debt and people who are bad at special effect makeup.

Wow do I not understand web advertising.

I think everyone's familiar with pseudo-interactive ads, in which it's suggested that the advertisee can win something by clicking on an ad. There are a wide varieties of these, with simple trivia questions, variations on whack-a-mole and so forth.

Just the other day I encountered a variation so bizarre that I felt it was worth calling out. Check this:

1

You get to pick a side and help Zeus or a soldier kill the other one. What is the backstory here? Why does a soldier think a sword would work on a god? Why is a god trying to stab someone with a lightning bolt? It almost makes me want to click on the ad so I can find out who is responsible for this madness.

Almost.

Adventures in terrible web Advertising

Look, I know that these ads are progressively generated as they pop up on my screen, and that the same one shows for every city - just because I'm near Ottawa, 'Ottawa' becomes part of the headline. What's less explicable is the use of the word 'best' to describe a restaurant that would serve this:

Seriously... what the hell is that thing? I see fried chicken, gravy, bacon, processed cheese... I've got flat-out no idea what the white slab is. Veal? And what manner of bun is that? Dear lord, people - if you ever see something like this on a menu, run far and fast.

Who on earth was putting together an ad campaign and thought to themselves "Yes - that's the perfect foodstuff to excite people about our promotions!"? Whoever they were, they deserve to be fired. And then to be forced to eat one of those abominations.

What's going on with classic video box art? (part 2)

Okay, last time I looked over the bizarrely cheap new art that Prince of Darkness had been saddled with on Netflix. As if that wasn't bad enough, take a look at the monstrosity that The Thing (one of our greatest movie posters), now has representing it to the world:

Is it an issue of having to re-license the art? Because I can't imagine anyone looking at the second box and imagining it was an improvement.

Now take a look at what's going on with Friday the 13th, according to Netflix.

This is more of a hit-and-miss situation, actually. I'd like to get offended about all of the changes, but some of them were actually for the better. I would have liked them to hold onto the first three posters as-is, but truth be told, the change they made to The Final Chapter didn't really hurt things much - the old one was classier, but a few bloody flames never hurt anyone.

Then five and six are just bizarre - five is a huge improvement over the classic poster, although still inferior to the teaser image I loved so well. Six, on the other hand, is just a generic mess. What the hell is Jason doing using a machete for a backhanded stab? Despite how Jason likes to use it, the thing doesn't really even have a sharp point!

Things proceed to get weird with seven and eight - who could have predicted that New Blood would join the original as the only movie to have its poster untouched. Eight, on the other hand, presents us with an example of Netflix actually undoing a historical tragedy - that poster was famously pulled back in the 80s when New York's tourism board threatened to sue, but twenty years later no one cares any more, and it's been restored to its rightful place as the face of Jason Takes Manhattan!

God, next thing you know they're going to mess with A Nightmare on Elm Street's poster, possibly the single most iconic 80s horror-

What the hell, people?

Has Lucky given up?

I'm sure we're all familiar with Lucky, the uncreatively-named mascot for Lucky Charms cereal, and his sisiphyisan attempts to keep his lucky charms away from the grubby mitts of ill-mannered children.

Well, it seems that years of toil and struggle have finally gotten the better of him, because on the front of a recent cereal box, he gives every indication that he no longer sees Lucky Charms as a precious treasure that must be protected.

Now he simply flings them haphazardly in the direction of literally anyone walking by the grocery store shelf. “You want Lucky Charms so bad? Well just take them, then. I hope you choke on it.”

Are you happy, children? You've driven the leprechaun mad.

(Wait - did those kids try to run Lucky off a cliff? That's fairly hardcore.)

What's Going on with Video Box Art?

Browsing through the old Netflix instantwatch library I came across something strange - the new poster for the film 'Prince of Darkness'. Now, I'll admit that the old poster was never especially clear-

There's some fluid, the screaming face and bug in the mouth, and maybe that's supposed to be the church in the background, although what with it being a weird door in the skyline rather than a in the middle of Los Angeles, that seems like a stretch.

It's nothing compared to the new one, however.

What is that guy supposed to be, exactly? Is he the Prince of Darkness? Is it Alice Cooper in his brief cameo? One of the random homeless people? Tom Cruise's monster face from Minority Report? Popular Canadian character actor Julian Richings?

And that's not even addressing the bizarre choice to cut the first half of the tagline. What on earth could explain the decision to replace a completely effective poster with a generic, incomprehensible one?

And if that seems bizarre, just wait until you get a look at what they've been doing with the Friday the 13th box art...

Slushie Bear Hates You. Or Does He? Yes, He Does.

This is Slushie Bear. You may recognize him, as he lives on the sides of various buildings, as well as in window displays. Rushing to capture a picture of him for a photo essay I'd planned entitled “Slushie Bear Hates You”, I quickly discovered the logical flaw inherent in attempting to take a picture of him in the daylight, and outside of his habitat.

Entering the video store in which he resides, I captured some improved photos of him. It was only then, when gazing at an unobstructed view of the creature, that I realized something.

It's not simply that Slushie Bear Hates You. It's that Slushie Bear intends to molest you.

Thank god he's held tight behind those bars, lest some manner of tragedy ensue for the poor people forced to work in the vicinity of such a monster.

Dream Small, Poor People!

So I was at Giant Tiger recently, because of my love of cheap jeans and large cats, and I happened to notice something odd in the discount toy section. There, among the remaindered Superman Returns dollars and the various low-rent attempts to catch up with Yu-Gi-Oh, there were three examples of what can only be called bootleg board games. Games that took the basic concept of a popular title, and tried to profit from it while avoiding a law suit.

What's so interesting about these three games is the insight they give us into the minds of the people making them, and how they're meant to inform the dreams and aspirations of the (presumably lower-class) children who play them.

So while it's perfectly acceptable for kids to fantasize about joining the navy-

Or perhaps identifying someone in a police lineup-

Being a doctor is, sadly, out of their reach. No, when it comes to the bootleg version of 'Operation', children of poor people can only dream of-

Salvage. Not even being a mechanic, which is a skilled, vital profession, and could easily have been the subject of the game - Junkyard Jalopy asks players to fantasize about being scrapyard workers, employed to remove salvagable parts from a wrecked cars, so they can be resold later.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, if anyone wants to surprise me for my half-birthday, I would appreciate a Deluxe Kitchen Machine.

Seriously, Credit Ads? What the hell?

Last time I took a look at an internet banner ad suggesting that I get my credit rating, I overlooked something pretty major. I was so distracted by the moods of the various dinosaurs being depicted that it didn't even occur to me that the background colours being used might have some relevance. Luckily the very same credit check agency people have put out a new series of ads that focus entirely on those colours, giving me a second chance to look at just how bizarre and confusing these ads are.

A word of warning first. These are just images, not real ads. Do not click on them. Also, if you see the real ad versions, don't click on those either. You're just rewarding poor design.

I'm confused by this webternet ad.

So I'm clicking over the old Internet Movie DataBase, as is my wont, and this ad turns up on the side of the screen:



The basic idea is that the relative health of your credit score is indicated by the type and mood of dinosaur in the box.