I imagine the readers of this fine blog are all saavy folk, well-versed in the ways of the internet, and now ascended to its upper echelons. We spend our days having RSServants serve us hand-selected news-de-voures, make our gmail chats wink at each other over jokes about the il33terate masses, and then tell our iTunes and Musicbrainz to tidy up our music library while we take a quick dip in our private custom wiki pool. I don’t know what the e-analogy is for screwing the maid, but we’re doing that too.
In addition, all our pages are W3C compliant, and they suppose they could let that IE riff-raff in, but they’ll have to use the side door, and none of the tables will render, and we will have pop-ups of stern firefoxes demanding that they get with the program. All of our ads are tastefully muted half-skyscrapers of relevant text-only advertisers.
However, recent developments have threatened our high-priced luxury internet real-estate. Like Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack II, some ugly money has moved into town, and it’s name is MySpace. The ol MySp has achieved a staggering feat of introducing new users to the net, but it has also done little to prevent (nay it has perhaps encouraged) the fledgling mistakes of the newbie webpage owner. gifs of sparkling princess text, spinning pot leaves, and jiggling fat kids aplenty have been coughed up from the internet sewers and shoved into too-small tables and text boxes, set against eye-melting background-and-text color combos, and scored by Hawthorne Heights, Godsmack, and people’s classmate’s shitty friend-begging bands. I think i would actually like them better if they were still embedded midis; I prefer my idiots low-tech.
In step with its users, Myspace’s general layout is also pulling no punches in it’s war against Web 1.1 and beyond. The main page and the annoying “you just sent a message, here is an ad” page almost solely feature huge ads for dating services with models so obscene Dov Charney would think twice. (Never a third time though; Dov Charney does not think thrice Start your Dov Charney Facts webpage today!).

The most intriguing ads, however, are a throwback to the Hotmail days (and sadly, still some smaller news media online) when everything begged for your click like a carnival barker. I’m talking Make the 3-pointer, Swat the Fly, Slap the President, etc. Most of these involved simple moving objects that usually didn’t even wait for more than a roll-over before opening up some horrid Pyramid-Scheme-for-an-iPod page, but they started a trend. In the past three years the games have got a little more complex, with things like “Box the Kangaroo” featuring up and down motion and life bars. One Virtua Cop imitator actually went so far as to tell you that you’d lost if you shot a hostage, and did not send you to the site.
Here, at this point in the (clearly mostly personal-view-biased) time line, is where I started to think that there was something noteworthy about this. But the first time a banner popped up and asked me to Kiss Brad Pitt, that’s when I knew these people, while clearly advertising bastards (hello, irony!), were clearly doing their job very well.
Now designing ads for these so-far-at-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-they-go-through-the-earths-core-and-end-up -at-the-top-of-a-barrel-somewhere-else websites has to be some unrewarding work. Either these guys are some down and out programmers who had to pay the rent with something more than auctioning Dreamcast games, or they might just be sadistic Russian entrepreneurs who love this job like they love mugging puppies. Either way, they have hit a new plateau of advertising that actually begins, in my mind, to reach the entertainment of actual games.
Let’s turn to Myspace right now and see what they have to offer: Help Anna outlift Paris (or the politically grey Bush vs. Arnie). Help Bush Out-knit Saddam. Slap the Judge, featuring Simon from American Idol shooting out words like “Karaoke!” and “Ghastly!”
I mean one half of my brain is saying “God the dumbness is deafening. But another part of my brain notices little things. The intentionally sloppy pasting of heads onto stock bodies. The bruises on GW’s face made with an MS Paint spraypaint brush. The vaguely Punch-Out manner in which Simon’s head wobbles after you smack it. These ads, and I’m about to stand on a soapbox perched out on a limb, are a revolution in advertising from the bottom up. They, like MySpace, have learned have become too savvy to swallow gloss, so they simply call their own bluff and design shitty ads. Shitty, idiotically hilarious ads. Snakes on a Plane ads. Whoa. I leave you all with a dream: “Help George W. kill the snakes on the metaphorical plane that is his handling of the latest government positions including letting the wiretapping NSA creep become head of the CIA!” Oh sorry, video games, video games.