Category: Advertisements

I have mentioned and alluded to the fact that I am not on Facebook much these days. I go some days without checking in, but I do like to go and see what I’ve posted on this date in the past, and some organizations with whom I deal use it as the primary communications channel. But I’m not posting a lot of content over there to fill the data mines.

And, seemingly, I have muted most everyone, or no one I know is posting much, either. Because my feed tends to fill with various non-sequiturs and seemingly random advertisements and recommendations. I think the ratio of random sponsored stuff and actual friends’ posts is closing in on 1:1, and as I mentioned, some of the things don’t really make much sense to me.

That’s not to say I’m going to poke fun at the advertisements and recommendations. I mean, they might be effective to appropriate target audiences, but to me?

Continue reading “The Whiff of Desperation” →

You know, I think I would subject myself to a CPAP before I would order something that was cut from A Clockwork Orange for being too over the top.

Wait a minute. I get the sense that he did not write all of those books.

I don’t know why I am seeing this ad:

99.9% caffeine free is only .1% good at all.

I was so put off I didn’t even click to see the woman do her presumed happy cacao-loving dance.

Fun fact about Nogglestead: We have, and have had for twenty years free weights at our home in Casinoport, Old Trees, and Nogglestead. We’ve added an elliptical here at Nogglestead. And the items go mostly unused; I’ve given this some thought as I look around the lower level and think about how we could rearrange it for some novelty.

Personally, I need the ritual of going to the gym to exercise. If I’m home, I have other things to do. Often work or checking blogs. Or tapping out twee little posts like this one.

Yesterday, I posted a bit on the audio course The Search for Intelligent Life in Space.

Today, I get a Facebook ad for launching my DNA to the moon.

Creepy fast.

The only thing that could make it creepier is if they were telling me that they were going to send my DNA to a Lagrange Point whether I liked it or not.

To be honest, I am not sure what sort of information the advertisers have on me. They think I’m wealthy, old, and beset by a variety of health issues. Somehow, brothers and sisters, my DNA is probably not the best hope for resurrecting the human race at some point. I am no Lazarus Long; I am more like Milwaukee Short.

A woman in essentially a medieval bikini and fishnets with a magic staff and some sort of fire spell? Happens all the time here in Brookline when men are over fifty.

I am not sure whether this is the same game that features pixellated T&A and promises You can do anything you want, but it looks to be different from Vikings, a game targeted at youngsters who are only over 40.

Which the ads suggest is also a hyperrealistic portrayal of a warlike patriarchal society around the turn of the first millennium AD. The bare female midriffs coupled with weapons guarantees it, as does the targeting to men of a certain age.

An ad on my Facebook feed:

I wonder if they’re pre-soaked in CBD oil?

Oh, and an answer to the title riddle is not so much they both begin with F as They’re places that I don’t go much any more.

We are a long way from 2017, when I joined Family Video.

For some reason, Facebook has been showing me ads for cosplay wings over the last couple of days.

I cannot think what I might have clicked Like on that earned me that market segmentation.

In otter news (ahut), I saw that this guy posted something with an otter in it, and I would have clicked or commented on it, but that’s just reinforcing Facebook’s projected fetish.

and I say that I’ve come to appreciate a wider beauty in women as I’ve gotten older, but….

I don’t think I’d ever have called that woman a dog.

What? She’s hugging the aforementioned dog, and the advertising company cropped it so there would be a pretty girl to catch your eye instead of another dog? HUSH YOUR PUPPY!

You know, I am not sure what principle determines that I am the target audience for canine vocalization cessation, but I see ads for this a lot. I live out in the country; I don’t care if other peoples’ dogs bark, and if my dogs bark, I want to hear what they have to say. I haven’t clicked through to see if the treatment is for your dogs or the yappy dog in the suburban next yard that prevents you from sleeping, but, brother, that isn’t here.

UPDATE: I hit Publish on the post, and I go to another Web site, and:

A different not-a-dog and her dog.

I’m used to seeing ads for the “I am from Wisconsin, but I live in Missouri” t-shirts that indicate that I’m a Packers fan or a Milwaukee fan or something.

But I got this one:

The Milwaukee Braves are juuuuuust a bit outside my lifetime.

My oldest baseball card, though, is a Del Crandall Milwaukee Braves card from about 1952 that I probably found when I was living in the projects; its corners are rounded and I think it’s taped together. But that doesn’t make me an Atlanta Braves fan. And I’m not sure when Facebook tossed my closet to review my baseball card collection.

Perhaps Facebook listened when I wasn’t talking to it, as I’ve started getting more masculine outfit frames for t-shirt ads compared to the shoes and jeans layout:

To be honest, I wore a layered look a lot in my youth with generally a collared shirt over a t-shirt (and a classic fedora to top it off).

But I’m a man now, and unless I’m going to a sporting event or athletic event, I wear a button-up collared shirt. Although I’ve been wearing jeans and sneakers as I rehab a perpetual sports injury these days, so the full Grant is mostly off and the fedora gathers dust.

But, yeah, t-shirts are not a part of my official wardrobe, really.

But I bought a couple from Facebook ads, so I get ads for t-shirts all day long.

Facebook shows t-shirt ads in the feed in the following formats:

• Just the shirt.
• A celebrity holding up the shirt, wherein the celebrity probably held up a green shirt and t-shirt vendors paste anything they want on it.
• A shirt lying on a surface with a pair of shoes and maybe pants, like this:

  

What is that all about? Are they expecting people to coordinate their cheap t-shirts with shoes and whatnot? Come on, what kind of person does that?

Just take whats at the front of the drawer and go about your business like a man. Perhaps I have answered my own question.

Ha! I kid, but in a way that could be true. I mean, Facebook recommended this group to me:

Given that I’m in only a few groups (several related to my martial arts school, a couple related to multisports/running, a couple and the Legion of Metal Friends), I can’t figure out why the algorithm spit out this particular suggestion.

Unless Facebook on my beautiful wife’s phone heard me mangling some Spanglish and reported it to home base.

Ha! I kid. Or did I say that to cover my actual, raging paranoia?

Facebook has offered me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a tactical coin purse.

You know what would be better? Using your fanny pack, which has more range.

So Facebook, which thinks I like two things in the world (virtual athletic events and t-shirts), pushed this into my feed yesterday:

And I wouldn’t have known who that was except that I watched the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes in which the Donald Sutherland character Oddball (depicted on the shirt) appears. And I watched it, on DVD or videocassette in a device not connected to the Internet.

But I probably had my phone nearby….

At any rate, I did not buy this shirt. To be honest, although I bought the Scipio t-shirt, I am generally not in the market for them as athletic events keep my drawer bursting with them, and I have been relying upon them a lot for birthday and Christmas presents lately, so I probably won’t buy more than a couple a year.

Meanwhile, I get the ads. Also, Facebook seems to think I have a thing for otters, but really, I was just talking about Pauly Shore (the Weasel) movies recently. Well, okay, Encino Man, because it also stars Brendan Fraser. So who knows what the Facebook AI thinks?

All it knows is that it can extend advertising reach if I make fun of it.

I mean, the picture is of an attractive young woman, and the ad is something something reverse mortgage, which is a (foolish) divestment strategy for people who own their own home:

I mean, look at her; she’s too young to own her own home, and if she inherits her parent’s (single person possessive because this is the 21st century, you know; intact families are so 19th century) home and does a reverse mortgage on it, she’ll get an annuity for fifty years spinning off a hundred dollars a month in income. So, yeah, this is not addressed to young people who own their own home.

I mean, I suppose the message if you click through (not me, brah; I’m already getting enough senior-themed advertising as it is) might be your kids won’t inherit the house, but, come on, your kids don’t look like models. I mean, mine are strikingly handsome and do, but we’re talking about your kids, gentle reader, and they probably look like you (mine do not; they take after their beautiful mother).

So, yeah, this is all about the sugar babies. Or just another instance of ads putting an image of an attractive woman in them to catch your eye. Alright, my eye. I plead guilty. Because I look for pictures of ads with attractive women who really have little to do with the product/service being teased. Also, I like to look at pictures of pretty women.