The Denim And Daniel Webster
2004 Dec 09 // Link // E-mail
The most invasive and annoying internet ad I have ever seen came from Diesel Jeans. It was on the Hint Magazine site. I link to neither because I blame them both.
While I won't link to them, I will add them to the list of companies that won't get my money. Other nefarious list members include censorious bookmonger Chapters-Indigo, notorious spammonger Priceline, and vainglorious crapmonger Wal-Mart.
Oh, and Cher. She knows why.
The Diesel ad was an image of a dead bird oozing its own intestines. I guess it makes sense as a jeans ad because that sort of stuff makes some us want to change our pants.
The dead bird image I could live with. Frankly, some of Diesel's former campaigns were more offensive than the new gutted bird ad. (e.g. the "Big Titted Party Girl Bottle-Blonds Will Fuck You If You Wear Diesel Jeans" campaign from 1999, and last year's "It's Cool To Look Uncool, Provided You're Actually Cool And Just Wearing This Crap Ironically" campaign.)
But no, just like the label whores themselves who go truffling for currently hip brand names, it wasn't the image of the ad but rather its nature that offended me.
What grabbed my goat by his good bits was the fact that it was a full-screen animation that floated over the whole window, stalling my browser until a close box slowly wafted its way on to the screen. Now, this was not a pop-up in the traditional sense. Spamvertisers are finding their pop-ups increasingly ignored due to the prevalence of pop-up blockers and better browsers like Firefox, so the new trend is toward floating content inside the main window itself.
Normally I'm immune to such nonsense because I rarely keep the Flash plug-in enabled. Flash is used only for three things: invasive advertisements, puerile animations, and invasively puerile animated advertisements. It's worth the little bit of effort to move the plug-in for those rare times I do want to see a Flash gizmo, since it saves my eyes from dealing with the latest manifestation of some damn Click The Monkey To Win ad.
aside:
Note to browser makers: there really should be a "right-click to enable plug-ins for this site" option, like the one for pop-ups, to permit chosen sites to show Flash animations but by default block invasive ads from sites like Hint that hate their own readers.
end of aside
Alas, today I had Flash enabled because of some "it's worth the wait" link from lovely local linkmeister All Things Christie. I'd not gotten around to re-dis-enabling the Flash plug-in when I later clicked over to Hint Magazine (no link for you, boycotted bastards) from perennial time waster Boing Boing.
What ensued can only be described as a browser hijack. A big “bend my browser over the table and say hello prison style” from Warden Diesel and Screw-on-the-take Hint Magazine.
While I'm not going to link to Hint, because there's no way I'm going to help their Google placement, I will encourage you all to go to hintmag.com and reload the site until you, too, see the incredible eye-burning Diesel ad. But you must first promise not to click on the Diesel ad—the point here is to cost Hint a nice little bandwidth expense without actually helping their damn client.
After disabling Flash I returned to the Hint site so I could look over the code for the Diesel ad, with thoughts of perhaps writing a Firefox extension that wipes both Diesel and Hint from the face of the net as far as my own browser is concerned. But without Flash the Hint site was if anything even more useless:
The Javascript code that opens the ad didn't first check to see if Flash was available, it just grabbed the full screen and left it up to my browser to display a big blank "get the plug-in" link. The Hint site was hidden away underneath, only seen in fleeting glimpses as I scrolled up and down. Awesome.
Let's look at the Hint site's code and see what it reveals about the mag's mentality, shall we? Visiting the site with both Flash and Javascript happily disabled, a quick click on the "view source" menu reveals a site filled with nonstandard HTML, riddled with Javascript nonsense, and lacking even so much as a doctype declaration.
Clearly, somebody needs a visit from the web standards project. Yes, a nice long visit. With clubs.
Here's a list of the Javascript functions that appear at the top of the Hint Magazine home page, in order:
- popUpCentered
- popUpEmail
- popUpRegistration
- popUpProfile
- popUpSlideShowCollections
- popUpSlideShowSize
- popUpSlideShow
- popUpPoll
- poppedUpAd
- popUpFlash
- popUpFlashnew
See a pattern there at all? Take your time, it's subtle. I'll give you a hint: look for the word popUp.
Shame on you, Diesel, for running such an ad. Shame on you, Hint Magazine, for enabling it. You've both made The List. I wish your companies bankruptcy, your customers an increased awareness of your manipulative shallowness, and your board members syphilis. In whatever order is most uncomfortable.
