There are lots of examples of "horrible" to be found on the net, including enough fecal frolicking to turn even the blind a sickening shade of green. But frankly, I'd rather watch that than be put through this:
I hate these things. Like an animal introduced into an inappropriate ecosystem, advertisements have propagated over almost all kinds of media. (For reader benefit, Angry Kid was a less than interesting idea to have explored. Don't try at home) It seems that people behind ARPANET and the eventual birth of the world wide web didn't know at the time that we didn't want adverts. Otherwise, they would have stamped upon the faces of the people willing to slap advertisements in every available space on web pages.
But it's worse than that now, isn't it? Bored with the normal methods of advertisements people have learned to ignore during their browsing activities, they've invented ever more invasive forms of harassing us for attention. Cultprit one, as above is the in-line ad.
When you click on a link, the last thing you really want to sit through is an obligatory advert. Someone is sitting there enjoying the fact that people actually have to pay attention to the shit on their screen in order to get to what they want. Each advert is long enough to be aggravating, a good 30 seconds or so in this case. In what looks at first like an attempt to inform people it's safe to click on the ad, they've included a message saying "clicking on the advertisement will not affect download, links will open in a new window. This isn't actually reassuring you so much as subtley reminding you that any attempts to bypass the ad will have no effect whatsoever. Cheeky wankers.
Case two: the Alarming Audio Ads. Aptly named "AAA", these consist of flash animation banners injected crudely into frames at the side of pages. They're absolutely the most fucking annoying thing ever. Their current iteration is largely adverts for emoticons which nobody wants. In an attempt to grab attention of unwary surfers in 'disregarding-all-shit mode', the advert displays the face of a smiley you soon learn to hate, hands outstretched, *screaming* the words SAY SOMETHING!
This is not only a horrible shock for anyone who has the volume up at that point in time, but also something so unvaried and repetetive that you begin to become resentful to the little yellow face itself. I can't fucking stand those adverts. I can't express my irritation enough, either, without the aid of weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps a socket wrench. The current strongest contender for most aggrafuckingvating ads ever.
Seriously, you want to punch the face. You want to punch an emoticon, that's really how bad it is.
Somewhat less annoying are the ads for toys that don't make sense. Furbys are a brilliant example. Everyone had furbys, as far as I was aware, in their household. But in reflection…. why? What the hell does a furry blob with animated facial extensions offer anyone? Apart from a flammable treat, not much. It can talk to other Furbies. Occasionally it will wiggle and bitch that it's hungry. It moans if you turn it upside down. If you stroke it, it purrs in arousal. If you're intelligent enough (at the age these are targeted for, I doubt this) you can memorise a cornucopia of hand signals and patterns that can be used to play games. This results in an amusing watch for standers-by, who are witness to someone gesticulating furiously at a small fluffy blob.
In an attempt to realise this distinct lack of anything ground breaking, Hasbro (I assume they are behind this) rather than addressing the issue at hand, have simply distracted their customer base with an amazing new feature.
Can you tickle it's feet?
