Why I Don’t Sell Advertising On This Site
Let me tell you why I don’t sell advertising on this site.
Earlier today, I was mindlessly perusing Slate’s Ad Slogan Tournament. Both “The History of Advertising” and “Anything With Brackets” are high on my list of likes. I debated the relative merits of “M&M’s melt in your mouth, not in your hands” and “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” which is the tagline for Schaefer.
This reminded me of a fake tagline I wrote for Schlitz: “If it’s not Schlitz, it’s a drinking problem.” Penning fictional beer slogans is not something I normally do. But I recently completed a trivia game called Big Fat Lies with mental_floss and Quirk Books. My job was to pair fascinating, hard-to-believe truths with plausible fake ones. In this case, the role of hard-to-believe was played by a Bill Cosby anecdote:
After Miller unveiled the “It’s It and That’s That” slogan at a 1991 sales convention, guest speaker Bill Cosby joked to the crowd, “Which one of you idiots came up with that?”
Where were we?
Oh, the Ad Slogan Tournament. A breezy little diversion, right? Not after I glanced up at the banner advertisement. “If you died today,” it asked me in a serious serif font, “who would fund your family’s future?” Great question! Hang on, let me decide how far I have “Got milk?” going, then I’ll make plans for my untimely death. What kind of media placement is this?
Maybe it’s brilliant. Perhaps reaching me a few bars into the Alka Selzer jingle is the perfect time to chat about matters of grave importance. This ad unit (as we call it in the biz) is designed to shock me out of the carefree, frivolous world where I’d been happily existing. Hard to get worked up about the Avis (”We try harder”) vs. Delta (”We love to fly and it shows”) grudge match when you’re mentally pricing headstones.
More realistically, this ad was placed by an ad network automatically, without anyone considering the context. And I don’t want that happening here. A heavy message like this could spoil a perfectly happy post about Bailey. Other entries, like my ranting about Sprint, need no extra negativity. These ads steal focus from whatever it is I’m trying to tell you.
That’s why I don’t sell advertising on this site.
Another reason: nobody would ever consider buying advertising on this site. But I like to have long, drawn-out explanations to questions nobody has asked.