# Posted 12:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

MEAN ADVERTS SUCK WATCH: I was just paused to think, after reading some Aussie (not Porter) mouthing off in the Sunday Times about being rather glad turbaned terrorists had not knocked over the Chrysler Building or Rockefeller Center.

But what stopped me in the midst of my hot cocoa (courtesy my £1.20 Dualit espresso maker's milk frother, the gift that keeps on giving) wasn't so much Robert Hughes's decrying of monumental architecture. (Though he does, and it did; while I agree with him on the Bibliothèque Nationale, which turned out terribly suited in its window design for its basic purpose of archival preservation of books, I think it's a bit much to disavow the whole project. For no other reason than 95 per cent of things done in any avenue of culture are a bit rubbish anyway, but it's the 5 per cent that matter). It had more to do with a falling twin towers colliding against several Land Rovers transiting eastwardly across my screen. What I'm more curious about today is the reorientation of the commercial economy of newspapers toward online advertisement.

As everyone knows, the New York Times is meant to lose money on straightforward sales from each print impression. Where they recoup is on adverts, and there the marginal added sale provides them with a basis for charging more from advert purchases. So far, so likely to keep the world in grey. With internet readership now displacing print, newspapers have turned to dubious ideas such as Times Select, watching an advert voluntarily as with Salon (or unobtrusively as with, say, the Washington Post), or - the proximate cause of my hot milk growing colder as we speak* - the Sunday Times's rather obtrusive use of automobiles chasing you around the screen, requiring you to click on their moving target several times in a way likely to provoke nostalgic memories of Space Invaders, but perhaps not pleasant sentiments toward Land Rover. This is the point I'm hung up on - is obtrusive advertising really likely to stir readers to enhanced chances of buying a product, or favourability toward its brand; or is it not as wont to provoke revenge selection of a product which has not been touted as loudly or with as poor manners. Somewhat in the way we're all more likely to buy our curry from the store without the tout outside, ceteris being paribus.

Just a thought. Readers, please correct me where I'm wrong. There have got to be people who know this market much, much, much better than I do.

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* For the lacteal formal cause instead, see the Allen Ginsburg restatement of the laws of thermodynamics:
First law of thermodynamics - 'You can't win.'
Second law of thermodynamics - 'You can't break even.'
Third law of thermodynamics -'You can't quit.' (Because you can never get to absolute zero.) (4) opinions -- Add your opinion