This post starts out with a ridiculous piece of misinformation! I realized that I had just configured something wrong so Proxomitron wasn’t filtering anything at all, and the sites I was visiting just happened to have a bunch of Flash-based ads. Anyway, it does in fact block many of those ads, although not all. But I wrote this already, and it digresses pretty fast, so here it is:

The shortcoming of Proxomitron is that it only catches the image-based ads, but Flash ads sometimes right through. And Flash ads are inordinately more annoying than image ads, because at least GIF animation stops when you hit “escape” so if an ad sneaks through you can stop it from flashing wildly (if that is in fact what it does), but there is no “stop” button for Flash! So when I see “catch the X and get a free iPod” (or “punch the monkey” or “swat the fly” or… I could, really, truly, go on for an hour like this but that is, really, truly, a tremendously horrible waste of time).

Let me digress for a moment: it is ALWAYS an iPod. At least, it was up until this moment, but let me talk about iPods for a moment, and ads in general. The basic principle is: there is no such thing as free. Nobody wants to give you a free iPod unless they’ll get something from you of greater value than that which they paid for the iPod. If you have to sign up 10 friends to get a free iPod, rest assured that each of those 10 friends is contributing a little more than 1/10 of the cost of the iPod to the coffers of whomever’s giving you the iPod. So you might as well ask 10 friends for $20 each and go buy a nice iPod yourself, right? Well… maybe there’s value in this for the consumer somehow, but remember that no matter what a marketer tells you, there is no such thing as free. But let me put an asterisk on that, since it’s a more complicated issue, because money doesn’t always flow DIRECTLY from you to the marketer. It could be a promotion, or some such. And so on…

But as for the iPod itself. I just don’t like the image of the thing. It’s a pretentious music player. Maybe this is an image that has been created in my mind because of all the “X the X and get a free iPod” (always an iPod) ads, or maybe because it’s become a ubiquitous status symbol that everyone has to have even though there are hundreds of other players that cost less and do more. Maybe it’s because although it has a unique look, everyone has to have one, making them all conformists and I prefer the idea of evaluating products via their own merit. Maybe because I don’t like using Apple computers, although I can, and each experience I have with one validates my taste (and I’ll admit this is mostly a matter of taste, although there are issues on both sides using which one can argue for the superiority of various different platforms over others). Definitely a combination of all of those. This is also the same reason I’m not going to buy a Mercedes or BMW or Ferarri (i.e., status symbol; I hate status symbols); watch me get a De Lorean someday, though! But if I do that I’m not going to keep it in a garage, I’ll drive it around as my main car because otherwise what’s the point? Things are meant to be used.

Oh, anyway. So the iPod has the best reviews of any music player on CNet and it’s probably pretty decent, so never mind most of the above product disparagement, especially since I haven’t really thoroughly tested one. But then, I’m just talking about the product image here, you know, not the product itself. I’d still rather get an iRiver or something like that. I have an MP3 player already, and I’m happy with it. Just go invest in a good pair of earphones… those are a pretty important piece of your sound delivery system, but something I think most people overlook.

What prompted this whole, uh, rant I guess you could call it was a Flash ad I kept seeing which said “spray the stinky monster and get a free* Ionic Breeze air purifier!” with two people sliding back and forth across the screen forever after some brown blob with eyes, and your cursor turned into an image of a spray can. The fact that aforementioned ad would appeal to anyone (especially among the sea of “X the X and get a free* X” makes me question the sanity of the general population of Internet users that such a marketing idea would actually work!

Should product manufacturers be able to control more of how their products are advertised by resellers because certain classes of advertisements, to me and probably many others, represent “negative advertising” which devalues the product’s image??