advertising no-nos

On our encroaching “AI” dystopia

I put “AI” in quotes because it’s not really about intelligence at all, people just glommed to the term because it:

  • Already existed
  • Sounds futuristic
  • Sounds high-tech

Google released an ad that has been airing during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics (as an aside, this is the first Olympics that has been known probably as much for its meme generation as the athletic competition) which showed a father helping his young daughter write a fan letter to Olympic athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone–by using Google’s Gemini AI.

The ad (and Google’s defense of “it tested well”) is wildly tone-deaf and a prime example of how people don’t want AI to work. Leave the creative stuff to humans, AI can handle the drudgery. And yet a lot of the big AI push is the exact opposite.

Ars Technica story: Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash

In the comments to the above story is the following comment, which resonated with me:

A growing number of people expect the AI bubble to burst, it’s just a question of how soon.

I’m thinking it will be sooner rather than later. We’ll see what happens by the end of the year!

When your apple cider ad goes subliminally Nazi

Maybe it’s me (it’s probably me), but when I saw this ad in an unnamed email flyer, I thought:

a) That annoying art style I so fervently dislike
b) The person done in that art style, with the spaghetti limbs, is shaped…sort of like a swastika?

So I looked up an actual swastika to compare. According to Wikipedia, the left-facing swastika is “a sacred symbol in the Bon and Mah?y?na Buddhist traditions.”

It looks like this:

And if you tilt it 45 degrees, the legs work, but the arms are bent the wrong way, because that would be a very odd way for someone to hold their arms while running.

Still, it made me think of a swastika, and I can’t be the only one. I mean, yes, I totally can, but I’d like to think I’m not (fake edit: apparently this has been discussed on social media of some sort and the consensus is totes a swastika).

Dear advertising wizards: Don’t make your stuff look like swastikas. And pay more attention in history class!

Bad design: Unnecessary self-promotion in product reviews

This is probably more a complaint than actual bad design, but it’s my blog, so here it is!

There are a billion or so tech sites out there that review tech products. One such product commonly reviewed are laptops.

Apple just released updated MacBook Pro laptops that “correct” many of the features of the previous model, released in 2016.

Tech sites are reviewing these. And a few choose these reviews to indulge in a little branding:

They put their own website up on a browser running nearly full screen on the laptop’s display. You know, in case you were reading a review on engadget and forgot you were on engadget, or on The Verge and forget you were on The Verge.

The Verge is especially bad at this when reviewing phones or tablets, as they’ll use their own wallpaper for the background, which more often than not, is some hideous-eye-bending vomit of neon color, festooned with their logo.

You’ll never guess which site this product review image came from. (Bonus points for giving Sony some extra ad exposure.)

This is VERY SUBTLE, The Verge:

Notch on new MacBook Pro
In which The Verge chooses to associate itself with Apple’s notch

Really, looking over the first batch of reviews for the new MacBook Pro, it seems The Verge and engadget are the primary culprits here. And I should add a caveat–The Verge piece is only a “first impressions”, not a full review. We’ll see how they handle that shortly.

UPDATE: Here’s a screenshot from The Verge’s full review:

Hmm, what site could be reviewing these laptops? Hmm!

Still, every other review or first look I’ve checked so far does not advertise the site in shots of the laptops themselves. I almost wonder if engagdget and The Verge are mandated to do this. They lean more toward “filthy casual” than sites like TechRadar, so it’s possible.

Anyway, it’s annoying and unnecessary, and I already have enough ads in my life without cute versions of the same being snuck into product reviews or similar articles.