A little light humour for you today … or possibly, keen insight indeed into the dynamics of Internet advertising. Take your pick.
See, there’s this browser-based game that is known for questionable ethics on a variety of fronts, but it is particularly fascinating and downright amusing to examine the evolution of their advertising. To save you the trouble of clicking, here are the advertisements that have appeared for this game, in chronological order:
That looks pretty reasonable an advert, yes? Plays up the free, straightforward CTA button, informative as to the game’s milieux, looks like the kind of thing we’d probably do. But apparently that didn’t work out so well for them, so they moved to
Still not particularly objectionable we’d say, unless it’s your image they appropriated. But this was a bit too subliminal it seems, the followup was
Now we’re starting to get a bit disconnected from the actual game. But the theme must work, as we see in the next installment,
You armchair psychologists can go to work on what that layout is implying, we’ll just leave that alone. But the effectiveness of this can be deduced from the fact that they had to add to their FAQ “no, there actually is no queen to save in this game, we just made that up for the ad”. Maybe that’s why they dropped it and moved on to
Less and less subtle all the time, aren’t they? But this is as nothing next to the current ads they’re running. No, this is not a joke or a parody, we saw these ourselves all over a file sharing site this morning:
Yes, innuendo is truly a lost art. As is, apparently, even a vague correlation to anything relating to the actual game.
In the few minutes of googling which is all the attention to this that the WTF? moment of seeing that last ad this morning induced, we couldn’t find any analysis of how this progression correlates to actual subscriber growth, so we can’t say for certain that this is actually working out for them. Although you’d imagine that if they weren’t seeing positive results from this advertising strategy, they wouldn’t keep doubling down on it. And hey, it did eventually motivate us to make this post. Although you may notice that we didn’t actually link to the site anywhere here, which is definitely not an oversight.
But although we don’t endorse blatantly deceptive manipulation as an advertising strategy, we think it’s interesting to be aware of just how effective it apparently is. So if you do want to go after the Pavlovian boob-clicking market segment, well there’s how to do it!
