What not to do in advertising

Catch Your Limit is a marketing and management consulting firm. We are part of the world of advertising but certainly not an ad agency. We might do creative from time to time but it certainly isn't our focus. The cool thing about us not being an agency is we can complain about agency work without feeling like we are attacking one of our own. I don't know where this ad came from but it is one of the ads I hate most.

It is an ad for lowermybills.com. They seem to place a lot of really bad ads everywhere at msn.com. The fact is I hate this one almost as much as the one that features George Washington and Abe Lincoln dancing with each other.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to create these should be severely punished. How can they even sleep at night.

I guess what amazes me the most about these and others like this (nearly all domestic car advertising) is the abundance of chatter in the advertising industry about really connecting with consumers and using increasingly sophisticated technology to do so. But then in the end you still have ads like this. In fact this ad uses some kind of streaming video that shows the girl dancing in excitement. In the end all that technological know-how boils down to continuing to do the same old "SELL" SELL" traditional advertising has always done which consumers always try to avoid like the plague.

As long as I'm blasting advertising I'd also like to throw a punch in their to the websites that allow this garbage. Every time I go to a site like cnn.com or espn.com and I get a pop-up I never want to come back. Pop-up advertising should be restricted to porn sites. Those are the types of places you expect them, not in places you consider real websites, professional websites.

Move in and listen real close to the next part. If a pop-up comes up on my screen I certainly don't want to play a game on it. (I'm screaming now) This is not engaging the audience, this is annoying and I shouldn't have to be a part of it just so I can get my news.