Thursday, April 20, 2006

Ground Ads - The Future Of Advertising...

Would you like to see the future of advertising? Well with my latest project I hope I can give you a glimpse of the nightmare that awaits. I began it way back in January. It's a bit of a lark based on a few things I'd seen in the news stories to do with people targeting Google Earth and such services. I got the idea to do it after writing this piece at Third Square.

Ground Ads is a bit of a piss take, I've kept putting it off as other projects reared their head, but when I saw this article about Maxim targeting Google Earth earlier this week, I thought I'd better crack on and get it done before the idea behind it was passe. There's some political humour in there as well as general swipes at marketing - but the original idea seemed a lot funnier than the execution.

Sadly, I can see a lot of what I was aiming for suggesting actually happening given the way things are going in the world. I know I'm tapping into the revenues from web marketing with every site I make, but believe me I can hear Bill Hicks in the back of my head.

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good.

On a skills level, this site is a first for me as it's my first ever completely table less CSS design. I've used a couple of templates in the last couple of projects, but this was built from the ground up. Believe me, it took hours of hair pulling and fiddling to make it look so dull. Anyway, other than the odd update when I spot a related news-story, that's been fired and forgot. I just wish it hadn't taken so long.

Posted by Dio Bach at 20:54

6 Comments:

Elise Tomlinson said...: I think people should pay sattelites to project ads from space onto real flat surfaces, say the fronts of people's homes or the local supermarket or the football field.

Anyway, I applaud your tables free css! I hate to be the bearer of bad news...but it seems your right hand nav bar isn't top justifying in IE 6. I had a similar problem with one of my tables free sites, I never did figure out how to fix it. Let me know!; 11:48 PM
Dio Bach said...: Oh heck - I forgot to check it in IE. I forget people use that! Me goes off to look.; 12:36 AM
Elise Tomlinson said...: Are you a FireFox guy? Me too actually, only I like to mix it up from time to time.; 7:12 AM
Dio Bach said...: Oh yeah, Firefox and Mozilla before that. :)

I fixed it now, I ended up culling the CSS from the bespoke templates I didn't do for the last few quick blogs. I find layout with CSS very tricky, but being a fan of clean code, I want to get to grips with it a lot more.; 6:44 PM
keith said...: Did it occur to you that your "project" will undoubted help fuel the very thing you dispise. Life imitates Art and all that!!!! lol; 11:26 AM
Dio Bach said...: Of course it did, but the site wasn't launched until *after* the Maxim thing, and there's been a lot of it the news anyway. It'll happen without my site unfortunately.; 11:58 AM