Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

27-Apr-2005

Stupid banner ad of the day

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 3:56 pm

Heh. An interesting tale of banner ads…

I was surfing along and happened to see this banner on a software site that covered multiple platforms:
Your Mac may need a tune-up. Click Start to recommend improvements.

Thinking nothing of it– and thinking it was awfully interesting that they were specifically targeting Mac users– I decided to go ahead and click on the banner to see what they were selling… and I was met with this:

PC Booster: You can get more speed and stability out of your Windows computer...

Mehhh? I guess they don’t quite get this whole Mac thing…

Seems like they were just dynamically substituting into the ad whatever platform was mentioned in a browser’s user agent string, regardless of whether it actually made any sense in the context of what they were selling— and thus ended up pitching a product that’s next to useless for a system clearly recognized by the ad as such. Great work, InKline.

9 Comments »

  1. They also used a “windows” green arrow in the same ad as a mac button

    Comment by no one — 18-Jun-2005 @ 4:40 pm

  2. ‘no one’: That’s because it was an HTML form input. So of course Safari rendered it Mac-style.

    Comment by codeman38 — 18-Jun-2005 @ 5:10 pm

  3. hi

    Comment by hi — 19-Jun-2005 @ 9:33 am

  4. hey

    Comment by hey — 24-Jun-2005 @ 1:09 pm

  5. hello

    Comment by hello — 26-Jun-2005 @ 9:42 am

  6. hi everybody .And mom

    Comment by sawderf — 04-Jul-2005 @ 9:13 am

  7. That’s crap. Who cares. I’m gonna go listen to Mick Jagger.

    Comment by A person — 14-Jul-2005 @ 5:05 pm

  8. i want a cookie

    Comment by I want a cookie — 29-Oct-2005 @ 8:29 am

  9. I bit on the live TV right on your PC deal for a sale price of $29.99 plus you have to buy the $9.99 to get it to do exactly what you want. Do you know if there is a way I can get my money back?

    Comment by sharon — 29-Apr-2007 @ 9:24 pm

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