{"id":1395,"date":"2011-04-28T01:41:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T00:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2011-04-28T01:41:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T00:41:15","slug":"gamestop-network-possibly-the-worlds-worst-advertising-proposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2011\/04\/28\/gamestop-network-possibly-the-worlds-worst-advertising-proposition\/","title":{"rendered":"GameStop Network: (possibly) the World&#8217;s worst Advertising proposition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(a.k.a.: &#8220;how not to advertise on the internet, lesson 101 for Advertising Agencies who have no idea how &#8220;advertising&#8221; works, or what it exists for&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>Tonight, as I tried to show someone a game, it took 12 &#8211; twelve! &#8211; refreshes of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kongregate.com\/games\/synapticon\/tyrant?tab=achievements\">this page<br \/>\n<\/a> before Gamestop would stop replacing a URL with a flash advert for something unrelated.<\/p>\n<p>The advert was for cat food. !. !!. !!!111!!!!!!!11. Some stupid crap that I don&#8217;t want, and which Gamestop *should know without doubt* that I&#8217;ve seen 50+ times before; they know this because every time I view that page, I&#8217;m logged-in to the Kongregate badge-tracking system (via cookies and auth).<\/p>\n<p>(they also know that I have *never* clicked on the ad; it doesn&#8217;t take genius to work out that I have zero interest in the product, and that every time they show it to me, they are almost certainly damaging the client &#8211; what kind of ad-agency is so stupid as to *not* realise how bad this is?)<\/p>\n<p>Maybe &#8230; they are very, very stupid &#8211; and deliberately pissing-off players with adverts they&#8217;ve already seen &#8211; or, perhaps, they are charging advertisers 50 times (or more) to show adverts to the same individuals over and over again. It damages the website&#8217;s reputation, so presumably (educated guess) reduces the usage of the Kongregate domain; I&#8217;d be surprised if they&#8217;re doing it without some kind of remuneration&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>(NB: this new take on ads did not exist until GameStop purchased Kong; I feel reasonably confident in guessing that neither of the Greer siblings had anything to do with this insanity)<\/p>\n<p>If I worked for the advertising agency that had an employee who was stupid enough to sign this deal with GameStop, I&#8217;d be suing for breach of contract, fraud, or negligence right now; this is *not* how advertising works. Not even the most basic level of 1990&#8217;s-era checks have been put in place: IMHO either GameStop is screwing their clients, or they&#8217;re just really, really stupid (I&#8217;m betting on the latter).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(a.k.a.: &#8220;how not to advertise on the internet, lesson 101 for Advertising Agencies who have no idea how &#8220;advertising&#8221; works, or what it exists for&#8221;) Tonight, as I tried to show someone a game, it took 12 &#8211; twelve! &#8211; refreshes of this page before Gamestop would stop replacing a URL with a flash advert [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}