Breinthewild

Of the few select social media sites I occasionally spend time on, several have gotten weird lately when it comes to advertisements. I’ve gotten used to ads that have been hand-picked by the algorithm for my viewing, and those mostly breeze by the peripherals of my life without my brain registering them. I’ve gotten good at tuning out ads, simply out of necessity. There are SO MANY ALL OF THE TIME EVERYWHERE, (especially for AI, uuuuugh) that I mostly delete, skip, or suffer through them with minimal impact.

However, lately I’ve noticed a change in the ads I’ve been receiving: they’ve become hilarious. For example, my Youtube ads apparently believe that I am overweight (ozempic), septuagenarian (dementia meds), schizophrenic (schizophrenia meds), have a vaping addiction (teenage don’t do vape PSAs), and desperately need car insurance (the Limu Emu haunts my nightmares).

While none of these things are true, I can kind of see where they’re coming from. Given the scrapable information about me online, my rough age bracket and website tendencies, chances are at least one of those categories applies to me. They don’t, because humans are not simply the average of their statistics, no matter how much companies would prefer them to be, BUT I can see a world in which some of those categories come close(ish).

There is one site however (which shall remain unnamed) where the ad algorithm is so impressively, incredibly wrong, I started taking screenshots to document the process. Maybe that’s the plan? To make an ad so hilarious it gets shared organically? I know similar processes happen on TikTok, where companies purposefully create brainrot to gain traction. Those appear polished. These ads are… decidedly less so. Take a look.

{It should be stated that there’s a high chance ALL of these ads are scams. I did not visit any of the websites in these screenshots out of a sense of self-preservation. I recommend you avoid them as well.}

This ad sent me down a wiki rabbit hole on sand cartels, I thing I had never heard of before this ad. Apparently anything can be smuggled, including sand, mostly for construction purposes. Kitui is a county in Kenya, where rivers are being eroded by illegal sand harvesting to the point where it’s threatening local water supplies. Of all the strange ads I received during this venture, this one gets bonus points for at least teaching me something.

This particular ad sparked this post. At the time, I had no idea if feeler tips were a real thing or not. The ad hits like a bunch of random words flung together, photoshopped with pictures of buttons and broken doorknobs. I’ve since learned that feeler tips are an actual tool for working with lenses for glasses. Looks like I can add “working optometrist” to my personal dataset.

This one was notable if only for the fact it reminded me of this post:

At some point, every new startup decided it needed a unique search-engine-optimized brand name to draw attention. Once the real and sensible English words were used up, they started throwing nonsense together and copyrighting it. The origin of this trend was likely Google, who was so successful with their made-up word (roughly based on an existing word), it became a real word meaning “to search on the internet.” If I had to guess, I’d say Porkbun is chasing that high.

This ad has everything. A cut off image. Vague conspiracy-theory-sounding ideas. Ironic quotes around a “random” word. Word salad to the point where you have little to no idea what it’s actually trying to sell you. The words DISINTEGRATING NUCLEUS in all caps. The button to find out more being labeled “discover the truth.” A link to a wordpress site. 10/10.

As a former journalist, this one just made me mad. I may go off on an AI rant in another post because I have a lot to say about the topic (but then again I may not because other people have already said it in a better, more succinct fashion). In short: I hate almost everything about AI. As a data-compiling service for humans, I think it’s an acceptable tool. As a lazy art creation device, I find it abhorrent. I consider journalism to fall under the second category.

The problem is AI doesn’t give you the truth (you know, that thing journalists are allegedly paid to uncover and write about) it gives you a statistically likely answer. These are NOT the same thing. All the use I personally saw of AI before I left the field was NOT to compile or summarize data, but as a shortcut for writing scripts, or pure laziness when it came to the painstaking accuracy of reporting that the public is paying journalist for. All this raises red flags for me even before getting into the economic, environmental, and social issues raised. I personally have never used AI language models to compile a single sentence (outside of inescapable Google Doc spellcheck suggestions which I’ve found more and more erroneous as time goes on) and I hope I never do. Unfortunately, AI seems to be everywhere these days, and it’s getting harder and harder to avoid.

Another 10/10 advertisement. Who are these workplace bullies? Who is “us”? Who is Beth Pollock and why is she trying to advertise to me? Why is “Insight” capitalized? So many questions, so little time. In addition, we have the classic “image cut off” aspect which gets bonus points for cutting of the name of the website. I also love the bitmoji slapped on a white background with no other context. It looks like something my mom would text me.

I’m going to keep collecting odd ads moving forward (more out of a sense of morbid curiosity than anything else). Ironically, this process has caused me to reflect on advertising in general. In theory, I’m not opposed to advertisements that feature goods that are relevant or interesting to me. In practice, every time an ad blocks my progress on a website I’m trying to access, or interrupts a video I’m watching, an immense hatred for both the ad and its product/company burns within my soul. I’m all for content creators getting paid (and have willingly sat through ad reads/bought items to support creators I enjoy) but the current state of advertising is a horrible experience for the buyer and unfortunately, I don’t see it improving anytime soon.