Seinfeld
According to my research, everyone has a butt.
But that doesn't mean that when I'm sipping a cup of tea in the morning and immersing myself in the recent presidential debate, I want to see an ad that shows an illustrated posterior with a bar of soap wedged firmly between its two ripe cheeks.
And yet there it was, a rabble-rouser smack dab in the middle of an article in this week's New York Times, getting me thinking about the lengths the Gray Lady has gone to to scoop up that ad revenue that's in the gutter.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has sullied the paper of record. In 2022, I was progressive enough to screenshot the Times helping me sell a sort of wipe with the tagline, “When Your Ass Don’t Smell Like Ass.” It was also marketed as a deodorant for “your armpits and lady parts.”
Since I had no “lady bits” to deodorize, this wasn’t exactly convincing, but the real pinnacle of the Times’s butt irrelevance came when I was served an ad featuring a sad-looking dog pointing the business end of his behind directly at the camera. “It’s time to put your dog’s anal gland problems behind you,” I was told.
I have never owned a dog, and never will, much to the dismay of my children. So it fell to Ars Technica Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, a noted dog lover and true “friend of all creatures, even rats,” to explain to me what this perplexing ad actually meant.
Once you start looking for these kinds of oddly direct ads in self-consciously “posh” media, you see them everywhere, including in The Atlantic, where an ad for a bidet once promised that it would make my “butt crack smile.”
(Perhaps this last ad was due to my boss, who spoke so highly of the advanced Japanese toilet technology that I looked it up on Google, probably forever branding myself as some sort of “ass man.”)
What the rode Before seeing any of these ads, they all looked cheap, and none of them felt relevant. I have nothing against the noble bidet, but having “holy s*** this thing's a gamechanger!!!” pop up in the middle of my screen while I was contemplating a chinstroker of an article was not exactly the reason I visited The Atlantic.
The great irony of online advertising today is that it often claims to be “targeted,” using our personal and demographic information to show us the ads we've supposedly seen. want to to see. Wouldn't I rather see ads that were “relevant to my interests”? Maybe. But I can say with certainty that after two decades of being “extremely online” for work, the number of ads I've clicked on willingly and enthusiastically must be in the low double digits.
Instead, the engines that power these ad networks continue to bombard me with two types of ads: 1) those that are completely irrelevant to my interests and 2) those that are relevant to my interests because they show the exact product I once viewed in an online store. Companies that target ads may know “a lot about me,” but they don't know to know me in a really useful way.
For example, they don’t know why I looked at a certain product online, whether I’ve already decided not to buy it (or buy it somewhere else), or whether I just wanted to better understand my boss’s love of Japanese bidets. They don’t know if I have (or want) a dog. And they (clearly) don’t know that I’m disgusted by an edible product shaped like a human ear, with both bite marks and Mike Tyson’s name on it.
(Fortunately, some sites, including Ars Technica, let you opt out of ads entirely by subscribing for a few dollars a month, contributing directly to our profits.)
