Life without Ads

This morning I was watching a channel that stretched a half an hour documentary to more than an hour. While I was fine with it having it watched on a Free channel and unplanned out of blue. Just thought of a crazy-wild idea. How would life be without Ads. Ads, as in Display Ads, Roller Ads, TVC, Radio, Newspapers, Outdoor, Google Ads, Web Banners, E-mail shots & Newsletters Ads. And not even SMS or Telemarketers. And those annoying brochures left under your apartment’s door or the slips left on your windshield. Clearly no Ads of any sort.

Radio

Imagine driving on a road like Sheikh Zayed Road on a jammed day, traffic ain’t moving. Dial a radio station and listen to your music without no cheesy brand name insert here and there, comes News break then you do not hear that “why stand inline when you can book online, Fly Emirates”, ah so you change to Virgin Radio(104.4) and get that so annoying 5 words weather update, “it’s going to be sunny” and then another insertion, “brought to you by Snickers Ice Cream, your favorite chill”.

Think about this, how much of programming is done to do all the insertions planning. Man! If all that was spent on getting better music and repeating less tracks, we’d have amazing Radio Stations.

Outdoor Banners

Then you get bored of the music played, so you turn on your iPod on your car n’ rock your own tracks. Window down, lite a cigarette take a look around, and you find a jungle of colors and lights. It always reminds me of my room back in the teen days with all the posters in no order. Look right and you see some Hyundai ad, now Hyundai being a luxury wannabe’, look ahead and it’s all about why you should buy cheaper stuff. Air Arabia teaches you that it’s okay to go aged and balled exactly as how you have to accept getting the cheaper Plane tickets. So Air Arabia is something one has to talorate, not something to accept, who got sold on account managers’ crap. So it’s all about the economy weather?

Just like teenager’s posters, you could know his/her music Genre from the posters, you could learn the market from the style of the ads.

Close your eyes for a second and get all that out of your mind, get back to your own music. You remember you’re still connected to the world, hah, got Twitter and Facebook in your car, on your mobile.

You fire up that Twitter client and you find weird @yournickname replies to things you never talked about or related to, snap, spam that is. Star those cool tweets to read up links later on your big screen.

Time to see what your pals are doing, get that Facebook up, oh, got 4 new messages in my inbox. Wow, I feel so popular today, first reads Live invites you to use the Live Messenger App more often. Second reads “Hi I sell iPhone 3G for AED2799, hurry up”, third, “Hey S send me your BB Pin”, forth, “Sponsored by ***** win dinner at… while you’re at it, you get an e-mail notification on your Blackberry, oh, you’d be excited to be receiving replies to some of your earlier sent e-mails. E-mail reads, Lands, Apartments direct from the owner, hurry up.

So what’s up with the “hurry up” is everything on sale and for sale nowadays. Gets darker outside, turn your headlights on, the car ahead has stickers all around it with. Apple’s logo, some Air Intake brand(usually K&N) and when you get tired take a look at your left, there is that ugly public transport bus with AMEInfo all over it, I mean isn’t it enough that we have our inboxes full of AMEInfo already?

By the time you reach your destination you think parking, after a long search you spot a slot and you park. Waiting for the elevator, a screen between every two elevators showing a promotion on ACs? Winter y’all! Yo go in, reach your destination, wait to meet your host, you get coffee in a “Nescafe” mug, cheap bastards. On the waiting table, it’s all classifieds and promotional brochures, people don’t read magazines anymore? Or there’s no more space?

Down the building, reaching to your car, ah, man, another fine for what? Some bastard put up a promotional Brochure on your windshield covering your parking token! Fines remind you of more bills waiting for you, you race to your Post Office, you open up the box and you can’t take anything out, it’s all jammed, because Jutton had to send you a big-huge-brochure that is thick enough to cover up your inbox.

No moral, just a crazy thinking. You see, you can be frustrated about Ads, but can we live without’em? That was a way too negative way of thinking about Ads. I was about to edit some, but hell, that’s some reality.

Tweet This Post

What’s with du? It’s so dunt!

The buzz around Music on Demand by du, “yeah du’s got some new service for downloading music”, “why iTunes ain’t opening the shop for Music in UAE, du did that, and Nokia too”. All this got me to visit du’s website. I’m there and looking for a link to “Music on Demand”. Can’t find it any where on the homepage.

Being a web-head, first thing I did was typing www.du.ae/musicondemand, no luck. Tried musicondemand.du.ae, no. So I went back to du.ae’s homepage. Ah I get lucky there’s a 3,4 second rolling banner that I have to be lucky to see before it shows the next slide. So I clicked on it, it redirected me to a press release for “Music on Demand”, you joking? I’m a user, not a reporter. So I had to read the press release to find the link somewhere in the article. The worst part is the link looked exactly like this: www.du.ae/MyWorld. But anyways I clicked on it.

You want to show me a service you take me to its press release page? Just, why?

This is so not “du”. That was my first impression on the service before even thinkin’ of using it. Because everything done on the page was unprofessional. Back in the last two years I used to give example of du’s website for information architecture and how usable it was, and most remarkably how it connected the brand and went online with it, all intact.

This portal? Not du to me, that’s dunt. I’ll tell ya why! First let me explain something out here. If all this was seen on a start-up’s page, some guys in a garage or workin’ from home, that’d be forgivable because they can go wrong given they’re resources might be tight and limited. du though, can’t go wrong. No excuse! du ain’t a 10K-capital company, that’s why! So if I was du, I’d be ashamed, because if I was du I could afford professionals.

Here’s some.

Branding

This is the part that shows it’s a team that cannot relate to anything design. Why? I can bet on it, the designer didn’t have a look at du’s Branding Guidelines at all. Reason? None of the type-faces used are correct, nor the style of type used. The only things used out of du’s brand is the Logo, and the color pallete, and that’s it. It doesn’t feel du. While I’m not a du insider nor ever worked on Brand du, creatively du is one of my favorite brands that were born in UAE, that’s why it feels odd when you find it going down the toilet with such an awful artwork/development.

Identity Crisis

They call the service “Music on Demand”. Though you don’t see that name anywhere on the page! No where! Literally no where! Check these awkward details.

• Page title(what appears on top of the tab & browser window) is “du” and only clean “du”.
• Subdomain is “content”.
• Website Logo is “du”.

How am I supposed to know what this is called or get this programmed in my mind? How are you working on the awareness? How would anyone identify this other than being a du service which doesn’t feel like it?

This website doesn’t only drift from du’s brand, but this service has identity crisis too. The page doesn’t know what this service is called.

On top of the page, they called it “My World Beta”. Get your act together. Decide, is it “My World” or “Music on Demand”. With all the ads and branding activities couldn’t du invest in a brand for its new service? I don’t know, personally, I’m disappointed at du.

And the cheap part is how skewed, pixelated, and how badly images are resized. I mean they are artists and musicians, get some good photos or resize them well. Man! Such a cheap work.

Tweet This Post