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Tearing Apart a Hard-Sell Anti-Virus Ad
climenole writes "I came across an email sent by a security vendor, reminding me, no urging me with the liver-transplant sort of urgency, to renew my subscription to their product, lest my pixels perish. I spent a minute or two staring at the email, thinking about all the poor souls out there who do not have the comfort of being a geek and who may actually take the advertisement seriously." That led to this insightful deconstruction of these over-the-top ads, the kind that make it hard to keep straight the malware makers and the anti-malware makers.
Thank you for your uninformed, meaningless opinion. It has be forwarded to the trash where it belongs.
Everything he points out is true and illustrates how ridiculous advertising is now, especially in consumer-targeted tech products: forget facts and the reality of what their product does, just make sure they know they need it even if it's blatantly wrong or misleading.
Good fucking Christ your, i.e., Timothy, standards are low if that passes for 'insightful'. Usually these sort of puffed-up rantings are confined to sociology or semiotics journals. Since the author seems to pride themselves on the analysis of signs and symbols, it bears pointing out that, in this case, red has precisely fuck all to do with conveying 'danger' as it's McAfee's goddamned branding color. There are about a zillion decent arguments on both sides of whether or not AV products are needed. This idiocy isn't even close.