Look at this.
See this? I actually navigated away from the page accidentally after seeing this. I just couldnt believe it. I sat there trying to refresh until it showed up again for like, ten minutes before seeing the "browse all ads" link.
Seriously? What the hell?
Okay, upon further investigation, this is actually a parody. The poor spelling should have given it away. Good job, Somethingawful.com . You got me. I mean, who in their right mind would...
Ah. Right.
Okay, well. Lets talk about this shall we?
Actually, there isnt really a lot to talk about.
This is "Sex sells" plain and simple. I mean, everything about it is designed to suggest that playing this game will lead to sex one way or the other. After all, ads tend to have some sort of representation regarding their product right? So a game advertised with a with... well... /that/ is sure to feature a fair amount of it, right?
Well. Wrong. The game plays like a bad civ clone. But you're not liable to know that before giving it a shot. Also, its mostly spyware, so, yeah. Don't download it.
You'll notice how the actual name of the game is in this tiny little text up in the corner. Apparently thats where their priorities lie. They don't care at all that you know the games name. All they care about is getting you to start playing it. After all, why would they want to distract people with something like brand identity when they could just feature sex for half an ad?
The text on this one is surprisingly tame compared to some of the later ones in the campaign. "Start your journey now, my lord". Of course imediatly implies a master-servent relationship. This woman, it says, will be at your beck and call. Its actually kind of ironic that this is the closest thing to actually representing what goes on in the game, since you do play as a king or lord of some sort.
Start your journey, I'll give you, is pretty tame. Later ones say "Join the fun" which is a lot more suggestive, but it stil implies that playing this game will set you down the road to bed the pictured model.
Finally, "Unnoticeable Now" at the bottom there. I don't know whether they were trying to imply that you could run it at the office without people seeing it or what, but it seems to suggest that discresion is the sort of thing you'd want to be evoking when playing it. Perhaps you should close those blinds, get a bit more privacy. That sort of thing.
Regardless. The end result is just... uhg. Everything about this ad just says 'sex'. It barely even promotes a product. All it wants is to draw in links. Thats one of the problems with internet advertising I suppose. In the end it doesnt really matter how much exposure an ad gets. All that really matters is how many people actually follow through.
Oh, and in case your interested, here's the evolution of the advertisment campaign. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-of-evony-video-game-ads/
Scary stuff.
Is there any way in which the advertisers are playing with the term "Lord?"
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