Maybe it was just my education, but if I were to judge the advertising/marketing community based on the people who were educated as such… none of this would surprise me and indeed it doesn’t.
Smart and non-horndog business students were few and far between.
GENIUS!
I need new banners for my online “quit your job and work from home making millions” scam blog! (If you buy it, for $50USD, I just send you the source code to my website with very basic instructions on how to set up a LAMP. One line instructions, in fact - “Google it.”)
I’m thinking “Become a pimp from the safety and comfort of your own home. Make millions and get all the women you could ever want!”
FTC will probably shut me down for that one, but it’s bound to happen eventually anyways.
I suppose those ads help their click-through, but don’t they find that a lot of potential players are irritated when they discover is not the porno game implied by the advertisement?
I don’t know who said it, but:
“The internet, where men are men, women are men, and children are the FBI.”
Something that people, and WoW players in particular, don’t seem to notice: yes, there are a lot of male players with female toons. There are also a lot (not as many, but still a substantial number) of female players with male toons. It saves on a lot of in-game hassles, and besides, the gear looks a lot more badass.
Something else I’ve noticed over the years: It used to be that women played primarily healers of some type, with a few dps casters. While there are still a lot of them (and, for some reason, a lot of guys make female healers), I’m seeing a lot more IRL females playing melee characters. I used to be the notable oddball because I liked tanks, melee dps, or hybrid classes; now they may not be as common as the alternatives, but they’re nothing really remarkable. The two other women in my guild’s 10-man Ulduar group are a tankadin and a druid who either heals or tanks as the situation demands (ah, the joy of dual-spec), when five years ago they’d have been priests, and ten years ago they wouldn’t have been there at all.
Personally, despite being a 4X game addict since Civ1, I’m not going to play Civony/Evony, ever. Not because of the boobies, but because of the blog comment spam. I don’t buy anything, ever, from spammers. They’re filthy, stinking scum that ruin everything they touch, and I go out of my way to not give them any money. That, and the fact that they’re WoW gold-sellers, some of the people who have done so much to spoil WoW and, well, pretty much every other game. It may matter to no one except me, and I may be able to do absolutely nothing about them, but I can avoid giving them my money.
Good thing this is a text ad:
[advertisement] Interested in agile? See how a world-leading software vendor is practicing agile.
After all the promises of boobs and “full body” lattes, my fantasy goes dirty imagining a banner ad for that one. Although I really wonder now, what crosses the minds of mgmt types when they hear about ‘agile’ practices for the first time and don’t know yet, it’s about software development.
Interesting stuff about women coming out here. “there are no women on the interwebs” is definitely not true. However, there are vast swaths of webs where a person claiming to be a woman is actually more likely to be male than to be truthful. This problem, or at least its perception, contributes to people/media/etc. ignoring the participation of women in social or gaming web. This feeds back into creating a female-unfriendly atmosphere (like the busty ads) and impedes what could be more healthy intersexual behavior.
Thanks for the link to my site. Hmm, I definitely haven’t seen that last ad you posted. But nice find!
Wow, boobies in advertising? no shit… if you had any form of adblocking think of all the time you could have saved 1) writing the article 2) all the drones that read this article… me included… thank you for wasting my time… get some sort of adblocker…
up next, spammers declare my penis will get bigger! how dare they!
I wonder what the logical conclusion to this sequence of ads is. A pair of ovaries? I hope their game is a spectacular commercial failure.
Bahaha… I’ve seen most of these ads except for that last one, which made me choke on my laughter. It’s so hilariously blatant and devoid of even the faintest context.
Bill Hicks saw where this was going decades ago:
I’ve never seen that last one in the wild either. I was quite shocked to see the second to last on a site that I visit… slashdot I think it was.
This is a particularly (and absurdly) tacky example, but I’m having a hard time thinking of the last time I saw an advert for one of these ‘free’ browser games that didn’t have boobs somewhere on it. Though maybe I just don’t notice the others…
Great post! I’ve noticed all the ads shown except the last one.
This could make a great case study for online advertising.
Sex sells, but in this case, what were they selling?
Only one banner gave a clue with “Build Your Empire. Rule the World!”
I played evony for a while, but their Flash interface is slow and clunky and their game is the most expensive freemium game on the internet.
In the game you can control up to 10 cities and each city has a certain number of buildings you can build (~40 resource and ~40 city buildings) and you choose how much of which building to make. Each building can be upgraded up to level 10. Here’s the catch: To upgrade a building from lvl 9 to lvl 10 you need Michelangelos Script (one for each building). They cost 5$ each. An item for increasing ingame income for 7 days, costs 28$. If you dont like where you are and want to change your position on the map, the random Teleport scroll will cost you 3$ (or 9$ if you wanna pick where you wanna land).
And lets not even talk about the fact that you have to pay per line to talk in world chat.
As for the interface, there are way too many modal dialogs. And it has memory leaks so you have to restart the browser after several hours of playing or it will become much slower (and Task Manager will show your browser eating gigabytes of RAM).
OTOH, the tutorial and quests are very nicely done.
Oddly enough, I found your site and this thread through a purposeful Google of the Civony/Evony ad. Specifically, the second to last ad you have pictured. You can’t imagine how rare it is to see a woman pictured with…well, how I put this…hanging breasts. There’s a better view at http://www.evony.com/evonyyahoo1.html?yahoo1. My goodness…I never though I’d post blog comment with a better view of boobs.
But truly, to see online or anywhere else, a set of advertising breasts anywhere that aren’t so perky they could cut glass, or just set up to wetnursedly suckle the nation, well, it’s remarkable. No flower-shaped areola, no ceiling-pointed pencil-eraser-like nipple; just a normally large flopped over heavy breast. It’s remarkable. !
Truly, you (and Civony/Evony) have no idea how many of us women and girls there are with breasts like this that’d love to see ourselves positively portrayed online. You have no idea. Enough so that I’d Google the image and respond on some message board I know nothing about.
The game may indeed suck. And the advertising may have nothing to do with it. And that must be annoying, and I think the developers and advertisers deserve a kick in the shins for that. But holy cow I can’t believe a normal large-sized boob made it into a mainstream ad!!! I am, at this moment, slightly less ashamed of my similarly-shaped, overlarge, floppy breasts.
If they’re trying to get hits, I’m sure this works awesome. But are people really buying the game because of that?
What has this come to?
Go to Wowhead.com, and you’ll see these square and vertical banner Evony ads. (2nd to last ad)
Her boobs are actually exposed, but nothing shows. They’re just 2 blobs.
SERIOUSLY, YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THROUGH.
Tsk, tsk. Just because the advertising in your blog (overt and less so) is more highbrow, don’t hate!