The poster features a baby’s face, with his or her mouth wide open. What is wrong is around the mouth. It looks bloodied. It looked like the area of the face around the mouth has been mutilated. Or a carnivore baby that just had his or her feast of, hmm, raw meat.

It turns out that the poster was about “organic facial”. It was on a shop that sells the idea of using organic skin care products. Organic skin care products are basically made from ingredients grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, or genetically modified organisms. Somewhat like what organic food is.

But the baby’s face is still grotesque. I wondered what has the baby’s face got to do with organic skin care? Well, on closer inspection, it seems like the bloodied mouth is actually meant to be some sort of organic skin care product. The use of the baby, I suppose, was to depict baby soft skin?

Whoever made the poster ought to be fired. The graphics makes a very wrong first impression. It is simply terrible. The fact that the poster got me talking about it, and perhaps got other people noticing it, is not a good excuse. I think you could have made a plenty good attractive poster without making the wrong first impression.

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Interestingly enough, if you go to Google and search for “Apple Travel Laptop”, the 2nd sponsored link that appears is to the same Sony site. It seems that Sony is trying to position itself to be seen by buyers wanting to look for Apple notebooks.

Of course, there is nothing illegal about what they’re doing. But I just find it not in good taste to “steal” eyeballs this way. It would have been much nicer to do it in a more subtle way.

I liked the advertising tussle between SingTel’s red umbrella and MobileOne’s yellow sunshine, for example. They were quite funny. MobileOne’s recent swipe and other things red and green (StarHub) wasn’t so funny though.

Speaking of clever advertisements, have you seen the series of “Hi, I’m a Mac; And I’m a PC” advertisements ran by Apple? It started off very clever and funny. Of late, I think they are running out of steam, but they still make good entertainment that I do look forward to. Microsoft has finally gotten fed up at being “positioned” by Apple and decided to spend $300M on an advertising campaign that includes Jerry Seinfeld with Bill Gates. The first installment of the advertisements just totally doesn’t make any sense. Someone remade the first installment with an “alternate ending” that’s quite funny.

Anyway, back to the wrong that Sonny is doing. What in the world has Sony got to do with Apple? Are they kind of admitting that Apple products are better afterall?

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Be a Part of Our Army. Bring Out the Leader in You! Join Our Army, The Decisive Force.

I’m just thinking whether I should tweak my Adsense so that the Mindef advertisemtnt wouldn’t appear on my blog. Afterall, it seems rather ironical to find myself supporting the SAF recruitment campaign.

Recently quite a number of interesting types of advertisements have started appearing here. One type that I’m quite intrigued about is dating websites. I guess it’s because some of the content here is lifestyle oriented. But another rather odd is an opinion poll website, and it’s asking whether Singapore’s current PM Lee Hsien Loong is doing a good job. I hope the PAP doesn’t start thinking that my site carries objectionable content!

Anyway, back to my mundane routine these couple of weeks. Today is the end of the 2nd week of my 3 week ICT. Time flies (not really actually), and in just a few more days it’ll be back to usual work. Sometimes, ICT is a nice break from the usual work life routine. Sometimes, we also find that ICT mirrors some of the same problems from the usual work life routine. People who politic, people who backstab, people who are complain-some. Did I mention people who politic?

Same problems, just different place. The reality is that life is not fair. But we learn to cope with all that.

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I think they owe everyone, especially their customers, a much better explanation than that. What was the complication about? How complicated can it be to renew domain names? Besides, domain registrars do send out renewal reminders at least one month before the domain expiry. What can be so complicated that Advertlets cannot sort out in one month?

A business like Advertlets depends on its Internet presence, and a working domain name is certainly an important pre-requisite for its Internet presence to work. A typical brick-and-motar business can probably live with Internet outage, even if they do sell products or services over the Internet. For example, so what if Pizza Hut went off the net for a day. Big deal. I doubt it would seriously affect its business nor annoy its customers. But what if Amazon.Com went off the net?

The worse thing is that when Advertlets went off the net, blog sites that put up Advertlets advertisements ran into trouble: Visitors to their blog site found themselves redirected to a placeholder for the expired Advertlet.Com domain. It is one thing to be “out of service”, and another to bring all your customers down with you! Perhaps Advertlets needs to rethink how their advertisements are marked up in sites.

As I am writing this, Advertlets put up a new post claiming the issue has been partially resolved. Really? The WHOIS database continues to show that the domain is expired. The Internet DNS root servers for the .COM TLD also show that Advertlets.Com is currently parked at dns.parkpage.foundationapi.com. Who are they trying to kid? Their post also asks readers to leave comment to let them know “which areas are not facing the problem anymore”. If it works for anyone, well, then something is wrong because it is not supposed to work given that the DNS root servers are not updated!

I think they don’t know how the Internet works. How sad for a business to depend on the Internet and yet not understand how the Internet works.

ps: I don’t mean to be overly critical. I hope this would be a reminder to other Internet businesses to be mindful about “little matters” that can become big problems.

Update (7 Jan 2008): Apology from Advertlets. Still doesn’t quite answer my dying question of “what happened”, but nevertheless, time to move on.

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