Hasta La Creative!

Mobile advertising stinks? Whoa, hold the phone, that never occurred to me before! Solve Media picks an easy though apt target to skewer in this video starring comedian Harrison Greenbaum, who riffs about annoying banner ads ("I'm trying to just live my life, and you're throwing signs in my face") and complains that mobile screens are too small for people to interact with such messages ("Who has fingers that tiny? I feel bad for that man"). You're invited to tweet your stories of bad mobile advertising using the hashtag #MobileAds. Greenbaum works hard to amuse, and mostly succeeds, much like Police Academy sound-effects guy Michael Winslow, who, in Solve's previous promo, read aloud from a children's book about the negative impact of bots' bogus clicks on Internet advertising. These clips are fine in and of themselves, but I'm not sold on Solve's proposed solution. The company wants to replace banners and Captcha boxes (where you have to reproduce often illegible words and symbols to access content) with text ads that prompt you to type in taglines instead. Sure, Captchas and banners suck, but being forced to robotically type "I'm lovin' it" seems a tad dehumanizing, and this approach just boils down to throwing a different kind of sign in my face. I don't think they've solved the problem yet.