Vulgarity pays. Or does it?

In the past 36 hours or so, most of the websites I visit daily have been inundated by a series of ads, paid by the makers of Vimax, inviting men to expand their manliness.
(I am certainly not going to link to it, I am sure you can find it – or, more likely, it will find you, whether you want it or not.)

The message is very simple, along the lines of:

Surprise her with extra inches...

and

Want to shock the girls?

It is complemented by appropriately clicheic and poorly executed imagery.
(Worry not: there are no images of the organ in question, either "before" or "after" - thank God for small mercies... But there are aesthetically no less offensive closeups of women resembling hyperventilating, half-dead fish that, frankly, I don't see how anyone could be even interested in »surprising« or »shocking« anyway.)

Well, my pet websites – especially Care2 and Redjellyfish, IMDB to a lesser degree – certainly »shocked« yours truly by their inclusion of such advertising.

What's extraordinary is not the ubiquitous nature of this series – although I am not sure I've seen anything like this campaign on mainstream websites – but its unusually low-brow concept and imagery.

Will the client catch a lot of fish with such vulgar baits?

I am guessing... of course. Of course, they will.
It seems they always do.
Because you can always rely on people to be gullible to the point of stupidity, and to fall prey to the vulgar, even if it costs them their eyesight. (Besides, when you're trying to sell cr** to customers uneducated enough to buy into it, aesthetic sophistication will only harm the desired effect.)

But that's not the point.
What puzzles me is the willingness of apparently respectable and respectful websites to run these ads.

First of all, everyone sophisticated enough to use the internet (and even striving to use it for a greater good, like the visitorship of click-to-donate websites, for example) knows – or should know by now – there are no pills or other aids to effectively enlarge the male sexual organ. It is the sort of message one can easily envisage in the The Sun, the National Enquirer, that sort of »newspapers«, and their internet counterparts. Tabloids. You would expect them to have a very low opinion of their readers' intelligence or/and education – and, well, let's be honest: justifiably so.

But mainstream websites? Respectable online newspapers, click-to-donate sites, IMDB (not to mention certain »conspiracy sites«, where, I am sure, they will glean hundreds of eager customers)?

The truth is, the websites that run these ads do look diminished – very much so –, certainly in my eyes. They look... well, willing to stoop to almost anything in exchange for good money – including the ultimate »no no«: communicating to your visitors that you think they are uneducated and/or stupid.

What's remarkable - and somewhat worrisome - is that they never stooped to anything quite like this in the past.

Is »recession« already hitting them, and as badly as that?
(Yes, those are inverted commas, and it's not a punctuation error on my part.)

Is it some sort of post-post-modern sociological experiment of dubious ethics?

Whatever it is, I am sitting here, writing this, instead of spending the same amount on time on one or more of the websites above, as I would usually do at this time of the evening.

But as long as there are men clicking on those hideous banners, I guess they don't care.

The thing is... there's a good chance I won't be coming back even after those ads have run their course and they remove them.

Make no mistake: I am not offended by the implicit presence of the mighty(-to-be) penis.

I am considerably more offended, on a purely aesthetic level, by the brain-dead expressions of the unlovely faces shown to illustrate the reaction of the recipients of the shock-surprise.

Come to think of it... "offended" is not really the right expression.
I am surprised and disappointed; and, as in real life, I don't really look forward to spending time with anyone who I suspect believes me to be lacking in IQ.

No: no, that's not exactly accurate, either. Not in this case.
I do not believe that those websites I visit really consider the majority of their visitors, including myself, to be stupid, and so it's not that what I resent.

What I resent is being shown they think of me - you, us - principally in terms of numbers.

You may think of your customers in terms of numbers - of course.
You are expected to.

But showing it, rubbing it into their faces, is more than impolite.
It's bad, bad business.

Someone should do the math from this perspective, too.

And yes, I know that I am just one.
But – as the popular poem (and terrific slogan!) goes - I am one.
And there may be more of us, ones, than the myopic marketing pundits of those websites expected.