Spent the evening with my wife, oldest children and parents at the local Scout District Awards Banquet.

It was a good meal and a nice time.

I have a Smart Phone that runs Windows Mobile that I carry for part of my job.

There is an addictive little game on there called Bubble Breaker, some of you may know it well.

I solved it for the fourth time in 2703 games today.

Maybe I need to find something else to do with my free time.

I’ve written a little about Advertising here.  I don’t claim to be a guru, nor do I claim to be in the demographic of every Ad that I see or talk about.  It’s mostly just my own thoughts and observations.

One of the nice things about web advertising is that you can make them interactive, as opposed to Television, Radio, Newspaper, Magazines, Billboards, etc. where you can’t really interact with the Ad.  Sure there’s the occasional radio Ad that tells you to honk your horn or something like that but I wouldn’t consider that true interactivity.

Web Ads on the other hand allow you to click on something, play a short game, mouseover the Ad to see the full resolution, etc.  I’m sure that we’ve all seen them.

This morning while looking at a popular news website, I saw this Ad.  I don’t think that my first impression was really what the designers had intended.  I read the text wrong.

I’ll give you a chance to read through it first, then I’ll tell you what my impressions were.

So what did you think?  What were your impressions?

Well for me I somehow saw “Place the patch on her arm, receive a FREE Trial!” and in my mind I thought “You’re right, put the patch on her arm, she dies, you do get a “Free” Trial courtesy of the U.S. Government”.

I don’t know why I thought that and I’m sure that those who designed the Ad really don’t care what I thought, but that’s what I thought.

Is this what they want their demographic to think when they see the Ad?

Probably not…

I arrived home from work this evening to find that nearly all of the snow in my front yard gone.

I’m not sure that I’m ready for the Spring to come yet, but I guess if it has to, then it has to.

Having lived in PA for a time I became very familiar with Sheetz.  We stopped in there frequently to buy our lunch, which usually consisted of a couple of snack cakes and a soda.  It’s not nutritious I know but when you’re a missionary on a fixed budget and you could get your entire lunch for $0.65 it was well worth it.

Though after a while we started calling them “Little Debbie Hurl Snacks” and I still can’t eat the Oatmeal Snack Cakes without literally needing to hurl.

They (Sheetz) were always clean and reasonably nice to shop in.  They also had clean restrooms and again as missionary you quickly find out where all of the clean public restrooms are in your area.

Then I saw this article today and honestly had to laugh.

Mainly because what’s so different with the name of the store and what this story is talking about?