Ah, Seth Godin

So there's an ad on MSN lately that annoys me. Here's what it looks like:

You can see why it annoys me, right?

The space is not blank. There's not only text there, there's a cow.

When you hover over the cow, you see this:

Ah, more non-blankness!

The word balloon gives you an idea of what you're about to click on. When you do click, you end up here.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a banner ad on MSN go to an Amazon product page. MSN has its own Marketplace, or so I understood. Then again, I don't usually click the ads on MSN, so who knows how many Amazon links I've missed?

And that's the real point: the ad is annoying, but it sure as hell got me to click, didn't it?

That's Seth Godin for you. ("Author, Agent of Change.")

(Bear in mind that I did not click the first time I saw it. I clicked today in order to make this post. So make of that what you will.)

There's a neat aspect to all this: 100% of the author royalties apparently go to charity. That's pretty cool--and another brilliant marketing gimmick.