I was watching a few videos on MSN Video, and it seems that Gillette Venus (women’s razor) was the only sponsor - they played the same ad every three videos of so. Beyond the obvious bad targeting of showing me a woman’s razor, and the redundancy of the same video over and over (which tends to breed brand dislike in my opinion), I was shocked at how completely crappy the video looked. Flash isn’t a great medium for high-quality video (though the new h.264 codec in Flash 9 rocks!) but this video reached new lows in terms of quality. Check out this screen shot (saved as a PNG file, so the poor quality is from the video):

If you were an advertising executive working for Gillette, how would you feel about your product being portrayed in such a low-quality manner? The video was truly atrocious in quality. Perhaps MSN Video has some ridiculous limits on the bit rates of submitted advertising videos, but if I were working for Gillette I’d say “This is the video quality we want, if you want our advertising dollars, you’ll run this.”

I’ve noticed that a number of people, pretty much on a weekly basis, are deciding to link directly to images on this blog rather than copying the image to their own server. I’ve watched it happen for quite some time, but after seeing a few spam blogs do it, I decided it was worth putting a stop to: so, from now on, if you want to use an image on this site, please copy it to your own server or blog. Thanks!