I copied the original layout and washi tape shapes but changed the colours to match the serene pool image I picked for the facing page. I think it came out looking quite pretty!
On to today's app, and I'm going back to Buzzfeed to see what other sponsored content it has to offer me.
Today's top story is about how Boris Johnson is hiring a Daily Mail journalist as his new Press Secretary, which is.... a worry. Despite the feeling that it would probably upset me, I read through anyway and found no ads embedded in it. The next article is a listicle about YouTuber Jenna Marbles' dog which is of no interest to me - I'm not really a fan of her content, or of dogs. Next up, an advertisement for Buzzfeed's "Quibbles & Bits" newsletter. Let's see what that's about.
Buzzfeed has a number of different newsletters that it often advertises in this spot on the homepage, and this one is about "grammar, linguistic tidbits, and word facts you need to know". It prompts me to "enter my email address below" but I guess there's some sort of glitch with the app because there's nowhere on the page for me to enter any information. I've noticed that there are sometimes bits of embedded content on this app that doesn't show on my phone so I guess this is one of those times and I'm going to have to pass on this recommendation.
Next up is a quiz called "What Should You Eat For Dinner?". It's not an ad but I might be persuaded to change my dinner plans depending on the outcome...
It's one of those quizzes where you're asked to pick favourite things that have nothing to do with food (colours, numbers, that sort of thing) to get to an outcome, so I guess it's not going to make a suggestion based on what I'm in the mood for but is more random. After 5 short questions, Buzzfeed says I should have tacos for dinner, which sounds delicious but unfortunately my mum is cooking tonight and tacos are not part of her repertoire. Next time I'm home alone though, I think it might just be taco time.
The Internet Made Me Try It
App: Facebook
Ad: Lookiero
Targeted?: Unsure
Today we're back to Facebook, where I started on day one of this experiment. I've had to scroll through a lot of my feed to find an advert that I can use, as the ones at the top of my feed are for the broadband supplier I already have and a Government awareness campaign. I tried the 'stories' but there was only one ad on there and it was for expensive art software which is not in my budget. The marketplace in my area only seems to be for selling beds and houses, which are definitely not in my budget!
The first advert I ended up seeing that I could use was for a site called Lookiero, which is a clothing subscription box service. I've not heard of this particular company but I've seen Safiya Nygaard get some of these types of boxes before from social media ads, and since this one is offering me a box of 5 items with no purchase necessary, I'm going to give it a go.
Lookiero works like a lot of other clothing subscription boxes in that you fill out a questionnaire and then a stylist picks out items and sends them to you. There were a variety of different types of question - they asked for my clothing sizes, obviously, but also about my hair and eye colour and which features I like to accentuate. They also asked me to pick my favourite from a selection of pictures of different clothing styles, allowed me to link my Pinterest board and let me make a comment to my stylist explaining my style. Doing the questionnaire was quite fun and the idea of a personal stylist picking out some items to suit my answers is intriguing. I suppose what they're offering is the feeling of being a celebrity with a professional to pick your clothes out for you.
The box isn't going to come until next month so it'll be a while before I can review what they send me but I'm looking forward to it - the order was completely free and I will apparently only pay for the items I decide I want to keep, with the rest to be mailed back free of charge.
I'll be back next month to blog about what I receive but in the meantime if you want to place an order and join me on this journey into the unknown, the site is www.lookiero.co.uk . If you've ever ordered from a fashion subscription service let me know what your experience was like!
App: Buzzfeed
Ad: 44 Things Under £4
Targeted?: No
First off, let me apologise for my absence - I've been travelling for work so the hours I usually reserve for blogging have been taken up with fancy meals claimed on expenses and a trip to the cinema to see Jojo Rabbit (both funny and heartbreaking) in a theatre that had sofas instead of standard seats.
Also before I get into today's app/ad I need to return to day one and the Penguin Reading Challenge. I finished reading Persuasion last night, which is the book that was recommended in the first challenge email, and I absolutely loved it! As I said in my previous entry, this was my first time reading Austen and I feel like I've wasted too much time not having picked up any of her novels before (Pride and Prejudice has been on my shelf for the best part of a decade, still unread). I've had another email from Penguin that wasn't reading-challenge specific - remember the January 1st email had ten suggested books to choose from - but there was a recommendation for Jean Rhys' Good Morning Midnight in case I needed it. I've never even heard of this book before but the synopsis was intriguing so I'm on the look-out for it to add to my 'to-read' pile. The rest of the Penguin email featured new books and quizzes and other fun bits and pieces which I enjoyed reading through. Since I don't expect another reading challenge email until February, I'm now reading Claudine At School by Colette to keep me going for the rest of January.
On to Buzzfeed. I mentioned them the other day when I was looking at the 'Buzzfeed Quiz' Twitter page, and their quizzes are the main reason why I have the app on my phone - they're a fun way to kill a few minutes on my commute or while I'm waiting for my tea to be ready. However, I do also read the news and articles on there and while they don't have adverts as such, they do have sponsored articles. The top story on the app right now is about what's happening in Iran, which is obviously not an advertisement, but the next thing I see is a sponsored post, called "44 Things Under £4 That Might Just Turn Your Frown Upside Down". It was actually published a week ago but is up at the top of the page because it's advertorial content - there's a disclaimer at the top of the page saying that Buzzfeed may receive some compensation from sales made by following the links in the article. I admire this transparency, as I know a lot of sponsored articles and posts online will result in revenue for the writer but I don't always see this being declared outright; Buzzfeed's sponsored posts are good in that respect.
I like that they're offering me products that are under £4 as well because that's definitely within my budget for this experiment. The suggestions are mostly cute little trinkets with animals or positive slogans - there's jewellery, stationery, socks and the sorts of things you might put in a Christmas stocking. One of the items on the list is a set of Stabilo pastel highlighters which I actually already own so while this isn't a targeted ad, it ended up being relevant to me anyway. There's lots of things on this list that I like but no one thing that I feel like I must have, so I'm going to purchase item number 1 on the list which is a set of pens.
They're patterned which made me think that they'll all be black or blue ink pens but there's also a little notebook showing different coloured lettering so it's possible that they are coloured fineliners. Clicking the link takes me to Amazon where they're listed as "Korean Cartoon Kawaii Stationery Gel Pen Cute" and the price has gone up in the past week from £2.70 (the Buzzfeed listed price) to £3.09 plus 50p delivery.
The delivery date is 3 weeks away so I guess they're probably coming from Asia and there's not much in the way of description of the product, aside from "Ink color: 10 color" but the reviews and questions state that each pen is a different colour. Speaking of reviews, they're mixed. Some people give them five stars saying that they're cute and that they work well and came in a sturdy box, while others say that they received them in plastic wrapping with pens missing or leaking. I'm willing to take the gamble and see what they send me, especially since I got an Amazon giftcard for Christmas so technically this purchase isn't going to cost me anything.
The estimated delivery states these pens should be with me by Valentines Day so check back next month and hopefully I'll be able to try them out!
App: YouTube
Ad: Saturday Night Live
Targeted: Yes
Last week, YouTube tried to make me buy sofas and watch long movies. Let's see what it wants this week!
The top of my feed is an ad from 'Quixotic Blog' and it's a promoted video. It's in one of YouTube's most popular genres: gaming videos. I'm not a gamer - we had a Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure when I was a little kid and I have Guitar Hero now which I occasionally play on easy mode, but that's all my video game experience - so I've never been able to understand the appeal of watching other people play games online. Looking at this video, I've got no idea what the game is or what I'm supposed to be looking at. Rather than advertising the game itself, I think it's meant to be an advertisement for the channel itself. As the ad means nothing to me, I'm not going to click through and try to make sense of the channel. By the way, if I do get games advertised to me, and I'm sure I will, I won't be buying them since I don't have a console to try them out on...
On to the videos YouTube is recommending to me. Today it's not one of the daily mixes that's at the top of my feed - instead it's a compilation of Ricky Gervais' intros and monologues at the Golden Globes. I clicked and there's no ad, but I'm not actually sure why YouTube thought I'd want to watch this video anyway since I don't like Ricky Gervais. I guess it's probably because I'm interested in movies and comedy in general.
While I was typing this my phone actually went on standby which closed the YouTube app, and when I reopened it the feed had refreshed, so I won't ever know what else was in store for me originally. Upon reopening, I've now got a sponsored video called 'Nail Your Maths GCSE'. Definitely not targeted, since I took the Scottish equivalent of GCSEs 12 (!) years ago. The first non-sponsored video on my feed is a Saturday Night Live sketch called 'Floribama Shore', which is a parody of terrible reality show Jersey Shore set during a hurricane.
I watch a lot of Saturday Night Live clips on YouTube and there are so many of them that I'm not surprised YouTube is always throwing more into my recommendations. This one in particular makes sense today as I just watched their Love Island parody sketch, which I suppose is the British version of America's trashy reality TV. As far as SNL sketches go I'd rank it somewhere in the middle - it didn't really make me laugh but it was a pretty spot on recreation of the type of show it was lampooning. I watched the episode when it came out - the host was Saoirse Ronan - but I didn't remember anything about it, probably because everything else in that episode is overshadowed by the song from Saoirse's monologue about how to spell and say her name (which is one of those songs that's stuck in my head all the time!).
There wasn't an ad attached to the clip but under the video I was invited to buy Season 36 of SNL (not the season that this video came from). Season 36 is the one that ran from 2010 to 2011, which is a couple of years before I started watching the show so I don't think I've seen any of these episodes but it's possible I'll have seen some of the sketches from this era on YouTube. Rather than follow their suggestion to buy the whole season, I thought it would be fun to pick an episode from this run and review the sketches. Looking at the names of the hosts is like a time capsule of the era - there's Bryan Cranston while Breaking Bad was on, Jane Lynch at the height of Glee-mania and Jesse Eisenberg promoting The Social Network. As for musical guests, this season has Katy Perry and Lady Gaga at their chart-topping peak, debuts from Ellie Goulding and Florence + The Machine, plus legends like Paul Simon, Paul McCartney and Elton John.
I've chosen to watch Episode 5, which was broadcast on 30 October 2010 and hosted by Jon Hamm with musical guest Rihanna. I picked this one because I'm interested to see what sort of Mad Men parody they do with Jon Hamm - he's promoting the series of the show where they introduce Megan to the cast - and also because Jon Hamm is hot so I'd like to spend an hour looking at him. This is also the year that Rihanna put out 'Loud' which is one of my favourite Rihanna albums and aesthetic eras so I'd like to see which songs she sings and of course what she wears to perform them.
The cold open to this episode sets the scene politically with Jason Sudeikis playing Vice President Joe Biden. He talks about an election, which I assume must be midterms as we're in the beginning of Obama's first term, before giving a lot of his time to talking about the rescue of the Chilean miners. I don't know about you, but I can't believe that the Chilean miners story was ten years ago! A lot of my understanding of US politics comes from the SNL opening scenes so even on new episodes I miss a lot of the jokes, so even though this one is from a decade ago I don't feel like I'm watching something that I don't understand because of the time period.
Next up we're introduced to the cast, which at this point features stars like Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig, Seth Meyers and Andy Samberg. The only cast member from this season who is still on the show is Kenan Thompson but there are a few who I remember seeing when I've watched the show in the last few years, and a couple of faces in there who I don't remember but who I've seen in sketches. The one thing that did strike me is that there are far fewer women in the cast in 2010 than there are in 2020.
Jon Hamm is hosting the show for the second time and for his monologue he calls on the power of Don Draper to come up with advertising slogans for common household items. It's a fine introduction; not hilarious, but he's very charming.
The first proper sketch is an 'SNL Digital Short', which they don't do very often these days but they were big when Andy Samberg was in the show. To my surprise, Rihanna is in this one and it's a music video where she and Samberg play "Ronnie And Clyde". Rih is a confident gun-slinger robbing a bank with Samberg's 'Shy Ronnie' whose part of the song is an incoherent mumble which confuses the tellers and customers. Rihanna's Clyde gets away with the money (and Jon Hamm) while Ronnie accidentally shoots himself. It's no 'Natalie's Rap' or 'Dear Sister' but it's alright - Rihanna singing phrases like "they can't hear you, use your outside voice" was the highlight.
The next sketch sees Bill Hader impersonate Vincent Price for a Halloween sketch, "Vincent Price's 1960 Halloween Special". Celebrity impersonation sketches are probably my favourites on SNL and this one was particularly fun. Along with Price, we get Wiig doing a spot-on Judy Garland, Hamm playing a sexually-inappropriate Presidential candidate John F Kennedy and an even more inappropriate Liberace from Armisen. It's early days but I suspect this might be the highlight of the show.
I'm spoiled by a second celebrity sketch immediately after, which is a screen test reel for Back To The Future. Aside from Jay Pharoah's impression of Eddie Murphy, I don't think much of the impersonations, but it's cool to see that they've been doing the screen test skit for this long - there are versions of this sketch where the movie is Fifty Shades Of Grey and Star Wars (which also features Jon Hamm) and I've watched them more than once.
Next up, Kristen Wiig plays an unhinged woman auditioning for a play, with Jon Hamm as the husband called in to defend her when she doesn't get the role. Again, it's a fine sketch, but I have noticed that so far Kristen Wiig is the only woman in the cast who is getting to do any acting. We get a second part of the Back To The Future screen tests after this sketch and Taran Killam stands out this time with his impressions of Gilbert Gottfried and Pee Wee Herman.
Finally it's Rihanna time. The stage is lit up in red to match her hair and her band launches into a cool dancehall rhythm that I didn't recognise as 'What's My Name?' until she started singing. This version omits Drake's verse at the start of the song so we just get Rihanna, dressed in a bra and hotpants, with her backing singers. I'd forgotten how good this song is so it was a pleasure to see Rihanna singing it and looking like she was having such a good time on stage.
As is tradition, after the musical guest comes Weekend Update. In 2010 it was presented by Seth Meyers alone, and he goes through some political and quirky news stories. It was weird for me to see Meyers hosting the segment by himself, as I'm so used to the current duo of Michael Che and Colin Jost taking turns to cover each story. Some things in 2010 are the same as 2020 though - this edition poked fun at former New York Mayor (now Trump advisor) Rudy Giuliani. Hader came on to do a political impression and Wiig and Armisen did a turn as their characters Garth and Kat, who are singers that never prepare their songs ahead of the show so make up something terrible on the spot. Recognisable, but not the most iconic characters of the era.
After a saucy picture of Jon Hamm in the shower, we launch into the next sketch, 'I Didn't Ask For This', which is a talk show starring people who have become the subject of viral videos. Bobby Moynihan plays the host of the show, who has been the victim of a jumpscare and punches through his computer, Wiig plays a woman who gets hit by a hammer while trying to avoid a bee sting, and Hamm is a man who does a weird cry when reunited with his son. As good as she is, I'm sick of the sight of Kristen Wiig at this point. Jon Hamm is the star here and watching his face crumple as he does the cry which made his character internet famous is the first time I've really laughed during the show.
Another sexy shot of Hamm and then we're into a parody of a 70s buddy cop show. In this one, Hamm has to ride on the back of Sudeikis' motorbike and instead of going out to crime scenes they end up on romantic rides out in the countryside. The writing is so-so, but we do get to see the pair kiss at the end.
I expected Rihanna next but again, Kristen Wiig. This time, she and Hamm are playing a couple of lounge singers/comedians who keep arguing and then telling the audience these are fake arguments to draw in the crowd. Again, it's fine, but the chance to see any other woman from the cast would have been so welcome at this point.
Luckily Rihanna re-appears next to sing 'Only Girl (In The World)'. This time she's wearing a red prom dress and a big red bow in her hair and she twirls around the stage looking like an all-red version of Madonna in the mid-80s. The song is usually heavy on the electronics but it's being played by guitars and keys on the SNL stage which gives it a different sound. Unfortunately Rihanna can't actually sing it the way it sounds on the record, which has some soft falsetto in the verses. The chorus and middle-8 parts sound pretty good but, despite this being another great song, it doesn't work for her live.
There's one last short sketch, which is a cartoon chihuahua voiced by David Spade making cutting remarks about his owner and the celebrities at a party. I've never seen a cartoon on SNL before and I have no idea what this one is doing here; presumably they had a minute to fill and needed something short to fit the space, but as it features none of the cast and isn't funny it really sticks out. After this Hamm signs off with a Happy Halloween and the show is finished for the week.
A few things surprised me about this episode. Firstly, I can't believe they didn't do a Mad Men sketch, given its popularity at the time. Perhaps it was done when Hamm presented last time. I'm also quite surprised that the show didn't feel too dated for something that was ten years old - there was a Bill Cosby impression in there and references to Charlie Sheen and the Chilean Miners but because their celebrity parodies were set in the past it didn't date the show. The biggest surprise, of course, was the lack of female talent in the show. I'm used to seeing Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Heidi Gardner etc. featuring heavily so to have Kristen Wiig supported by one other female cast member (who got maximum of one line in a couple of sketches) was shocking. Vanessa Bayer joined the cast for this season and she became a bigger star later but isn't even seen in this episode except for in crowd scenes.
The best part of this episode was Rihanna's performance of What's My Name, with the Vincent Price sketch and the Jon Hamm interstitials coming in as runners-up. Despite the number of big names on the cast I was disappointed by the lack of variety - not nearly enough Andy Samberg moments - and I'm thankful that the show is a lot more diverse ten years on.
I took a day off yesterday but I'm back and ready to see what Twitter has to offer. I see sponsored tweets mixed in with my timeline and I've interacted with them only to vote if there's a poll, but I don't think I've ever clicked on a Twitter ad.
The first sponsored tweet on my timeline always comes immediately after the most recent tweet (i.e. it's the second tweet on my feed) and right now it's for HSBC UK. Their tweet is a video ad about inclusiveness and home - obviously trying to show themselves as being pro-immigration and togetherness with the slogan "we are not an island". It's bold to be advertising that on Twitter where people have so many arguments about Brexit but I admire it. The replies are mostly people insulting the bank and being pro-Brexit, mixed with some pro-Brexit parody and a few people calling out racism. A mixed response, then. Even though I liked the ad, switching my bank account to a company who don't have a branch nearby just for the purposes of a personal experiment seems like a big effort, so lets move on.
The next tweet on my timeline isn't an ad but it is promotional. It's from Buzzfeed Quiz, who I'm a little ashamed to say I follow. Buzzfeed quizzes are another of my guilty pleasures - even though the results are meaningless, I like answering the questions. My favourites are the ones where you 'build a playlist' from the list of songs they offer in the questions, but sometimes I do the polls and the 'would you rathers' and the general knowledge and star sign ones if I'm bored.
The one they've just tweeted about is called "Which member of these K-Pop groups has the best vocals?". I do not listen to K-Pop at all and while I could name a handful of groups, I couldn't name a single member of a K-Pop group. I considered listening to some K-Pop and making an informed judgement so I could take part in these polls but you guys, there are 12 questions and so many members in most K-Pop bands that it would take me days to listen to them all and come to a conclusion. If you're a K-Pop fan the quiz can be found here but I simply cannot commit the time to this on a work day!
I don't feel great about looking at 2 different promotional tweets and not actually trying either of them but I'm going to consider this to be a bit of an education about Twitter content. When I register sponsored tweets as being such it's usually because they're surreal (not as surreal as Tumblr though, more on those when I do a Tumblr day), so it was interesting to see a real trusted company putting themselves on everyone's timelines and opening themselves up to abuse like that. I don't think the HSBC ad was targeted; I tweet about being left-wing and in favour of as much unity between nations as possible, so they've mirrored my political opinion, but the replies to the tweet suggest that it was also seen by people who do not share my views.
The Buzzfeed Quiz tweet, by its nature, can't be targeted, aside from the fact it tweets the content I followed it for. It's a shame that in this case it was promoting a quiz that I'm not qualified to take part in, but I'm sure I'll get to indulge in my Buzzfeed Quiz pleasure with my readers sometime!
The Internet Made Me Try It
Day 7 - 7 January 2020
App: Pinterest
Ad: Bright Eyes Book LED Light
Targeted: Unsure
I thought it might be interesting to go back to the same app I picked yesterday and check out whether the ads or pins have changed at all, after clicking on the WWF ad yesterday. Will it show me the same ad again, or something similar? Will it put some animal/ocean themed pins onto my feed? Lets take a look.
Here's what I see when scrolling through Pinterest today: a bullet journal spread, a photo of Lana Del Rey from her Ultraviolence video (not the same photo as yesterday, but I saved yesterday's one!), an ad for an LED book light.
An ad! It's from a website called "Amazious" whose logo looks suspiciously similar to the Amazon logo in terms of font and colour scheme, but it's not Amazon. I'm immediately distrustful of their basic-looking website which has a few products for sale, mostly gadgets, and looks like the sort of online store you might set up as a beginner.
The LED book light is the first 'featured product' on their website and is advertised for £28.09. It's a sheet of clear plastic (presumably it isn't glass) with a strip of LEDs down one side. If you Google search the product name "Bright Eyes Book LED Light" you get a number of websites which all have the exact same description - none of the sites are 'Amazious'. I also found an eBay link where the product is on sale for £5 and found it on Amazon for between £2-£30.
This experiment was meant to see what sort of things the internet would like me to try and buy, but I can see quite clearly that I should not give my banking information to this website and I won't be buying this book light from them. However, I don't have a book light at the moment and do my reading by the light of my bedside lamp, so maybe one day I'll invest in one from a trusted retailer.
As to whether or not this is a targeted ad, it's possible. I have looked at reading challenges on Pinterest and I save a lot of bullet journal inspiration so it would make sense for them to think I'd like a book light. I hope it doesn't think I'm down to get scammed though.
Since I'm not risking that, I've gone back to the first pin, which is the bullet journal spread, and saved it to try on the next page of my journal. It looks like this:
The spread was made by an Instagram user called the.pinecone.planner and they have a lot of cute ideas on their Insta page, if you're looking for inspiration. I'll post a photo of how my spread turns out once it's done!
I'm now a week into the experiment and so far I'm surprised that most of the adverts have been for apps and projects, rather than straight-up asking me to buy things. Going into this, I expected to have spent more money by now so it's cool to have been offered book recommendations and tips on saving the planet from sponsored content instead.
Ah, Pinterest, that most aspirational of apps. It's one of the few apps where I don't feel like I'm putting on a show because I don't have any followers (or at least, I don't know any of my followers), yet it's the social media app that I see as the shiniest and most in pursuit of perfection, even more than Instagram.
I use it to 'pin' pictures in different categories - photos of my favourite celebrities, inspiration for my bullet journal, the occasional lifestyle tip, that sort of thing. Of all my apps, it's the one that personalises the content on the homepage the most, aside from maybe YouTube - I don't really follow anyone on Pinterest but it knows what I like. I usually ignore the ads on there when I'm scrolling through potential pins to add to my collections and find them to be an annoyance but today I paid attention to see what I got.
Here's what the algorithm served me today: a photo of Lana Del Rey from her Ultraviolence video, a photo of Matty Healy lounging dressed all in red, an autumnal bullet journal spread, a list entitled 'better synonyms for 'sad'' (Pinterest thinks I'm a writer, despite me never pinning anything relating to writing), another more recent photo of Lana Del Rey and finally a video ad that started like this:
It's another New Year's Resolution themed ad! It goes on to talk about how plastics are killing our oceans and is a promotional video for Ocean Rescue, which is a project Sky is running in conjunction with the WWF. Clicking on the video takes me to the Ocean Hero page on the WWF website:
Apparently, Sky have pledged to cut down on their plastic use and are investing in alternatives, which is a good move. I see and hear a lot of adverts for Sky on social media, especially on Spotify and Podcasts, and usually they're trying to sell me broadband or TV packages, so when I saw that Sky was the sponsor of this ad I almost didn't click, assuming that's where this was going. As a side note, I won't be switching telecoms providers as part of this experiment for a few reasons - I don't pay the phone bill, we entered a new contract on December 31st (with a different provider), and I work in the telecoms industry so it's going to take more than a shiny ad with some bold claims to earn my trust!
So, I was pleasantly surprised to be taken to the WWF and asked to make a pledge to become an 'Ocean Hero'. There are four pledges to take:
Say no to plastic
Reduce carbon emissions
Eat sustainable fish
Donate
The first one suggests cutting down on carrier bags, coffee cups and plastic bottles. This is something I'm already working on (and I hope you are too) - my family have always reused our carrier bags so always use bags for life at the supermarket, and if I go out I always have a tote bag or a cool plastic bag from a record store to re-use. I've stopped using plastic cups at the office watercooler and I'm working on finding an alternative to a plastic sandwich bag to bring snacks to the office. It doesn't seem right to pick this one as my pledge since I'm already doing it.
Reducing carbon emissions is all about using public transport and clean energy. Like the phone bill, I don't get to choose the household energy supplier so I don't have any control over that part. I also can't drive so I don't have a car, which means I rely on public transport to commute and travel. Basically, I'm already doing all I can here. I'm also not the person who buys fish to bring into the house for dinner, so looking for the MSC or ASC label in the supermarket isn't for me either.
That means it's time to donate! After clicking the 'donate' link on the page, the site took me to a page that explains some of the things they've done with people's donations, like built a robot shark designed to eat plastic, planted seagrass which absorbs carbon, and lobbied the government to protect marine life. I decided to give £10 which only required me to enter my details, no registration needed. They sent me a thank you email which offers links to environmental petitions, WWF membership and information about the endangered species that they're working to protect.
Although I'm not a big animal lover, it's hard to argue against the WWF as a worthy cause, especially as with this campaign they're trying to save the environment for humans as well as animals. Climate change is a very real threat that I hope the big global powers start to take seriously. Sometimes it feels hopeless to try to make changes on an individual level when the huge corporations aren't doing their bit, but as Greta Thunberg says, no one is too small to make a difference. It's good to see Sky advertising some action but I'll be on the look out for other Comcast companies making a positive or negative impact on the environment to see how believable I think their story is.
It's hard for me to say whether this was a targeted ad or not. I think Pinterest ads are probably rolled out to all their users because I haven't pinned anything relating to the environment or animals, but I can't be certain. Perhaps once I'm further into the experiment, I'll be able to draw a better conclusion.
If you want to check out the WWF's Sky Ocean Rescue Project and donate to the cause, click here.
PS. I haven't mentioned her today but did anyone else watch Safiya's wedding video that just came out? It made me a little misty-eyed, what a beautiful wedding!
Ad: Be A Better You - Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Targeted: No
I'm an avid podcast listener, racking up a few hours each week soaking up my favourites. At the moment I'm listening to Chart Music, Decoder Ring and Reply All. Of those three, Chart Music has recently become "all adverty" as they put it, and the other two don't feature ads aside from Decoder Ring occasionally telling me that electric cars are "normal now". Unfortunately, I'm up to date with Chart Music at the moment and have no unplayed podcast episodes in my library, so that won't be my source for today.
Like the iTunes Store, there's a tab on the Podcasts app for finding shows that Apple recommends, called the 'Featured' tab. Today, the top banner was advertising a collection called "Be A Better You", aimed at those of us who are figuring out our New Years Resolutions and looking for some tips and inspiration.
There are a few different categories of resolution in the collection to match popular Resolutions - things like 'be a better exerciser', 'be a better reader' and 'be a better cook'. The first one on the page, 'be a better parent', was of no use to me since I'm not a parent, so I skipped ahead to the next category: 'be a better thinker'.
This category is all about mental health. Like most of the categories, it featured podcasts I've heard of, like Fearne Cotton's 'Happy Place' which has been well-publicised, along with ones I hadn't, like 'Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee', which was first on the list and therefore the one I tried out.
The average episode of 'FB,LM' looks to be an hour or two long but the newest edition lasts 2 hours and 43 minutes. Titled "If This Man Can Turn His Life Around, So Can You with John McAvoy", I dived in. That might sound unfair since I didn't give The Irishman the same chance the other day, but with podcasts I can do other things while I listen so I think they're different. Plus, the average Chart Music episode is 4 hours long so I'm used to podcasts that take up a whole evening! I'd never heard of either Dr Chatterjee or John McAvoy, although the latter's story was so unusual and compelling that I'm surprised not to have come across him before.
John McAvoy is an endurance sportsman who landed on this profession after growing up in an organised crime family who led him to armed robbery and, inevitably, a ten year stretch in prison. From that point onwards, no matter how many times the Dr. dropped the word 'mindset' into the conversation, the podcast became like listening to a compelling episode of 'This American Life'. McAvoy's story truly is fascinating and he's great at telling it; the 2.5 hours where he described everything he'd been through and how he got to where he is today flew by.
The episode ended with another plea to purchase Dr Chatterjee's book, which claims to give 5 minute fixes to bad habits or something. I found McAvoy compelling but would have enjoyed it a bit more if it wasn't being viewed through the prism of self-improvement and health; there were no gory details about the actual bank robberies which I suspect might appear in another type of podcast, and I'd rather have learned more about that than had the conversation continually steered to that key-word, 'mindset'. I won't be subscribing to this podcast but if you like to hear stories told by interesting people that centre on health and wellbeing, I can't fault it as a production.
The Podcasts app doesn't have any sort of personalisation or targeting - the 'Be A Better You' thing is for New Year, not for me specifically. I'd like it if they did have a 'recommended for you' tab on there as I often wish it was easier to find other podcasts like the ones I love most, as all they have at the moment is a 'similar to...' which works like Amazon recommendations in that it shows what other people who listen to that podcast have downloaded. As a result it always just shows the really popular shows, regardless of whether or not they truly are similar in genre or style. The alternative is to listen to podcasts on Spotify which does offer recommendations, but there's no way to tell it if I listened to something and didn't like it, so it continues to tell me about new episodes of a podcast I listened to for 5 minutes and hated.
If you're a podcast fan, please tell me what sort of shows you're into!
Snapchat is a weird social media app because I don't actually use it as a social media app at all. The only reason I keep it on my phone is because it has the best filters for those rare times when I want to take a selfie - they're cuter than what Instagram has to offer, so usually I'll take a photo with Snapchat and then upload it to my Insta story. I do have a few friends added on there but it's been a long time since I sent a snap or looked at their stories, until today.
Safiya has done a Snapchat ad experiment video before and she looked in a few different places for ads, so I replicated that search. The first place I looked was in my friends' stories, where I'd expect to see an ad interspersed between them. However, I've only got 2 friends on Snapchat who are still posting stories - I saw one baby picture and a few night out selfies - which apparently isn't enough to insert an ad into, so I was out of luck. Next I went to the filters available when taking a photo, as you often get sponsored filters that are either app-wide or specific to your local area, but today there was no option for a sponsored selfie and I also got nothing at all when it came to post-photo filters, since I live in a place that's apparently so remote that there isn't even a filter to announce where the picture was taken.
The final place to look was the 'Discover' section, which is where news and lifestyle sites post interactive stories which include things like celebrity gossip, funny videos, quizzes and beauty tips. For some reason, a lot of the Discover stories wouldn't play on my phone. The one at the top of the page was from Allure magazine and featured K-Pop band NCT 127, but all I got was freeze-frames of the start of each section of video and as a result I didn't get to see ads either. The first one that worked was a story by 'Brother' which I can only assume is an online publication - I've never heard of it, and I don't think it was the printer company which comes up when I try to Google them - and the story was a guessing game where you got 12 clues and had to guess what item they were describing (spoiler: the answer was condoms and I got there after 3 or 4 clues). The first ad appeared after a couple of clues, and consisted of a short video of a man saying something like "this is how you talk to girls in Wales" followed by him running up to a herd of cows and yelling in their direction. I knew it was an ad because it says "AD" in the corner, but there was no branding anywhere on the video itself so I had to swipe up to find out what it was for. It turns out they were advertising another social media app - TikTok.
I know that TikTok is an app for posting short clips that originated as a place to share lip-synching videos, but has grown into one of the most popular apps among Generation Z. It's in the news today because the US Military have banned it from government phones since it's owned by China. I've never downloaded the app as I usually find this sort of content excruciating, but I have seen TikTok clips online before because they're unavoidable to a young person who uses the internet, and obviously I've heard Old Town Road plenty of times. Since I have 0 storage space on my phone for new apps, I downloaded it on my tablet to check it out properly and see whether maybe I was wrong about it. After all, it has apparently been downloaded from Google Play over 500 million times.
After downloading the app, it asked me to choose my interests from a list of around 20 categories, including comedy, animals, sports and food. I ticked 9 of them and that was it - the next button was 'start watching'. So that's what I did. The 'Home' page started showing me clips that I assumed were linked to the interests I'd picked until I realised they were showing me clips about football and I definitely didn't pick 'sports'. Almost everything I saw aside from that was teenagers messing around, posing and falling over and performing. I tested out the search function by looking up "egirl" which I understood to be a fashion culture originating on apps like TikTok that used over-the-top makeup in opposition to the mainstream Kardashian look and an updated version of Tumblr's 'pastel goth' style. What I actually found was videos of teenage girls dancing seductively and miming along to spoken audio clips, and they weren't nearly as subversive as I'd expected.
I gather that you can't speak in a TikTok video and have to pick a snippet of music to play over your images and as a result, the videos mainly fall into three camps. There's the ones where people are seen lip-synching, usually not to music but to obscure spoken word clips that I didn't recognise at all. There are ones where people have uploaded their own soundtrack - usually a song they've written or are performing to show off their singing talent. But overwhelmingly, the soundtrack is that soft mumbled SoundCloud rap/R&B music that has probably been given a specific genre label by now but I don't know what it is. The only recognisable song I came across was Dance Monkey by Tones & I which was at the top of the singles chart for a little while at the end of last year, and now I wonder whether TikTok was the place where it started to gain a following. The other thing I noticed that it had verified users, marked with the same blue tick that Twitter uses. I recognised Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Chelsea FC, neither of whom are 'TikTok celebrities', but most of the verified users were teens I've never seen or heard of. It's interesting that it seems to have its own circle of influencers that haven't spread out into the mainstream media, as far as I can tell.
I don't think this advert was targeted towards me, considering how little I use Snapchat. I can't name any 'influencers' who are/were on there aside from Kylie Jenner, who famously said that she'd grown tired of the app and caused its stocks to plummet as a result, so I don't know how it would gauge my interests aside from their 'Discover' page. I carried on looking for ads throughout the day to see what else Snapchat would offer me, and more often than not it was other apps that they encouraged me to download. I had a quick look and it appears that Snapchat and TikTok are not owned by the same people so I wonder what the deal is there - it's a bit like YouTube sending me to Bing yesterday. I was prepared for TikTok to show me some ads as the Google Play Store warned that the app contained them but I didn't see a single clip that appeared to be sponsored - it would have been interesting to see an ad for Snapchat there.
I don't want to sound like an old person who looks down on the media choices of the generation that come after me, but I don't 'get' TikTok. I've never been into watching people's homemade video clips, even when it was a YouTube thing or even a You've Been Framed thing, so it doesn't really serve any purpose for me. I'm glad I looked at it because I understand it a little better, but I won't be keeping it on my device.
If you want to check it out for yourself, they have a website as well as an app: https://www.tiktok.com/en/
YouTube, owned by Google, is one of the more unpredictable apps when it comes to ads. I use it every day on my laptop, which has an ad-blocker installed, so I don't see ads on there, but if I'm using my phone or my Chromecast then ads do occasionally appear between videos. Before getting to a video though, there's always an ad at the top of my YouTube app homepage, so let's take a look at that:
The ad is paid for by "New Sofa Search" and offers to find me "the best sofas on a clearance sale". Now, I'm not looking for a new sofa at the moment, never mind the absolute unit in the photograph, and it would be wild for me to purchase one just for the sake of an experiment like this. However, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad before, so I had a look to see where it went.
I ended up on a dodgy-looking site called "bestsearches.net" which offered me a list of different sofa types ("modern sleeper sofa", "white sectional leather sofas" etc) and then when clicking on one of those, I go to a Yahoo search which shows me "ads related to" the category I selected. I find this really curious - YouTube is owned by Google, but the advert on the homepage is for some sort of search engine which then leads to a Yahoo search which in turn is powered by Bing, aka Google's arch nemesis? Utterly bizarre.
Anyway, as I said, I have no interest in purchasing a sofa so I moved on to the first video on my feed, or in this case the first 'YouTube mix', to see whether I can find an ad attached to it. Eagle-eyed readers will spot that the first YouTube mix starts with a New Order song; it's apparently "My Mix" but YouTube honestly puts the same few videos at the top of every mix so it doesn't really matter. For what it's worth, I didn't have a problem clicking to listen to Age Of Consent since it's one of my favourite songs of all time.
There was no ad before the video, but there was a little yellow marker at the end of the video progress bar which I thought meant that an advert is placed there. Apparently I was wrong because the playlist went right on to the next song. After the third, I did see an advert but it was literally just the YouTube logo for a few seconds before moving on. Finally, after 6 videos, I got an advert!
The ad was for Netflix, more specifically, it was an ad for Netflix containing the trailer for The Irishman. The Irishman is a Scorsese movie that was released on Netflix a month or two ago and I already know a couple of things about it: it has some weird CGI to de-age the actors, it's a typical Scorsese gangster movie, and it's over three hours long. I already know that this movie is not going to spark joy in me so I'm making the decision not to waste three hours of my life on it.
However, since I already have a Netflix subscription, lets instead see what it would like me to watch today. For those of you not familiar with Netflix, when you open the site it has a 'Spotlight' show or movie that appears as the page header - usually it's something that's newly released and, more often than not, it's a "Netflix Original" aka something released exclusively on Netflix. If you scroll on, it offers shows and movies under categories, like 'recently added', 'acclaimed UK TV shows', 'romantic movies' and so on.
Today, the Spotlight is on a show called You, which has just released a second series.
I haven't seen You before but I've heard of it. It's a Netflix-exclusive series that I remember seeing advertised on the Spotlight when the first series came out, and I was mildly interested in watching but was watching a few other shows at the time. I've also seen a bit of content around it recently - Buzzfeed quizzes, that sort of thing - to coincide with the new series. I don't know much about the plotline but from what I understand it centres on a man who has decided to pursue a girl he likes by stalking her, and there was a bit of controversy when it first came out in case people thought it was a sweet love story and not genuinely terrifying.
Netflix implores me to "Watch Season 2 Now", but as I'm new to the show, I started with Series 1 Episode 1. Knowing even the small amount that I did about it, I was paying attention right away and looking for warning signs that this might not be the fluffy romantic story that I often turn to on Netflix (their teen movies are a guilty pleasure of mine) and it didn't take long for the episode to lay out its premise: this guy is bad news. I won't say anything to spoil it for those who haven't seen any of it yet, but I will say that I enjoyed it and will definitely continue watching.
I might have cheated a little bit by not watching what social media advertised to me, but this is my experiment and therefore my rules. I don't know whether YouTube's advertising is particularly targeted. On the one hand, the sofa search ad was pretty abstract and bizarre, and doesn't match up with anything I watch there, but I do use YouTube to watch movie trailers so it's possible that the Netflix ad was at least somewhat aimed at me. I do occasionally watch Netflix on my computer through a browser that's linked to my Google account, so if it collects data on me then it knows I have a Netflix account and haven't watched The Irishman. When it comes to Netflix, it wants me to think that its recommendations are targeted at me. When I clicked on You it told me the series was a "99% match" for me, but honestly every time I see that 'match' bar it's usually set at 99% so I don't know whether I trust it. I think the Spotlight is the same for every user so it might be coincidental that today it's offering me a show I actually wanted to watch, but if I get any more Netflix ads when I'm browsing my socials, maybe I'll get to test that theory.
Day 2 - 2 Jan 2020
App: iTunes Store
Ad: Stormzy - Heavy Is The Head
Targeted to me?: No
The iTunes Store isn't a social media app, but the Apple media store for books, films and TV shows. It's installed as a default app on iPhones so I thought it would be interesting to see what it tried to sell to me and whether there was any personalisation to it.
The banner ad at the top of the iTunes Store is for Apple Music, but I've decided that I'm not going to sign up to subscription services as part of this experiment unless they sound really intriguing - otherwise I'll forget to cancel things and end up with payments coming out of my bank all the time! As I use Spotify I don't feel like signing up to Apple Music makes sense for me, so I skipped this and looked at the 'Hot Albums' section immediately underneath. The first album on that list is Heavy Is The Head by Stormzy, which came out last month.
I don't think the iTunes Store targets its shop-front to individuals because this album doesn't really fit in with my past iTunes purchases. For a start, it's very rare that I'll buy a whole album on there - I have to have a physical copy - and while I have bought a couple of rap songs over the many years that I've had an iTunes account, my last five purchases were:
People by The 1975
break up with your girlfriend, i'm bored by Ariana Grande
Narcissist by No Rome ft The 1975
Brass In Pocket by Suede
Stay Together (Long Version) by Suede
I don't think Stormzy fits in particularly well with that playlist! I'm familiar with Stormzy - in fact, I saw him live at a festival back in 2017 - but he's not an artist I usually choose to listen to, as I'm more of a Britpop person than a grime fan. He is undeniably a huge star at the moment, having headlined Glastonbury, picked up a host of awards and reached number one in the UK with his debut album, Gang Signs & Prayer - the first grime album to hit the top spot. He's in the news this week because his single Own It (featuring Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy) hit number one this week and also because he's involved in a Twitter beef with Wiley (arguably the first grime star to have mainstream success in the 2000s) who is critical of the link-up with Sheeran.
Heavy Is The Head is Stormzy's second album and is currently retailing at £4.99 on iTunes. Unlike the old days when you had to buy a record to hear it all the way through (or curl up at a listening post), in 2020 I don't have to drop £4.99 to try this out, so I hopped over to Spotify to see how it sounds. I don't listen to rap/hip-hop/grime albums very often as I find that the music gets a bit samey after a while but this one didn't become background music midway through like these sorts of records often do for me. That said, I find it hard to pick out individual tracks that stood out to me; I liked the tropical-inspired beats of Own It and Superheroes (which features Stormzy singing the theme song to Tracy Beaker at its outro) but the whole thing sounded pretty good. Like everyone else I've seen and heard enough of Ed Sheeran (did anyone else see Yesterday last summer and wonder what he was doing there?!) but he doesn't overpower Own It so I'll be happy to hear it on the radio now that it's a number one hit.
I think Stormzy has risen to the top of the grime pack because his music has become a lot softer and more commercial as he's become more popular, compared to other rappers in the genre like Giggs and Skepta, whose songs feel charged with violence. Stormzy's lyrics reference his home and the culture he grew up in but somehow it feels more universal; less claustrophobic and less trapped in a specific section of London than his contemporaries.
Overall, I'm not going to buy the album but I'm okay about having listened to it. Since I didn't use the iTunes Store to listen or purchase I don't expect to see more grime on my front page, but I do wonder what it's going to do to my Spotify algorithm...
Happy New Year everyone! It's that time of year when we all reflect on where we've been, what caught our interest and where we want to go over the next 365 days.
In 2019 I achieved one of my New Years Resolutions and learned to play bass, albeit using the bottom strings of an electric guitar I stole from my brother, so now I can play along to all of Elastica's debut album (the album I listened to most in 2019!). For 2020 I was unsure which new skill I wanted to learn but then I discovered 'thrift flipping' videos on YouTube, where people buy old clothes and re-work them into something modern and more their style, which I think I want to try out.
2019 was also the first year for a while where I didn't complete a 'reading challenge' and as a result I ended up reading more books than usual - sometimes I get stuck on the same book for months and then have to grab some short reads in December to finish the categories, or start counting audiobooks that I've listened to via radio or podcasts. Over the last month or so I decided I should go back to a reading challenge for 2020, but now that the new year is here I've changed my mind and elected to just get through as many of my books as I can without worrying about fitting them into a category. I've also decided that if the blurb and first chapter don't excite me, I'm not going to force myself to finish them.
I've also flirted with the idea of trying out a few experiments based on advertising, 'self care' and social media. I wanted to try out that classic feminist-scholar experiment of buying a women's magazine and following all the tips and buying all of the advertised products, to see whether they had any effect on improving my life. However, when I went into WH Smith I was very uninspired by the selection they had to offer - a lot of the glossy celebrity weeklies have gone online (aside from things like OK! and Hello! which don't really fit my criteria) and none of the monthlies caught my eye aside from US Vogue, which wouldn't be of much use to me since a lot of the products won't be available to me and also it costs an eye-watering £8.50 as an imported title! So I abandoned that idea. I also thought about trying out some of those 30 day productivity/self-care/wellness challenges that keep appearing in my Pinterest feed but I quickly got bored of that idea.
Inspiration struck me once again when I was watching YouTube. At some point in 2019, my recommendations threw up a video called something like "Trying on wedding dresses from Wish". As someone who once (and never again) made the mistake of buying clothes on Wish, and who has always been curious about what the wedding dresses they advertise really look like, it caught my attention. Since then, I've spent many, many hours glued to the YouTube videos created by Safiya Nygaard, who is a fashion and beauty vlogger known for experiments like mixing every lipstick from a make-up store together to see what colour they made, creating outfits inspired by different decades, and a series called 'The Internet Made Me Buy It', where Safiya scrolls through her social media feeds and buys whatever is advertised to her. This last one is what has inspired my experiment for 2020. I have about a dozen apps on my phone which I'd categorise as being social media or shopping apps, and they advertise to me all the time. Sometimes the 'sponsored content' is clearer than other times, which means that sometimes I don't even notice that I'm looking at a paid advertisement. Part of Safiya's aim, and one of the things that I found interesting about the series, was to work out to what extent ads are targeted specifically to her. She found that some apps (Facebook, Instagram) seemed to have a really good idea of what she was interested in - for instance, a lot of her purchases wound up being clothes or makeup - whereas others (YouTube, Snapchat) were more generalised. However, I'd argue that it's hard to tell how specific they're being when only one person is taking part in the experiment - you could argue that Instagram is geared towards aesthetics and maybe everyone sees a lot of clothing advertised on there, and that it's a coincidence that Safiya's interests match with that.
So, this year, I'm going to complete my own version of her 'the internet made me buy it' series to see what sort of things I get advertised to me on the apps I use every day. It feels like the modern equivalent of looking at magazine ads, especially if the content is personalised to my specific interests and not "female 18-45" or whatever the magazines perceive their target demographic to be. Unlike looking for a challenge that someone else has written, I can do this while I mindlessly scroll through the internet every day.
I've set some limits: I'm not going to throw money at designer/expensive brands just because they're advertised to me - I don't get YouTube revenue like Safiya for my experiments! - and I'll be ignoring things that are in opposition to my lifestyle, like adverts by drinks companies or services that are unattainable to a person living in a relatively rural area.
Here are the apps I'm going to be focusing on, which have all been living on my iPhone for a few years and which I use almost every day (aside from the Apple stores but I think they could be interesting!):
App Store
Buzzfeed
Facebook
Instagram
iTunes Store
Mail
Pinterest
Podcasts
Snapchat
Spotify
Tumblr
Twitter
YouTube
Day 1 - January 1st 2020
App used: Facebook
Advert: Penguin Reading Challenge
Do I think this was targeted to me: Yes
Day one, and I chose Facebook to start me off. I've had my Facebook account for over 10 years, so if they're targeting adverts to me, they ought to know me pretty well, no? I open it every day to scroll but rarely interact - my profile picture is from 2016, I update my status every few months (usually with a music video or a picture from a concert I've been to) and I rarely get tagged in any memes. My main uses for Facebook are to keep up with news about my office and the band Suede, whose Insatiable Ones fanclub has a very active Facebook group.
I interact far more with Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp,which aren't 'Facebook' but are owned by the Facebook company. As Safiya Nygaard points out in her series, these apps and sites state that they use your data from across sites and other sites and apps you use that don't belong to Facebook in order to select ads for you. In that context, this ad makes sense.
When I was shown the ad for the Penguin Reading Challenge, I was still almost convinced I was going to try one of the reading challenges I'd seen on Pinterest - I'd searched "2020 reading challenge" on there a few times in the last few days to help pick a list of categories. New Years Day is the perfect day to hit me with this ad; it's probably the one day of the year where most reading challenges are set.
After clicking on the ad, I was taken to Penguin's website. For anyone reading this who prefers blogs to books, Penguin is one of the UK's (maybe the world's) biggest and most beloved book publishers, specialising in 'Penguin Classics' as well as contemporary works. I expected them to present me with a survey which would personalise some recommendations for me from their vast catalogue, but instead I was met with four choices:
(Image from Penguin website)
I was a bit disappointed that their challenge is actually far more general that what I'd expected to find - I hoped they'd offer me some books I hadn't heard of that were a perfect fit for me, but instead I can pick a resolution from "Expand my mind", "Keep up with the big hits", "Read the books I've always meant to" and "Discover the best contemporary writing". I get most of my books from charity shops and have a stack of 'classics' that I've collected and not yet read, so "Read the books I've always meant to" sounded like the most attainable and that's the one I signed up for.
I received an email immediately telling me I'm "on my way to an exciting reading life" followed by a list of 10 books with a short description. Of the list, I own two: Persuasion by Jane Austen, and A Room Of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Persuasion was given pride of place at the top of the email, along with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - these two have full descriptions while the other 8 books come with a tagline only (such as "essential feminist literature" for Virginia Woolf), so it seems like that's what they want me to read, if I haven't already. I've actually never read a Jane Austen novel, which comes as a surprise to some; I started Emma once but University got in the way and I didn't get very far into the story.
After reading this email I swiftly put it into my Trash folder and decided not to bother with the challenge, but writing this blog entry has changed my mind, and persuaded me to give Persuasion a go. Clicking the book cover in the email took me to the Penguin site which recommended online book stores where I could purchase a copy, but since I already have one in my book drawer, that won't be necessary. Sadly, mine isn't a Penguin but a charming 1964 US edition from the New American Library.
I can't offer a review just yet as I won't start reading until bedtime, but check back at the end of the month and we'll see whether I've made it to the end! I'm looking forward to seeing what the next Penguin Challenge newsletter is like for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I want to know whether it will let me weigh in on last month's choices and offer them a review of Persuasion to base future recommendations on. Secondly, I'm interested to see when it arrives, as the email says 'monthly' but the website says 'bi-monthly' which could either be twice a month or every second month.
