So I was just helping somebody at work getting an advertisement to go away, and I thought I'd share the experience because it provides a little insight into how a non-tech-saavy end user reacts to advertising and other techy things.. He called me up and asked me about this problem he was having regarding an ad that said "You just won a 47" plasma television", he went on to tell me that when he tried to close the error, it just brought up another window. I figured it was some popup mechanism that launched another popup every time you close the last one. It was much more simple than that. What it was, was that he was on a site looking up some information that he needed.(looked VERY much like a Made for Advertising site, using Euroclick, but apparently the info was what he needed, so it all works out...) There was an ad banner that said "You won a big f*'in television, you want it?" with a yes and no "button" on the image, and a red X in the corner. Looked very authentic to the untrained eye. What he was doing was clicking on the "red X" on the banner image, launching the popup, closing the popup with an actual red x button, then clicking on the "red x" on the banner again. He basically kept on repeating this, not realizing it was part of an advertisement. There's a few things to be learned from this. a) non-techy users are very trusting of familiar microsoft interfaces, and the fact that it can be easily recreated with a graphic isn't the first thing that occurs to them. Call it naive or ignorant or whatever, but people trust their computers. b) not everyone reacts the same way to the same things. Almost any of us on DP would have known right away what was up with this banner, but we're not really the target market for most IM, are we? I've always looked at those things and thought "Who the hell clicks on them???" I knew somebody had to, but wasn't sure who. c) he didn't buy anything, so even though he clicked over and over, didn't mean he actually bought into the fact that he'd "Won" a plasma tv. He just couldn't figure out how to get rid of the dang window... hehe.. It's a CPM ad from what I saw on Euroclick's site, so that doesn't really matter to the site owner a whole bunch, does it? So yeah, whether you like this kinda spammy stuff or not(I personally am not a big fan), it's kind of interesting to see how users react to it. Just figured I'd share, it's cool to see the IM world from the user's point of view sometimes..