Recently I’ve been participated in Empire Avenue, an online person stock exchange, where users buy shares in each other.

One feature that has caused me much amusement is the advertising. Using the game’s virtual money, one can buy an ad and make the case for their stock. I’d previously concentrated more on my investments rather than my own shares, but yesterday I decided to have some fun with some increasingly odd ads. Here are the results of my little experiment.

My ticker, by the way, is PORG.

I began by stating facts. I’d jumped over the weekend and was still going up.

From there, I’m moved to the Head-On approach of repeating a barely coherent statement a couple times.

Next, I decided to move into chastising users, like online “entrepreneurs” do. Nothings says ‘trust me’ like ‘you’re an idiot for not trusting me’. I approached this with increasingly nonsensical metaphor (What does “breeze of regret even mean, and is it even bad? It was originally “gentle breeze”, but I figured that was too much.)

Note that I had a typo (though I like to imagine it being said with Mario’s faux Italian accent – “THAT’S A-the odor..”), so for the the sake of keeping results fair I reposted it.

Next, I moved into rewriting history.

Taking a slight detour in tone, this one references the other ads. It doesn’t make sense if mine is at the top, but if it’s under another ad it may offer an amusing juxtaposition.

Next, suggestions of nefarious dealings.

Some more of the Head-On approach.

And as a final experiment, a comparison between yelling and speaking, with the same statement punctuated differently.

So, how did it turn out? Here are the results:

1 click per 1200 views! Success! Oddly enough, my share prices jumped by another 2 credits overnight, though that was based more on my portfolio.

As impressive as the results are, it did fare worse than my other ad, which gave me 1 per 167 views.

Note: let me know if you want an invite to the game.