The Internet Is Sadistic

At The Jupiter Drawing Room CT, we’ve made a few observations about the Internet. Some of these observations will not be new to you, but here goes:

• The internet is a made of every demographic imaginable every group, every niche, every massive collective.

• Within this collective, we are all still humans and humans have certain quirks of interest, certain things that appeal to our base instincts.

• So for example: People like naked people, that’s why porn is so popular. Surprise!

• Most people love animals, just look at all the puppy and cat videos. Awwwww.

• People are self-obsessed and celebrity-obsessed. Social media shows us this every day. Just look at Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kendyll, and Kylie. If you recognise any of these names you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Our client Webafrica is the leading internet service provider that loves to cause kak and give people fast, affordable internet. They have a knack for having a simple message delivered in an interesting way.

Lucas van Vuuren, executive creative director at Jupiter CT says for the latest Webafrica campaign, the agency leaned straight into another internet insight that humans bizarrely like to see people in pain.

“For our latest campaign with Webafrica, we decided to run with this ‘pain’ insight, so we decided to up the pain with a pre-roll ad that tortures our brand mascot, Will, to get a secret out of him. The ad shows Will being electrocuted for almost 3 minutes. In this time, he confesses everything you ever wanted to know…and even things you didn’t want to know.”

The ad went live on 1 March 2019, and so far the data shows that most people watch the video up to the point we stop torturing the character at 1 minute 56 seconds.

“ At the same point that the torturing stops, the interest drops. This is fascinating, but not surprising if you look at the amount of fail videos, car crashes, beheadings and all the other bad or awkward stuff on the internet and the amount of views and attention they get.”

2 years ago, Jupiter CT produced another Webafrica ad that was designed for Youtube.  The agency played with the fact that viewers could skip the Youtube ad after the 5 second countdown. “We counterintuitively made our ad almost 3 minutes long and all it showed was our brand mascot skipping and waiting for – no, actually, begging – the viewer to push the skip button.”

“The audience seemed to enjoy the fact that this poor guy was skipping and getting more and more tired as the ad went on. It seemed the viewer enjoyed seeing this man suffer – there’s that ‘pain’ thing again. The average viewing time for this pre-roll ad was 1 minute 24 seconds, and we now know that people are slightly sadistic.”

So in conclusion, people are pervy, cat-loving, self-obsessed, torturous creatures that like their internet fast, cheap and slightly controversial. Good to know.

For more information on The Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town, visit the website and to find out more about fibre being cheaper than ADSL, head to Webafrica’s website.