On what grounds was it banned?
I am conflicted. A company has made me want to watch an ad and I enjoyed it.
At its core, I don’t mind if someone wants to let me know about their product. Unfortunately we’re in an age where it’s absolutely in our faces all the time and pushed with the most brain-rotting algorithms, and they’re absolutely horrendous. Every once in a while though I’ll still find ads that I enjoy, mainly YouTube creators who don’t just read scripts, but put in effort to make something worth watching.
I’ll always point to ‘TomSka and Friends’ (TomSka being the creator of the ASDFmovie series) as being decent ads; each one is a full skit and I actually enjoy those ads because they put in the effort.
At one point in time advertisements were in dedicated sections of newspapers, magazines, posted in business windows and maaaaybe sent out in mailors. And that was about it. If you didn’t want to be advertised to you didn’t read the ads. When TV broadcasts first started there was an dilemma over whether people would tolerate TV commercial breaks, and whether they were even ethical since you couldn’t just turn the page if you didn’t want to read the ad. We’re light-years beyond that mindset and level of consumer respect now. Ads that try to appear to be anything but ads, individually targeted ads, unskippable ads on CPR instructional videos, ads in search results, ads on floating billboards among the beach, ads on your refrigerator, ads on your personal tablet or laptop, ads on the damn gas pump… it’s fucking dystopian.
unskippable ads on CPR instructional videos
Funnily enough, this is an actual example they use in one of their ad skits!
Video is time-stamped at the ad, but the whole video is pretty great (if it happens to be your type of humor)
Its weird. It wouldn’t be out of place as a pre-roll ad in a theater IMO. It gets the point across without narration in a horribly corporate voiceover OR obnoxious music.
I never would have expected to see a Dude Where’s My Car reference in 2026.
I dunno, it tracks to me. Someone sees Dude Where’s My Car in theaters in 2000 at the age of 16. In 2026 they’re 42 and have been working at an ad company for 15 years.
Yeah, that surprised me too.
Here’s some irony
Yep. Should have just linked to this one, which works:
https://media.mullvad.net/andthen/30s/Mullvad_AND_THEN_30s_US_ProRes422_Webmix_4K.mov
First mistake was using a Twitter (twimg) link.
I intentionally used Twitter/X video link instead of Mullvad website video link because Mullvad website is blocked in a good number of countries.
On the other hand, Twitter is one of the top 10 websites globally. Which means it’s guaranteed to work in most countries.
Yeah, but it’s still Twitter and backed by a fascist POS. Gross.
Also you often can’t view Twitter stuff like this without having an account and being logged in. (Thus the 403 Forbidden response)
At the very least they could use an xcancel link or something.
Fucks my phone up. Don’t see video, hear audio, have to kill browser.
I don’t think X works as well or as widely as you may think.
