Blue Gorillas, State Babies, and the Complexities of the Mortgage Market

Like everyone else, I’ve heard a lot about the mortgage crisis. About risky loans, and the effect that their failure is having on the economy. It all seems extremely complex though--so my understanding of it all is, at best, basic.

Naturally I notice the ads for mortgages and refinancing online. Not only because they are topical, but because they are strikingly ubiquitous.

The only example image I was able to find online was the dancing alien. There are several varieties of dancing aliens. This one is a wearing a wig and a bikini.
















But there are others as well. There is a dancing Santa, moving with the grace you wouldn't expect from a rotund gentleman in fur. And one with dancing blue gorilla, throwing his hands in the air as if he simply didn't care about balloon payments.

There are a number of ads with silhouetted man and woman in lascivious, throbbing dances reminiscent of the iPod ads. On one ad, they are a dancing tattoo on the arm of a man, while a disembodied hand is adding another tattoo that reads "Calculate New Payments." (He will regret at least one of those tattoos, I'm sure.)

The dancing habits of various species seems to be the advertising strategy here.

There are other ones I've seen too though, non-dancing ones. There was the one with the cartoon babies—an identical one for each state in our union, with the two letter postal designation on their diapers. They were holding hands in a sort of peaceful, happy sit-in..... the idea being that you should click on your state's baby for more information on great mortgage rates. (incidentally, you should find out what your State Baby is if you don't already know. New York's is the Recalcitrant Strollerdweller.)

Each of these things, seemingly, has nothing to do with a mortgage. It’s hard enough to think of why there would be one ad like this, let alone dozens. There is, of course, only one reason for these ads.

They work.

People click on these ads. And loans are made to the people who click on them. The fact of the matter is that transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are often begun with a dancing blue gorilla.

Suddenly, the complex mortgage crisis becomes a little more clear.

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P.S. This is a YouTube video cataloging some of these ads.

P.P.S. And this is what you need to do to remove said ads forever. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising:

"Windows users can block a web server's content by adding it to their hosts file, which maps domain names to IP addresses. If you use this to map an ad server's domain to 127.0.0.1, which is an address for your own computer, you'll never see its ads again.

Windows XP keeps the file in the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc folder.

The following line will stop the music for the dancing mortgage people and any other advertiser using the same broker:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net"