Tag: Advertisement

Getting rid of those pesky MTNL Ads

In the NDTV app on Android
In the NDTV app on Android

That’s the article view that greeted me when I tried to read one of the news articles on the Android NDTV app. MTNL has been doing this for the last few weeks in Mumbai, and I’d noticed it earlier while browsing sites on my iPad, laptop and phones as well. I finally gave up and decided to block the IP serving these ads – 203.94.227.140 – at the router level itself so that I wouldn’t be bothered on any device.

In fact this doesn’t seem to be the first time MTNL has done this given Yogesh’s similar post from over a year ago which also contains instructions to block the ads in greater detail (maybe first time in Mumbai though). If you want detailed instructions, check out his post, and use the IP- 203.94.227.140, as his IP seems to be for MTNL Delhi. It is also possible that they start using other servers, so if you come across any MTNL ad, right click and check out the source server IP, and then add it to your router blocklist. In my case, I found the IP this way, and then enabled the firewall on my TP Link router and added a rule to block this IP (use add WAN host to add the IP).

TP Link router firewall
TP Link router firewall

If you check out the user posts on the MTNL Mumbai facebook page, you’ll find similar complains from other customers as well. Airtel drew its share of flak sometime ago for similar behaviour, but the MTNL shenanigans have gone almost unnoticed with hardly any mainstream coverage.

This is a very poor way to treat customers and it really gets in the way on mobile devices. Of course, this kind of injection only works on non secure sites only, so HTTPS sites like Google, facebook etc should be problem free. Here’s to hoping that MTNL stops being user hostile.

What’s worse than in-game ads?

Ads in school targeting children:

But at least adults have some defences. As the advertising executive Alex Bogusky points out, “children are not small grownups. Their brains are fundamentally different, the big difference being that right-hemisphere brain development doesn’t really kick in until the age of 12. This is important because without the right hemisphere involved, all decisions and concepts are very black and white. If you sit with a child and watch TV commercials, you will notice how vigorously effective the messages are. ‘I want that.’ ‘Can I have that?’ ‘I need that.’ These words come out of their mouths with seemingly every message, and they mean it and they believe it and they are defenceless against it.”

via Hey advertisers, leave our defenceless kids alone | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.