Advertising often gets a bad rap -- no one likes commercials and pages upon pages of ads distracting from the articles in adult magazines. But for the most part we're so used to them they kind of fade into the background. Which is why the modern advertiser has had to find new, intrusive and awful ways to harass us.

5. "Fun" Phone Ads
For years now you thought Captain Morgan was your friend, but it turns out he's just a profiteer who wants to waste your time and makes you dislike the friends you already have.

If you head over to the Captain's Web site, you can sign your friends up for one of three hilarious phone pranks, like pretending a hot girl who saw him out at the club wants to go out with him. It'll waste two minutes of his life and then hit him with an ad for booze at the end. Fantastic.


4. Promo Girls
The scourge of the bar scene are girls who have been hired to stand around and look hot. She approaches you, and it seems like it might be your lucky night, until she starts saying how she's parched and nothing but a cool, delicious glass of Thunderbird can assuage her terrible thirst. Or she stands there in her Jager tank top, flirting and offering you tiny cup after tiny cup of her foul elixir until your wallet runs dry, then she leaves you with nothing but a foul taste in your mouth and a hole in your pocket.

3. Pause Ads
Thanks to the DVR, commercials have become an endangered species. No longer do we need to actually sit through that ridiculous Miracle Whip commercial. But TV evolves quickly and now channels are simply shutting your show off, midway through a sentence, to allow someone to actually walk on screen and hawk something else. You may have seen this on TBS, when Bill Engvall came onscreen in the middle of "Family Guy" to talk about his show, like an unwelcome neighbor poking his head in your window to tell you about his latest rash.

2. Tattoo Ads
This trend started a few years back and sadly hasn't gone away. In a nutshell, some people are willing to use their own bodies as advertising space for places like GoldenPalace.com. Back in 2005, Karolyne Smith sold her forehead to the online casino for $15,000 and now probably has to wear a sweatband everywhere she goes. Sure this method gets your name out in a unique way, but it comes with a really creepy vibe of desperation.

1. Virtual People
We're not going to admit what kinds of Web sites we find these on most often (they do exist on mainstream non-filthy ones as well), and they're about as annoying as their evolutionary-throwback brother, the paperclip from Microsoft Word. A tiny little person (kind of like Bill Engvall) shows up in the corner of your browser and starts creeping you out. It's not even the content of these ads that's bothersome, it's the idea of some kind of marketing pixie wedged behind the glass of your monitor that refuses to go away and refreshes itself every time you change the page on the same site. It's like being haunted in the most annoying way possible.

What non-traditional advertising method annoys you the most?