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When playing UNO on my iPhone I can get extra coins and other advantages by watching ads. I try to play them at times that I am not looking at the phone in a brilliant scheme to smash the system in return for something that might cost me tens of pence otherwise. I don’t always succeed, but so far I have not clicked on a single ad, so I am winning (and I have actually paid out some money to play the game, so I don’t feel that’s bad - what happened to the good old days when you bought a game and then could play it as much as you wanted without having to chip in a tenner or so every few months (or weeks)?
One of the ads that comes up is for Royal Kingdom, an off shoot of Royal Match which is one of the most persistent advertisers on other games, even though it claims it is free and has no ads in it. So how are they making their money? I don’t know. I refuse to download it.
But this ad is fronted by a woman I don’t recognise who introduces herself very coolly simply as Tia, as if she has earned the right to be known by just one name and under the assumption that everyone knows who she is. Now, I am nearly 56 and I am not going to pretend I recognise many people that the younger generations would venerate. I don’t follow music or sport or social media particularly closely. So I was very prepared to admit that I was at fault for not knowing this woman who seems to assume that we would all know know her. So I googled Tia and Tia and Royal Kingdoms, but Google was no real help.
If you ask who is Tia then you mainly get told about transient ischemic attack, which I don’t think is who or what I was being addressed by. The most famous Tia, it seems, is Tia Mowry, one of the twins from Sister Sister. But the woman on the ads does not look 44 and is a different race than her and also doesn’t have Tia Mowry’s face which is the real clincher (though obviously many stars have plastic surgery and their appearance can change, or maybe she’s heavily filtered. But I am 96% certain it’s not her. None of the images on image search look anything like the Tia who is in the ad. Who the fuck is she? And why is she so sure that we’ll know who she is and that she doesn’t need to give her surname? Another American also does similar ads and I assume he’s an actor because he’s sizzlingly handsome, but he uses his full name. I don’t know who he is, but I could find out.
Tia also seems very glad that Royal Kingdoms doesn’t have any ads. Thank God, she exclaims, as if she doesn’t realise that she herself is in an ad and a pretty ubiquitous one that I have seen or half seen over 100 times. Having an ad telling you that the thing it’s advertising has no ads is a very strange state of affairs. And annoying. Even though Tia has only just started playing the game she insists it’s about the best game out there and that we should tell her if she’s wrong about that. Which is decent of her, but then again it’s very hard to do that because I don’t know who she is and can’t find out and so have no way of contacting her.
I just hope she’s a random person called Tia who has never done anything else online in her life. And who doesn’t have email or social media.
Don’t tell me if you know who she is. I’ve got to the point where I prefer not to know.
