Like many people, I’m intrigued by the thinking behind the proposed Facebook alter ego Diaspora – although a better brand name would be a good start. My hope – and reports vary as to its exact raison d’etre – is that it will give ME the power back to decide who gets bombarded with things I tweet, write, and broadcast on FB, or update on Linkedin.

This could only be a good thing, but it is merely one narrow example of a near-global malaise today in online marketing in general, and its communication forms in particular. The summary symptoms of the illness can be summarised as fascist, rude, mendacious and irritatingly inisistent interaction with customers. Is this the way to engage brand users? Discuss. OK then, I will.

Although many contemporary business rationales boneheadedly repeat ‘choice choice choice choice’, the end objective of most stuff online is to force consumers into decisions they don’t want to take. Because of the clout of Facebook and Twitter now, for example, most online media sites will waste very little time before asking if you want to sign in via one or another community product. Their method of making the request after polite refusal is often to darken the screen and ask you again. There’s no way out of the screen. So you sign in via Facebook. And get 200 rude emails from friends asking why your every web post and comment thread is filling their inboxes.

The lack of manners is displayed in the online equivalent of In Yer Face, which I would call Up Yer Nose: when that huge panel appears magically and orders you to subscribe, buy, try or switch. If it’s from Asia, there’s no way to get rid of it other than coming out of the site and starting again. Is this, I wonder, what the site-owner needs? And does it work?

American panels are smaller and have a ‘CLOSE’ x in the corner. Some of the x’s are so small you need a new glasses prescription to hit them. Others take you to another panel, and have another go at seeing whether you’re up for an enhancement or reduction of some kind. The rest simply don’t work: like old burglar alarm boxes on crumbling suburban terraces, there’s nothing behind them. And, I’d wager, not a lot between the ears of the perpetrators.

In the TV medium as once was and still occasionally is, the interruption factor of marketing communications is unavoidable – but there is a warning. Online, this forecasting stage is skipped in favour of another panel fuelled by amphetamines. Online music stations actually stop the track you were listening to, and offer messages like ‘Advertisers pay for this station to keep going’. If only such insights were interactive, one could write ‘Silly them’ in reply.

Ill-mannered interruption clearly isn’t cutting it, however, because many online ad agencies have chosen to up the ante by being terminally irritating. The best example of this is the panel that jumps about like an ancient video game. I’ve experienced viruses more engaging than this St Vitus dance of ‘can’t catch me’.

Once again, the objective seems to be to coerce the screen user into watching the message, whether they want to or not. Somewhere in the offices, think-tanks, pods and spaces of the advertising industry I do not doubt there are many bright young things – but on the evidence of this persuasion strategy, the young dimension is in the ascendancy. I’m all for enthusiasm, but behaving like a salesperson for the Jehovah’s Witness Double Glazing Company is not the road to user loyalty….unless you define a jailed criminal as loyal to the prison.

The standard tack of the double glazing brigade was ‘lie a lot’, and this too has been embraced by the communicators who imagine we’re all wannabe panel-beaters. ‘You are the two millionth visitor to our site’ says that dayglo-flashing thing to everyone hitting the site that year. Somewhere there may be a Groundhog Day victim trapped in the two-millionth visit, but I know it’s not me, so why am I seeing it?

Diet-fibbing is (so far as I can audit given all the shake, rattle and roll going on) the most common form of whopper available on your pc screen, mobile, Blackberry or Ipad. Last week -I’m being serious here – I counted twenty-three different weight-loss offers all using the same visual.

This comprises a chubby lady in a bikini who suddenly morphs into a skinny lady in a bikini. That is truly megafast weight-loss. Perhaps it’s all the jumping about she does all day, but therein lies the real kernel of the problem for any self-respecting advertiser: twenty-three brands using precisely the same visual ‘idea’. (From what I could see, it was the same bloody bikini).

The lack of creativity in all this dross is the clue to the sector of the advertising industry that’s probably in charge of it. They are, I’d imagine, all those not very stylishly dressed folks who thirty years ago were insisting that they and only they understood the secrets of direct marketing.

They had odd names like Veneer-Harpy. They wrote long direct mail letters in light blue ink with every other sentence underlined. They plotted results. They proved you could sell off the page without any writing ability, charm or punctuation. And every month they held a seminar somewhere nice proclaiming that next month, direct marketing would take over the world.

Their new name for the new world of virtuality is digital. And although some agencies are doing excellent work in this sphere called – for no special reason other than it sounds good – digital, most of them are the new generation of process-merchants adhering to the hammer/head theory of marketing communications, and the belief that the supply of gullible clients is infinite. The former hypothesis is as wrong as wrong could be, but unfortunately the latter faith is well founded.

One could argue that the idea-free, ill-mannered-jack-in-the-box-barrow-boy pillock approach to onsite marcoms simply reflects the disrespect of brand owners and the nature of our consumer culture – and you might prove to be right. But sooner or later every market stall needs better premises. I’d like to think that the potential for a better shopfront lies in the immediate future, as more and more gossip & blog sites, social networks, brand-trial sites and online news providers grasp the fact that giving advertisers more room to breathe can reflect well on their sites…if they control it properly.

But for this to happen, ‘proper’ ad agencies need to wind up their media and creative departments to script, shoot and tailor stylish advertising to upgrade the site experience. The old adland did this on posters and in the cinema: they raised the standard of TV advertising so much, many campaigns became assets for both client and medium. We need a new generation of wise and talented mavericks to do the same today.