Baseball, Beer, Travel, and Running

I'm not really sure what Extra Sexual Perception is, but apparently Xbox Live wants to help me boost it. When I signed into my Xbox a little while ago, I was greeted with the advertisement pictured above. This seems like a serious lapse in judgment on the part of someone at Microsoft.

I'm no prude, I enjoy the aesthetic appeal of the female form as much as the next guy, but if I had turned on my console for my kid to play an E is for Everyone rated game, only to discover that the console was trying to sell my kid "success with the ladies", I'd be pissed. If you go to the advertised site, BoostYourESP.com (which I'm not linking to on purpose), it's an attempt to get you to agree to let Axe (the body spray people) send you junk mail with minimal details about some new shower gel, which likely doesn't do anything to improve any gamer's chance with the ladies any more than a shower of any kind might do.

I understand Xbox Live has a captive audience of paying customers, which is highly attractive to advertisers. Because we Xbox Live users are a captive audience, Microsoft has some responsibility to recognize their captive audience comes in a variety of ages. I paid a subscription fee for the "privilege" to see this garbage.

Microsoft could innovate in the game console advertising space. Instead of force feeding us crap like the ESP ad, they could give the users some control over the types of ads we see. I love seeing ads for new video downloads, because I don't always know which videos are added to the library. I don't mind seeing ads for new games or new game demos. I'd love to have a dashboard option where I could fill out a short survey to tell the Xbox Live people about the kinds of ads I'd like to see and the kinds of ads I'd prefer to never ever see again - this is something they could easily implement at the sign-in level.

What do you think? Am I way off base, or should Microsoft be more selective in who they allow to advertise to the Xbox Live audience?