There is something in advertising that has been bothering me for ten years. On movie posters, in TV commercials, even in newspaper articles, everywhere there is always a rather large "small print" that states the AOL keyword for whatever is advertised or written about.

Am I the only one who feels this is like giving up a chunk of your own adspace to AOL? In the case of newspapers reporting on some website , declaring the URL of that website makes sense, but then they also print the magic words "AOL Keyword", and AOL gets mentioned more often than Dubya Bush.
Talk about clever branding. "I know" they must have said to themselves, "lets invent a browser without a location bar, and force people to mention our brand name all the time, even in their own ads!"

Pepsi spends a million dollars on a commercial, and happily throws a few seconds of it away on a lousy "AOL keyword" super. With so many people not on AOL - and the dawn of a AOL browser that actually has a location bar, isn't it time to cut them off the free advertising ride?