Slashdot Mirror
Bringing Interruption-Based Ads To the Web
Andy Smith writes "British production company Celador is to launch an Internet version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as reported in this BBC story. This may interest Slashdot readers because the online competition, which will be free to enter, will feature "e-mercials". It's commonly accepted nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners, pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate, so it seems inevitable that the next step is interruption-based advertising, which has worked fine for TV and radio. The Millionaire web site will display 7 second ads between rounds, and the player must watch them before continuing. E-mercials couldn't arrive in a more high-profile way, so once the online version of Millionaire launches we can expect to see similar ad systems used all over the web." Actually, rollouts of this have already been attempted - the media agencies called them "interstitals" and they are supposed to be 5 seconds between pages or so. Some of the drive behind this is that selling interruption-based ads is easier, because the media buyers who bought TV/radio ads are well familar with them.
They call it a failure because if they called it a success they would reveal to their clients the long-hidden fact that advertising is overrated and overpriced.
... is that as they get more advanced in trying to stick ads in our faces, we'll get more advanced in avoiding them. Banner ads are removed by junkbuster, TIVO makes tv advertisments a non-issue, and CDs and mp3s make radio pretty much obselite. Why do they think that people arne't going to get around this with a simple checkbox in their browser of choice that says "avoid interruption based ads [x]"
They'll come back with some way around this, browser writers will come back with a better version, etc etc etc. Why can't they just realize that advertising doesn't work (or web advertising doesn't work) and leave us the hell alone! If they found a better way of advertising that DIDN'T piss off consumers, people would be happier? Know why we don't object all that much anymore to banner ads? We've learned to ignore them, so we don't bitch, and they are basically just something to scroll off the top of the screen when you start reading a page. This is the symbiosis we've attained with the advertising agencies on the net, and it's comfortable. I guess now they are realizing "hey, banner ads don't work! lets find a way to be more annoying and obnoxious". What they should say is "hey web advertising doesn't work! lets find a way to be more effective and more helpful".
My $0.02
You're watching an idiom evolve right before your eyes! You can impress your grandkids (or bore them to death) when you can explain that you were *there* when they first set up us the bomb. :)
Who says TV ads have a better immediate response? You can measure web banner click-throughs, but that's meaningles in comparasins to other media where there's nothing similar to measure. For all they know, the TV ads may be just as ineffective as the web ads are. Most viewers have gotten quite skilled at totally ignoring the commercials on TV. But, since they can't measure anything with TV ads, they are willing to spend the money on them just because they *believe* they are working.
In practice, in the TV medium, the typical interruption advertisement format doesn't result in me wanting to buy the product. It results in me reaching for the remote control to 'surf' for a minute or two until the ad block is over. I think this is fairly typical for a lot of viewers.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Then people would be... wait for it... web surfing! Tada!
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
What hardware do you use for this?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can't even download a complete page these days in 5-7 seconds, much less an animated GIF. How is this supposed to work if you don't have broadband access?
This will also give the masses yet another (good) reason to turn off JavaScript.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I think you mean the SNR is too low (as in, not much signal for the amount of noise). I tend to agree. The couple times I have clicked on a banner, I get dropped into some noisy top-level page that has nothing to do with the content of the ad. Either that, or a page that says "Click here to add to your shopping cart", with little detail about the product or the company.
*sigh*
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Actually, there are sites that are starting to do something like that, if in a less proactive way. Rather than host the sites themselves, they sponsor sites which meet those criteria. Of course, the lack of impartiality on company-sponsored sites can make them less attractive. That's why you end up sometimes with "astroturf" sites which appear to be impartial by not disclosing their sponsorship, but are not... :-P Ah well.
Here's one example I came across recently: The website www.feline-behavior.com seems to be sponsored by Friskies Cat Food. Makes perfect sense, I suppose.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
You're missing the fact that less than 1% of all on-line advertising is banner ads that pay on click-through. Traditional radio/tv/print adversiting is indeed what is failing.
It all calls money. Companies that have no problem dropping millions for a 30 second superbowl spot somehow think that their IT department should be a profit center, and they make techies life hard when their websites cost more than they make.
That sort of silliness reminds me of Jostens. Jostens is a company that makes class rings. Anyway, some moron in that company looked around at their computer staff and figured out that they had a negative monetary balance for their department. How to solve that problem? Make the IT department a profit center! They could hire them out to build systems for other companies. Everyone would be profitable and happy. WRONG! After getting spanked hard, they stopped that nonsense. Somewhere along the line they forgot that the IT department is a *cost* associated with doing business, just like marketing. Companies need to realize that websites are the same thing. They will probably lose money, but if they are done right, they will help to drive business to other parts of the company.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Jeez man, your article reminds me of a commercial for dictionaries!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Advertising is the most pernicious odiosity perpetrated on modern man. One side is propaganda , perfidy and blatant bull, the other is an incredibly low rate of return which is deemed acceptable because its not zero (but dollar for dollar, the results are about comparable with the lottery.)
Open a site, put on it where you are, when you're open, what your wares and prices are and we'll find you when we want you.
Until then: Shut up!
I boycott any advertiser that shoves itself in my face on the web.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
.. has done this since the beginning.
Bah.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
The reason that people don't watch as much television (at least the people I know) is they're sick to death of ``interruption-based ads''. They're not as effective as they think. I rarely watch them on TV... I use the time they're on to go to the bathroom, raid the refrigerator, read a bit of my snail mail or the newspaper.
When will the ``media buyers'' figure out that the internet is not television? Sites that try to recreate the so-called television experience on my computer will not have me as a visitor. How many of those free internet connection portals that required that you click through an advertisement every so often are still around? Not many I'll bet and ``interruption-based ads'' are probably the reason.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Actually, I think the plan is that they'll shorten the ads to the point that they're virtually subliminal but not short enough to be illegal (assuming, of course, that subliminal ads are still illegal). Before long, you won't even notice the ads.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You know, there's this thing called TiVo and...
It even runs Linux fer chrissakes!
You really don't get it, do you? Nor do you know much about TiVo, do you? You cannot build your own video library with TiVo, unless you first output the signal in analog format (read: you lose quality). Your viewing habits are public knowledge, or at least purchasable for the right price, etc. etc.
If you want to be a serf, forced to submit to the whims and limitations the Copyright Cartels choose to impose upon you, with your viewing habits recorded and made available to marketing enterprises with their own, not your, interests at heart, be my guest. If instead you wish to retain your rights to fair use, record and archive the programs and movies you wish, under your own terms (and with better quality), then may I suggest thinking outside of the box just a little?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
(One hour dv video requires ~12 GB as avi's).
Details on the software I use can be found here
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The details on how I go about this are here, but to answer your question: I do use dvgrab for the actual capture. MainActor is used soley for the non-linear editing of the product, in order to cut out commercials and cruft preceeding (and following) the actual program (dv grab captures the video, but it does not filter commercials or do any kind of editing).
... editing the footage takes about twenty minutes, and the renders to MJPEG avi format take several hours, as does the final conversion to DivX. The latter isn't an issue, really, as I fire off the MJPEG renders in parallel before going to bed, then fire off the DivX conversion before leaving for work the next morning. That evening I burn the result to CD and watch it.
Yes, it is a little tedious
Obviously this is something you only do for a program you really enjoy and want to add to your personal video library, not something you are just casually watching.
Of course, PBS broadcasts are much easier, as there is almost no editing out of the commercials involved.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't know about the general viewer, but when I watch TV, I change the channel when the commercials come on.
I watch (and record) Babylon 5 religiously. However, I don't watch it at 6:00 PM CDT when it comes on the Sci-Fi channel. Instead, I capture the signal using a firewire converter box (Sony) and host adapter to my Linux box using dvgrab. Once the episode is recorded I fire up MainActor, snip out the commercials and splice the various parts together (moving the intro sequence to the beginning for good measure), then convert the resulting product to divx and burn to CD.
I end up watching each episode a day or so later (usually while the current episode is recording), but I do so without any commercial interruptions of any kind. Once I've watched the episode I put the freshly burned CD in a booklet with a hundred or so others. I already have most of season 4, all of season 5, and am currently getting season's 1 through 4. In the end I'll have every episode of my favorite show on CD, and have watched every episode without having seen a single commercial.
Not everyone is interested in taking the time to edit out commercials of course, but for those programs one really enjoys, viewing the show without interruption enhances the experience immensly and is well worth waiting a day or so to watch (while the render and conversion take place overnight).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
we already have ad filters that catch a bulk of the ad's. I'm sure the ad filter programmers are chomping at the bit to block these puppies too. If it's javascript then it can be killed easily, otherwise it will just take a clever programmer about 3 days to figure out how to block them.
It's kinda silly that advertisers are shoving this media heavy ad's at us when less than 15% of the US has broadband access in the homes. I use junkbuster to save what little bandwith I have now. Imagine 1.2meg quicktime ro macromedia files shoved at you for no other reason but to annoy you just because these marketing people have not a brain in their head when it comes to technology.
Your TV commercials take 30megabytes per 30 second spot for TV quality.(and that's with our industry standard of mpeg2 compression.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Amen! I think the thing I dislike about banner ads is that they're bugging me while I'm trying to pay attention to the content. With YDKJ online, I can play the game without any outside distractions, then sit back and watch the commercials. (And I usually do watch the commercials -- They're pretty entertaining in their own right, since they can focus on being funny/clever instead of trying to grab my attention away from whatever I'm reading.)
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
Seriously, I haven't purchased anything I haven't actively sought out in years.
The fact is that the real way advertising works evades even the advertisers. It works by numbing your mind into not listening.
Market research is conducted to pinpoint empty pockets of market demand. Businessmen who know what they're doing enter only these market segments.
The fact is they know that consumers are already looking for this good or service, and they know where they looked for it already. All they have to do is create it and put it in the right place. Consumers will find it and they will sell their product.
All the ads do is numb your brain into deafness, so that people aren't able to tell you NOT to buy products. Think about it, when commercials come on, your brain turns off. You only really retain the info you willingly made yourself open to. When somebody tries to tell you something new that you weren't already open to...you don't listen.
This is why people listen to o-town, when the band next door keeping them up at night is the next beatles.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Instead of "Who wants to be a millionaire", how about /. hosts "Who-wants-to-prove-they-never-stop-refreshing-the -slashdot-page-so-let's-try-to-get-the-first-post- and-yet-miss-it-barely,-and-annoy-those-folks-who- actually-have-something-useful-to-say-or-who-would -like-to-read-actual-content-instead-of-a-14-year- old-unloading-his-pimples-on-us"?
I mean, come ON... what is with the s-to-n ratio here lately?
On-Topic - I will have to remove the fake hosts file which maps all those ad servers to localhost now. 8^( sigh...
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
There are plenty of examples of this type of site already on the web. One of my personal favorites (WARNING: shameless plug) is the home page for Weber (as in the manufacturer of outdoor grills). I found a fantastic salmon recipe there which I use whenever I have the chance.
The only problem here is that you're never going to see any information critical of Weber on that site. These sites can generate customers, but not unless they come there looking specifically for you. For example, I never bothered to even look at Weber's site until after I'd already selected my grill, a decision made with a little help from Consumer Reports. From an advertising perspective, other than creating a little bit more in the way of "brand awareness" for me, this had precisely zero value. And for information on non-Weber products, I'm going to look somewhere considerably less professional looking, but with a good deal of info.
More importantly, this creates a huge burden on would-be advertisers. It used to be that to sell a product, you got a few (possibly fake) testimonials, whipped up a contest, and generally tried to convince everyone that your product was the best thing since sliced bread. Using the mini-portal method, suddenly every manufacturer of every type of product has to become an information clearinghouse on their own website. Here's a news flash: I'm not looking for everybody who wants to sell to me to impress me with their knowledge of whatever. I'm looking for a good deal. And that's the kind of thing that good old ads - the kind that take a second or two to read - are good for.
Godin must be shaking his head over this one. A big step backward.
In case you are wondering what Permission Marketing is all about. A few highlights:
- People's attention is a limited resource. There is only so much time during the day to look at ads, even if you want to, and the amount of that resource is non-negotiable.
- The more money spent on Interruption Marketing the more effective Permission Marketing is.
- Permission Marketing is not SPAM but it can be if you are not careful.
- Interruption Marketing is shotgun. Maybe you'll hit something.
- Permission Marketing is a smart bomb. You don't "fire" until you know what you intend to "hit."
- Permission Marketing is more work but more cost effective.
I work for an advertising firm and even I think web advertising is being done wrong.--
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Grrr. Damn companies trying to trick everyone into thinking that the web is the only reason to use the internet. The web could go away, and I'd be happy with just ssh and SMTP.
The business model of ad-based web-sites is fundamentally flawed, whether passive or active in-your-face. Think of why we browse ... we are activitely hunting for a specific (or fuzzy) piece of information. Any distractions, no matter how amusing initially, is a waste of time/energy. Just like email has become the defacto asynchronoous communications and SMS the instant pager and chat the social background noise, the web is the equivalent of scanning/comparison. This is distinct from window shopping or TV channel-shopping.
... given all those epensive MBA's you'd think those guys and gals would have half a brain-cell to at least come up with an attractive alternative.
If you look at the porn sites, they accept that the feeder sites are there to filter and sort out the desires of human browsers and grant a finder's fee if that person converts to a full subscription-based site. This model has shown to work. Some catalogs which aim to build bulk purchases appear to work. Library based access fees also seem to work for large or unique archives (e.g. MedLine). Pay-per-page/view/download does not when the user has no idea of the end-quality unless there's a strong reputation behind it. Ad-backed sites at this stage do not appear to be relevant to consumers and are consequently discarded as noise unless pertinent to their immediate needs.
Sheesh
LL
This article from Salon in 1998 talks about the Tampax site doing exactly what the poster was talking about.
OK, so he's a complete [expletive deleted], but at least Chris Tarrant makes UK Millionaire mildly engaging to watch. Will Celador be using him as their global front man, I wonder?
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Dunx
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
IANAMT (I am not a marketing type) but from what I understand, part of the issue is the targeting of traditional ads.
For example, say you're a pasta company. You notice your sales are slumping. You put a 30 second ad on during Days of Our Lives, which the network assures you is number one program in its time slot among 20-40 year old women. Your marketing data has shown you that 20-40 year old women make a lot of decisions on who buys pasta.
Within weeks, your pasta sales are up. Not only that, but your grocery stores tell you (through their nice discount cards) that sales of your product are up 10% in the Female 20-40 demographic.
You can now say your ad campaign was a "success."
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
just log into excite.com 's games section.. they have "intermission" quite frequently..of course.. their version of intermission is disabling the game, switching to a full ad, and then returning after a minute. As scary as it is, it works.
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
I believe I read somewhere that television (at least as presented in the US) is the perfect medium to cause people to grow up with and develop ADHD.
Slashdot being the second best.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Reminds me of those current M$ ads about how interoperable and compatible they are with other machines. So annoying that I now hate to buy M$ products.
;)
(Boy, I'm sure glad that M$ has helped out the Samba project so much...)
But seriously, I do not and will not shop at Old Navy for precisely this reason.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
As much as people here love MBA's, I'll post anyway:)
You are correct. The main goal of advertising is to help name/brand recognition. The point is that when the customer is ready to buy, your product is one that they will associate with that need.
There are of course many instances where this is not the case in the short term (coupons, vouchers, rebates, etc are the best examples) but the long term goal is still to keep your name in front of the consumer.
That's why Coke buys so much ad space/time. They are number one in the cola market (and a large player in the overall beverage market) but their market dominance is new since about the mid 1980's. (Actually with the introduction of 'Classic Coke'.) Their market share and the money spent on ads are directly proportional. Ditto Pepsi, who has not spent anywhere near the money Coke has.
(BTW, that MBA is with a specialization in IT, so I know how to manage you programmer drones. NOT!:)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
There is nothing wrong with your browser.
For the next 7 seconds, we will take control
of your computer.
We control the horizontal
We control the vertical
We control the Javascript.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Mozilla (Netscape 6) using the Gecko rendering engine doesn't render a page linearly as the older and other browsers do. Whatever info it has already downloaded is put on the screen right away, then the other, later arriving elements are slotted in when they finally do arrive.
I find that on most websites the text comes up first, then when the ads and other images are received, they are popped onto the screen and the text rearranges itself around them.
The rare times when I need to revert to using Netscape 4, I find myself feeling rather impatient as I sit for countless seconds staring at some stupid blinking ad on an otherwise blank screen. With Mozilla, I find myself more relaxed and my workflow less interupted.
Trickster Coyote
Reality is a consensual halluciation.
Ideology is for ideots.
Absolutely.
It would be really interesting to get the add companies data on the effectiveness of different forms of advertising, but unfortunately I have heard ( not checked ) that such data is difficult to get a hold of because each company has its own and it's all propritary. Does anyone have any good references on this ?
Aol has been doing this for years!!
They are the poineers of annoying ads on your computer!
When will they get the respect they deserve???
Juln
The free download version of "You don't know jack" had ads between the rounds that were part of the reason that it was free.
Not to mention the "find the no-thanks button" style advertising on AOL and other cheap internet services (Juno?).
This seems like a case of spin and hype trying to draw advertsers maybe - advertisers that have become disenchanted with banners as nearly everyone has learned to tune them out. It seems that netaddress is having problems as well - they have more and more ads every time I go there, including pop-ups for online mugging^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgambling sites.
Just another sign of the bottom falling out of things - correct me if I'm wrong here.
+++ ATH0 +++
They really really bug me. Leaving crappy shortcuts all over my pristine desktop. Signup for this, signup for that. I don't want to sign up for anything, I just want to use TurboTax. AND I DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR AOL, YOU ASSHOLES!
I like TurboTax, and I gues it's worth the hassle, but they really ought to give you the option to opt out of such crap. It's still my machine, right? Right?
You sound overly optimistic. In reality many "free" community sites are drying up now that the ad revenue is gone (shacknews.com, Snowball/IGN network, SomethingAwful.com, Stomped.com, GameCenter.com).
We'll have to see if micropayments/benefactor/street performer's protocol programs actually work. Ain't nothing for free...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Television has the limitation that, while you can interrupt the viewing experience, you don't know that the viewer actually saw the advertisement. The internet does not have this limitation. For a high demand environment such as a gameshow, the next logical step is to quiz the participant about the content of the ad.
Blatent questions like 'What product was being sold' will not work. But imagine the more subtle ones. For instance, set a scene - Two girls are sitting down at a bar drinking a name brand beverage. Add some action - a handsome may walks by; from the front, he looks good but his shirt shows large iron burn on the back. Then ask the user for input - which response would be funniest: (A) I'd never date a guy who can't iron (B) I always dump <competing beverage brand> on my clothes when they start to burn or (C) at least <beverage brand> tastes good and looks good. The user may be forced to pay attention and possibly identify with the characters in the ad.
Laugh now while you still can.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
For sheep and cows, maybe. I stopped watching TV when I acquired a VCR and could watch cool things like movies... without commercials- this is where dubbing is beatiful, as you can slice off the scads of previews for crap you're never going to watch. I stopped listening to radio when I bought a laptop and started collecting MP3s. I really, TRULY despise bulletin boards, banner ads, and especially commercials. I can deal with NPR and PBS, as well as HBO... but the rest of them? Hell, I'd rather see the damned advertisers spend money on product placement within the program than cut down the time of it with their annoying drivel. Watch TV on mute with subtitles on- you'll find that advertising loses its programming pretty damned fast.
This is where the web is *really* cool- if a site wants to ram a seven second blip up my nose every time I check their page, then I'll find another site that fits what I'm looking for and doesn't have that sort of "feature", if you really want to call it that. IMHO, if you want to make money from the site in order to run the site, then SELL A PRODUCT- look at the comic sites that sell compilations, mousepads, T-shirts and so forth as an example of this. I'd rather buy a Penny Arcade T-shirt than have to look at the damned tip jar or watch ads- the shirt keeps the sun off my shoulders and is a far more effective form of advertising, as people who don't know much about the web will be curious....
I don't have a problem with advertising- where I really have issues is when I'm FORCED to look at the shit (I can block the ads on Slashdot. I can't block them on the idiot box.) . If it were well and truly *optional*, I may actually have less of a grudge about it. I may actually think it would be worthwhile to watch TV every couple of months for an hour or two. As it stands now? Hell, one *less* reason to use the web. Great.
And in response to televison Bill said:
This is especially true when you consider internet penetration. Just over 50% of americans are on the net. What percentage of those happen to be on the site hosting the interstitials?
On the other hand, greater than 90% of americans have a television and, even including cable/satellite, there are a helluva lot fewer stations than websites, leading to a greater concentration of users on any given television channel.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
(donning flame - retardant suit)
MSNBC has actually been doing this for months. Go to their page and click "technology". You'll get an ugly verticalnet ad in the center of your browser. The link to "continue" to their technology section appears directly above.
This may be less of an issue if you download MS's menu features..but ick!
There are any number of webbased sites that use 'intermissions' 'commercials' or 'e-mercials' or whatever you want to call them.
This is nothing new, move along. Obviously if Hemos worked in the USPO these guys would of got the patent for this 'new' technology.
Well, I guess Andy Smith would have to work at the USPO to make this pass.
Hemos can keep his day job.
Especially for game related sites. Just like television, whom the net wants to copy, it gives me a few mins to grab a drink, food, or talk to the girlfriend and keep her interested.
I'm blessed to be flamed by a wannabe 'Signal 11'. Took a high intellect to come up with that nick I'm sure.
Using a word to try and make yourself seem smart actually underscores your stupidity when you use it incorrectly.
In this case you're doubly stupid, because using a slash between two words is for inept writers and your big word of the day, moot, means to discuss or debate. In trying to use it for a replacement of the word irrelevant to make yourself seem important, you only ended up making yourself look like the jackass that you are.
Go back to helping mommie unpack the groceries.
Not a marketing person myself but have worked with plenty.
.5% for a successful campaign. Offline advertising (with the exception of direct mail and telemarketing) is primaraly brand building. As was mentioned in a previous post the real reason Coke paid millions for superbowl commercials is not so that you will leave your house and buy a Coke but so when you are in a restuarant and looking for a soft drink the first name that pops to mind is Coke. Branding is a tricky thing to measure as it is indirect and requires getting out and talking to people and making some statistical leaps in order to prove your ad worked.
The difference here is that online and offline advertising are measured by two different standards. In online advertising the measurement criteria is clickthrough. In other words your ad is only as successful when it intices people to directly respond to this. Since most people have realized that clicking on an ad will take them away from the task at hand there are really good reasons why they don't click and thus clickthrough rates are currently hovering at about
The great promise of direct response advertising was that it was supposed to eliminate this mess and give advertisers a concrete way to determine if their campaign was a success or if they should fire their agency.
As current web advertising schemes are dying companies are trying different ways to make them work. Some of the larger companies are starting to make web advertising more about branding than about direct response. We'll see if it works.
As for this instance it could work. The context is a game and previous games (You Don't Know Jack, etc...) seem to not be too bothered by this. I would imagine that while this might work in a game it would fail on a site where people wanted information or transactions.
An excellant point. Actually, there are very few ways to measure ROI on TV and radio commercials (return on investment). The only way to do this on the web is the click-thru (since we cant count the number of people who looked at a banner rather than avoided it with their eyes.) The beauty of all this is it helps make underground, grass-roots media more attractive .. the sites which do not succumb to this style of advertising will enjoy some run-off of P.O'd viewers. Contrast this to television, where everything has ads; its an accepted fact that you cant avoid them on television. The net is quite different in this respect.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I HATE intersitals. These are about the only form of advertising that annoys me enough to write webmasters. One of my favorite weather sites (www.intellicast.com) started using intersitals. I wrote them ranting about how much I hated them, how annoying your customers isn't a good way to sell things, and just for good measure ranted a bit on how I didn't like their new directory structure. Interestingly, about a month later I a boiler plate reply, "We're sorry we've annoyed you.. we just want to make money to supply you with great content, blah blah" but the cool thing was it got forwarded to about 7 different people! I don't think the webmasters like uglifying their sites like this. The decisions are almost surely coming from managers. When you find an intersital, send off an email to the webmaster, you might just help them get their site un-uglified.
Ian
This system reminds me to something similar:
Here in Europe there are several "free" web based SMS services, which show several banner ads on their page and you must click on one of these ads instead on some send-button to send your message. But I can't imagine that such forced add clicking works much better either...
-- There is no place like $HOME.
I use iCab to knock out 90% of the banners found at the top of sites like /.
The Mobile Millionaire has a time limit, so perhaps the Internet version will aswell.
It seems that internet ads are probably the only ads they can actually keep track of how many people have followed the link. In terms of other ads, how will said companies know if they work? Ie, if I buy a bar of Ivory soap, or a Dell computer, how the hell do they know whether I bought it based on the TV commercial during the Simpsons, a billboard on I-95, a magazine ad in Knitting Today? In fact, how do they know how many people even look at ads in magazines, radio, TV, billboards, etc.
People get numb to web ads after awhile, but so too with billboards on the highway. Yet billboards seem to be prospering. Radio and TV ads somewhat too.
What has led these companies to determine that all other ad sources are a success, but internet ads are a failure? .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
As far as interstitials in particular are concerned, I already browse with at least 2 windows open, because most sites are so slow that I want something else to read while they're loading... and I'm going to interpret a 5-second interstitial as yet another delay, I can tell you right now.
Furthermore, it's a bit deceptive to say that interstitials "have worked just fine on TV." With an unprecedented amount of channel variety and choice, many people don't even SEE interstitial TV ads anymore... we just flip to the cooking channel. The direction TV is headed is product integration, like in "Survivor" when they got the Target(TM) gift pack or the Doritos(TM) and Pepsi(TM) picnic (which would have made me puke, incidentally, if I was starving in the middle of the desert). We've seen this in sports for a long time, but now it's to the point where they're working brands into the plot of TV shows.
Unfortunately, I'd say we're going to see more of this kind of thing in web content. Except the problem is, the web isn't as entertainment rich as TV; it's more about communication and news. How are we going to get brands integrated?
You make a terrific point -- one which should be obvious to marketers but is not, for some reason.
/. stories, is because there's no promise of an immediate "reward" with most banner ads. When they start telling me that I can see some cool streaming video or hear a cool song or learn something novel, I might start clicking their banners again.
I have my own theory (of course) about declining click-through rates: Today's web-based banner ads typically include a lot more copy (especially the animated ones,) than the banner ads of yore. As a result, they leave less to the imagination. I can "file away" the information in the banner ad for use later, because they've told me everything I need to know. As a result, I no longer feel compelled to click through.
Another reason I don't click through on banner ads, but often click through on
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The Big News Page
Coke already does this, for the most part, especially in coutries where a large fan base exists for football (soccer.) Check out the giant list of world-wide sites for Coke shown below, especially the Taiwanese and Argentinian Coke pages, and the Australian diet Coke page.
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The Big News Page
IE users will be at a loss. NS users can download Mozilla, find some function like Javascript::delay(uint ms) { :)
usleep(ms);
return(0);
} and just coment out the usleep() call
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
The birth of play back TV, with such products as real play and TiVo mark the end of the commercial. This products give power to a dumb TV set, let the end user have some say, and all have the ability to fast forward or jump 30secs ahead. Therefore interruption-based commercials will die. But, these products cant filter ads, thus any advertising In the show is seen.
The computer is one of the most (or the most) programmable and powerful tool for the average person. While banner ads have been unsuccessful, why would more annoying interruption based ads be better?
if giving power causes the death of interruption based ads for TV, how could it work on an amazingly more powerful machine? the logic behind all this is flawed. all a user would need to do is store the feed on their hard drive, and either filter out the ads somehow or just fastforward.
My guess is that these ads will grow very quickly, but once there is an easy to use tool for the general public, pop, the ads will be gone.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
It started with Berkeley Systems games (or even earlier perhaps) in 1997 or so. ACROphobia and You Don't Know Jack Online had between-round interstitial advertising. And people chatted about the goofy ads they saw in the chat space, during the next round.
Today's iWON.com does this by requiring a gratiuitous banner ad click-through to 'collect' your tokens. Today's Uproar! site does interstitials between every round of that Family Feud style game. A few seconds of ads, and back to the game. It's accepted.
This is just another example of a press release suggesting that they're "reinventing the web" whether it's true or not, just to get more attention. And slashdot bit the bait.
[
It is due to the page design. The banner advert is in a separate table from the rest of the page, and a table does not get rendered until it has completely downloaded.
Thus the advert table will display long before the content table is downloaded and then displayed.
No conspiracies there.
Devil's Advocate: On
That takes time. That takes money. We aren't in the market to inform people, we are simply in the market to sell a product. All we want the customer to do is give us money, not learn a new skillset, or be happy, or improve the value of their home.
We want their money - brainwash them with commercials.
Devil's Advocate: Off
I first saw such ads in Acrophobia 3 years ago, and since then, I've seen them in assorted other games. (The game was designed with certain intermissions. In the finals of each game, the top two contestants play while the others wait, then the others vote on their plays while they wait. During both of these waits, the waiting players get an ad that takes up the whole window. There are also periodically ads between rounds. When I first played Acrophobia, these were full-screen ads with sound that were the closest thing to a TV commercial I'd ever seen, and quite possibly still are -- only possibly surpassed by the embedded commercials in some RealVideo clips.) Some of the games at Boxerjam do this, as do some of the games at Excite games.
The Internet is not television, no matter how much advertisers are trying to make it that way.
Yeah, it does. And everybody hates the ads and routinely mocks them. I really miss the little Shockwave tic-tac-toe game that you could play while InkLink loaded (not that I played it a lot--gotta love the T1), which they have since replaced with an advertisement.
I thought the Brits showed ads between shows only, for like ten minutes. Guess I was wrong.
Inklink does use commercials before the game while it is loading and also a commercial break halfway through about a 12 round game that advertises digital cameras from HP. It was a bit annoying at first, but Inklink is a great game and a bit addictive. It is basically online Pictionary.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Noooo..., you certainly don't. Well all those snobby Internet people with their "advertising sucks" attitudes can all just kiss my ass, because I'm HAPPY that the Web is becoming just like TV. Yesserree!
AS IF banner ads were REAL advertising..
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
and if they start putting them in windows that are full screen, and that i can't close, minimize, or resize i bet you can guess who i am never going to buy from again...
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
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Free Mac Mini
Doesn't InkLink (that Shockwave pictionary game) already do this? Nothing really new, I don't really mind the ads but then again I have cable so they don't waste any time downloading them.
Funny that it's a British company that will introduce this type of frequent interrupt advertising to the "mainstream," since, as I recall, British TV ads are much less intrusive than American ads in that they only come up every 15 minutes.
I would not go to a site with 5 second interruption based ads if it was in order to print money on my laser printer.
TPO (and Jeopardy, and probably everything else on the Sony Station) has had this forever. With TPO, though, you have the option of seeing the commercial, and viewing it gives you a magic transporter token. Fortunately, you can see which of your opponents have sold their soul and berate them for selling out.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I think the general viewer is much more influenced by advertising than you are. Why else would they spend so much money on it?
Test 1 2 3 4
The online version of Jeopardy! does this, too. There's a commercial between the rounds. It doesn't get in the way much, it gives you time to refresh your drink, just like the ones on TV.
Porn sites have been doing this (and/or similar) for a while. Click on a link, have an intermediary page come up with banners/etc, click on another link to go to the page you trying to get to. links embedded in flash animations force the surfer to wait until the flash animation finishes to go on.
Actually, most technology uses start in the porn industry. Consider the multi-angle view capability possible with DVDs. No one's used it, right? Wrong: All Star. I'm pretty sure streaming video started here too.
When you put it this way, I can't help but think of BlipVerts from Max Headroom - time-compressed advertisements that were so intense (more than just a visual experience to) that sometimes the couch potatoes the ads were directed at exploded!
Somehow, I don't think any of us are going to explode from them, but, the way that ads are getting these days, BlipVerts may become a reality ;-)
(Jesus - I'm wondering if anyone on here even REMEMBERS the Max Headroom series! Strange but good show :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
They've been doing this since at least 1998. Has no one here played flash games with advertisements like Acrophobia?
I agree with about 80% with what you say.
But part of the idea behind commercials is to bring people who were either a) not aware of your product, or b) using a competing product into your space. So if I just Dodge trucks, odds are I would never go to Ford's web site voluntarily. So Ford has to grab my attention some other way.
But you are right - if companies want to increase their web prescense, they need to have a good one. And as much as I dislike banner and pop-up ads, for a 5 second commercial, I could probably live with it, as long as it wasn't every other page. It would have to be between say, every 4 or 5 pages. Or each page would have to be sufficiently long enough to make it worth my while.
Of course, I could be wrong.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I've seen harsh reactions to, for example, C|Net's (and, thereby, ZDNet's) new large block ads. These remind me of print ads in magazines. I don't mind them (as long as they don't take over my browser with pop ups, home page changes, and other evil methods).
These new advertising methods are the price people will have to pay for "free" (new word:) Inter-tainment. The free ride is over. Fine.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
and it is still a really fun game those commercials are only about 5 seconds
Gott in Himmel, does no-one else remember the horrors of blipverts?
Five tons of flax.
This may interest Slashdot readers because the online competition, which will be free to enter, will feature "e-mercials".
Oh, yeah? How about "no-mercyals"?
That's it, I'm downloading links...
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
That is cool. Great way to show support for your favorite sites, and NOT interrupt your reading. I normally automatically scroll down to ignore the banner ads, but I will start right-clicking.
Personally I think interstitials will be ok for broadband folk.
I ignore banners at the top and bottom of the page.
I HATE ads in the middle of what I'm reading.
I don't think I'd mind more interstitials. As long as they don't require interaction, I can let it blow by like a tv ad, but for 3 to 5 seconds or so I will be looking at your page and not distracted by the content that I'm actually there for.
PS: for a buck a drink, I'll get you a beer! I mean, I normally try to tip pretty good when I go out to eat, but I'll stop in a bar for 2 or 3 drinks and only tip a buck. I admire your generosity, and willingness to pay for good service. Pretty cool.
"Ok, you still have 3 lifelines left, would you like to use Altavista, Hotbot, or Google?"
:)
Who needs lifelines if you have a fast connection to Google ?
How are they going to implement this ?
If you have ever played the trivia game "You Don't Know Jack" (the netshow) - You've already been subject to this form of advertising.
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
MSNBC has been doing this for a few months now. If you go to their site and click on any of the categories, you're often given a large (300x400, perhaps) graphic featuring some company's latest product, a new web site, or just another general advertisement. Therefore, interuption-based advertising on the Web isn't quite as new as many people think it might be. Here's an example of what I saw after clicking on "Technology" in the left-hand link menu.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
There used to be a ISP here in germany, who offered free internet access through an 0800 number and a proxy you couldn't circumvent. Every 10th page or so that you requested was an ad-page with an "click here to see the actual page or wait x seconds" on the bottom. I don't know wether they are still doing this (germany.net / nexgo.de)
I guess most people agree that TV is not a good metaphor for the web wrt. advertising. Are there any better ones?
The main way in which the web is different from TV (&radio) is that it is interactive not passive. So are there any other forms of interactive media? Books are more similiar than the TV & Radio, but that doesn't help because there are no adds in books.
From the limited amount of time I've spent thinking about this, it seems that magazines are the closest to web pages (at least the current state of the web). Banner adds seem pretty similiar to the ads you see in magazines.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
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1) This transition has been occuring slowly but steadily over the last two decades or so.
2) This transition will continue to accelerate, driven in part by the new opportunities and threats created by the internet.
The discussion of this effect was not by any means the central point of the book -- it was an honest-to-gods marketing textbook, not a sociological rant. But sometimes it sounded erriely like the Cluetrain Manifesto.
The book in question is "A Framework for Marketing Management" by Kostler, for what it's worth.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Should advertisers be forced to reimburse users for overhead costs of their adds? This is a crazy idea, but from a capitalistic standpoint, why should these users be forced to pay for information they never even wanted in the first place?
The logical solution, of course, is for users under a variable rate charge plan to avoid websites with lots of ads and/or interstitials. Or they could use programs such as WebWasher or JunkBuster.
Thoughts, comments, flames, ephiphanys . . .
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"
Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.
"
A good example of this is ,
Rane Audio : www.rane.com
They have a reasonable list of technical data sheets on their site including a helpful "how to wire up odd cables for dodgy pieces of kit" sheet. As someone who runs a small venue we link to their website as a technical resource and we have printouts of their pages in the cupboard to aid people in wiring.
We've now started buying their kit too because we know it's made by competent people.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
1) Please proof me wrong, aren't consumers, who have a need to jump the coupon-hurdle the ones who care the least about brands? And isn't the coupon stuff the tool to get higher prices from well-earning consumers while still getting a little from thoes who do no have that high a willingness-to-pay? Thus I follow they are no valid marketing tool, and cannot enter the comparison with banner-ads.
2) Isn't Coke just paying that much, because if they wouldn't Pepsi would win a substantial part of Cokes share? Following from that Pepsi and Coke are duopolists, much in a way Bertrand and friends explained, thus, we find a long-run equilibrium.
This leaves an other question, aren't banner-ads and TV/radio ads complementary? The TV/radio ads are largly succesful, because they are present in most of the time we spend on non-working duty, banner-ads could fill the gap and provide consumer access, even when he is "working" e.g. searching the net for some info. I hope no real world marketing model will use _only_ banners, but they should not underestimate them either. Do I have a point?
BTW: No MBA nessesary, 4 terms economical CS will do. And I think most /.ers are quite familiar with BA anyway...
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42 cows on a 42km road on their way to 42.org
if both are making a profit /.
Well this is, _if_ they are making a profit, which I'm not sure they are... economic profit != earnings.
As to the "growing the market", well, that would be against the rules (of perfekt markets, or isn't it, not that sure on that one...), but I've to admit, it's a way to escape this dilema.I'm tired too, but I enjoyed one of the few educated discussions on non-computer topics at
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42 cows on a 42km road on their way to 42.org
...are the ones that say "We're just showing this to you until the page you requested is loaded." But if you look at the lights on the cable modem, nothings being loaded. There's just some timer keeping me from seeing the page I want.
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Ok, what happens here is a table cannot display until it is completely loaded. This means in order to have a banner ad display first, the banner must not be in the same table as the rest of the page.
Use your 'view >>> source' menus on some of these pages to see what I'm talking about. In fact, just view the source on Slashdot here, they do it too!
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
Guess who will be claiming a patent 2 years from now for intermercials? :)
I wish for once that these fucking meat heads would leave well enough alone. Don't go fucking up the internet for the rest of us by forced "stop" of our browsing! What if I forced you to stop working for 5 seconds to watch me stick forks in my ass?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I don't know about the general viewer, but when I watch TV, I change the channel when the commercials come on. On the radio, I flip between 4 local stations looking for music. If I don't change the channel, I just ignore the radio/TV until the music/show is back on.
Now if I'm playing this game (dumb game, too easy compared to quality trivia games), there's little chance I'd be spending those few seconds seriously looking at the ads, I'd be thinking about the questions, etc. Besides, 7 seconds is an easy amount of time to just simply ignore. I guess we'll have to wait for the statistics, but I can't imagine the click-through rate will be good at all (after all, who wants to interrupt a game they enjoy playing?).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Anyone remember the online game called Acrophobia? The makers of "You don't know jack" had a free game where you make up sentences based on random acronyms. Long since dead, they had 2-3 short commercials from their advertisers... Macromedia type ads... If you were losing, it was no big deal, but if you were on a roll, it was insanely frustrating...
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The Naked News has had this for over a year.
Because it is done in streaming quicktime, you can usually skip them if you have a fast enough connection.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The Naked News has had interuption advertising for about a year now, and they just instituted a "pay for non-advertising" subscription. I guess this means it is unsuccessful on the net as of today...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Great...
Now, instead of the relatively long (30-60sec) T.V. Commercials, we have 7 second commercials. The next generation is not going to be able to focus reliably on anything if we continue to shorten the collective attention span. Does anyone else think that perhaps shortening the length and increasing the intensity of advertisements is a bad thing?
I personaly find myself repulsed by these "Interruption based" advertisements. I don't watch T.V., Ever, and I hate to thing my antipathy may soon extend ever further, as advertisement based media sends it's corrupted tendrils further into the internet.
In the words of Bill Hicks, "They are Demons, set loose on the earth, to lower the standards."
But people will be as reluctant to switch browser window as they are to channel surfing while the ad is on. Insofar as some people are willing to look at the ad or don't know how to ctrl+tab to another window then the advertiser will be successful.
It'll work exactly like Bezerk Network, which has had this for years. You Don't Know Jack, Acrophobia, Get the Picture, etc. has small 15-second commercials in between "rounds". The commercials are done in Flash, and pressing a key on the keyboard brings up the advertiser's web site after the game -- a lot smarter idea than today's banner ads.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's commonly accepted nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners, pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate
As it turns out, the click-thru rate on my television and radio is exactly zero, which when compared to web click-thru results seems pretty abysmal. Yet people still buy tv and radio ads.
I thought the purposes of advertising was to raise the profile of your product; when I keep hearing "Drink Coke" all day, I'm more likely to think "Coke" when the question "What do you want to drink?" comes up.
By this measure, I think that web advertising might be just as successful as traditional advertising. However, somebody set us up the meme that a web ad that doesn't result in click-thru is ineffective. I find this reasoning inconsistent. You're going to have to prove to me that they're less effective than traditional magazine and newspaper ads, but until then, I find the "low success rate" argument a falacy.
I sometimes wonder if there should be a generic slashdot user profile that could be used by mobs of people as a registration tool.
Would sort of put the whammy on the whole purpose of the user profile in the firstplace.
I can see it now: 50,000 copies of Windows XP registered in the name of John Katz
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"This File Download has been brought to you by Microsoft, ReInventing the Internet, Just for you!. Before your download begins, let us remind you to check out the latest Microsft product, Microsoft Spam ..."
And Then:
"Before we continue your download ..."
This would be enough to make me change my mind on gun control.
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Nakednews.com has been using interuption commercials from the get go.. it's certainly not new to the net. I heard they're going to offer pay-subscriptions for those who want commercial-free. Similar to the slashdot article a few days ago about paying for a banner free site. I wonder if 'Millionaire' will offer the same? Also it seems a dumb show to port, I'm surprised they wouldn't offer something a tad more 'geek' like robot/junkyard wars, etc.
Lots of people have already pointed out how they'll just switch browser windows, etc., but what's to think that Junkbuster and its friends won't catch up?
First, I'll assume that this'll commonly be done with server-side processing to decide if you've waited the required amount of time. If it's done with JavaScript, Flash, or something else proprietary, we've already seen that that just won't fly.
I can envision a proxy that does a bit of read-ahead for you. If you go to a site that uses such an obnoxious kind of advertising, the proxy will follow the next few links and throw away those that are advertisements. By the time you're done reading the page you're on, the next page with real content has already been loaded, free of commercials. Truly obnoxious web sites that try to defeat such a scheme will break all the ISPs, companies, etc., that rely on Squid or other caching proxies.
Personally, I see many people getting increasingly turned off of advertising alltogether. People use VCRs and Tivo-like appliances to skip commercials. Everybody hates spam, telemarketing, billboards...you name it. I'm just waiting for the day when we all say, ``enough!''
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
At a friend's band's site, I noticed that banners had started to appear. That's no problem, as I've developed a blindness to banners.
After following the fourth or fifth link, instead of seeing the page I expected, I was taken to a page telling me that "This site has been brough to be with the help of one of our sponsors....". This changed (using a <meta> tag, I guess) to being the page I expected after abpout five seconds.
Naturally I told all of this to my friend, but the band's unlikely to change ISP.
The upshot is that I'm unlikely to go to this site again. Sadly, I think that other people will accept this sort of advertisement, as yes, it's what they're used to. I don't watch TV (don't have one, don't want one), and I only listen to Radio 4 (BBC - non-commercial), so I don't have to put up with that sort of advertising.
So, I'm not typical. I don't like blatant advertising in this manner, and I'll do my damnedest to avoid it. Will the average user? No. Most general web users probbanbly still maximise their windows and only have one browser window open at a time. They will read those bloody advertisements, because I'm sure it will become standard practice to ahave an awkwardly placed 'click to continue' link.
Oh, what's the use.
Tom.
Oh arse
I remember many a drunken night making up the most horrendous acronyms :) But even though I recently found it again (on flipside or something like that) it doesn't seem to get a connection to the server. And YDKJ is offline as well! I thought these could actually make some money, I still remember some of the adverts from acrophobia, and that's more than a year ago, so it must be good advertising!
ponxx
Why does it have to be Javascript?? That will be totally server side code, like CGI or JSPs. I think JavaScript's got nothing to do with it.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
If I see an interstitial ad, I click on the Close Box. Probably not the best way to get people to participate in your game show.
sulli
RTFJ.
All of it. MSNBC is the worst. That's why I always provide "printable" links on stories I refer to (or submit for immediate rejection).
sulli
RTFJ.
Berzerk Online was doing this 2 years ago with thier games... such as "You dont know Jack, the Netshow" "Acrophobia" , etc. The ads themselves were between rounds or after X number of plays, and the ads were actually kind of entertaining. They were similar to flash animations, but not quite so.. well, flashy. If only they had more than 4 ads in rotation per 2 weeks, it wouldnt have been so bad.
That has to do with every single site out there using nested tables to do their layout. It also has to do with the placement of the ad. It's the first thing up on top, which means it'll be the first thing to take a hike when you start scrolling down to read your page. If the content were to finish loading before the ad, then your eyes would never see it since you'd already be down low on the page before the ad ever got displayed. It's just a natural side-effect of HTML parsing and probably a bit of javascript.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Inklink - which is a muliplayer Pictionary type game stops for 'a word from our sponsors' 5 - 10 second ads in between rounds and sometimes in between player turns.
subvert the elitist slashdot patriarchy! (where all the stupid women at up in here?)
Or at least as well as traditional commercials. Personally, I just flip the channel, the only challenge comes from guessing how many commercials they're going to show. With all breaks exactly 7 seconds, it will make it just that much easier to switch to another browser window, and say, read a Slashdot story (and post a comment).
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
In this case, you're doubly stupid, because the whom/who issue is moot. It should be 'which'.
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You are a fucking moron.
Most [useful/popular] websites are more like books than TV. Which means you are going to start paying for content if you want it annoyance-free.
Besides, when was the last time you opened a book and had to watch a stupid 5-second commercial before you could start reading it?
"And like that
If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!
Or, they could advertise on these websites which already exist in their market.
Which is more work?
"And like that
Have you ever noticed that the banner ad at the top of a page will load and then, 20 or 30 seconds later, the page content will load around it?
This usually happens with less sophisticated web browsers that have to wait for the entire (table-enclosed) webpage to load before they can display anything. And the webmaster knows this, so he keeps the ad on the outside of the table so it loads right away...
"And like that
Consider the former for a minute. The click-thru rate for TV ads may literally be zero, but there are other roughly equivalent metrics that advertisers can use. If they run an ad and the phone starts ringing off the hook, well, that's a reasonably good sign that their ad was effective.
Advertisers -- at least some advertisers -- are also much more sophisticated about print advetising than you may think. Dell is a great example; for years (before the spread of the Web) Dell used to use different 800 numbers in different publications so they could tell which ads were getting the responses. Now if you look at their ads you'll see that all the specific configs have an "e-value code" or something like that, which conveniently enough happens to tell them not just what product you want but where you saw the ad for it. It's pretty darn nearly as informative as a banner click-through number.
OK, back to the "raise the profile of your product" argument. Sure, companies use ads for branding. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to be that Web ads suck when it comes to branding. Basically, people just ignore them. And it's not surprising, since effective branding ads on TV are generally ones that set up an emotional resonance with the viewer. It's hard enough to get someone's attention, let alone play with their emotions, in a 468x60 banner.
Also, precisely because the data for Web ads is so good, it's easy to do the math and look at your customer-acquisition cost and realize that banners not be the ticket. Say you are paying a $40 CPM (cost per thousand impressions -- why it's not CPK, I don't know) and get a 0.2% clickthrough. That means it costs $20 for every person you get to page one of your Web site. Maybe you convert one in ten of those folks. So each new customer just cost you $200 to acquire. At prices like that, you might well make the decision that it would be cheaper to, say, send a door-to-door salesperson to try to sign up new customers. (For comparison, even AOL with its incessant streams of CD-ROMs has traditionally a customer acquisition cost of around $30, IIRC. And I'm pretty sure that $200 is significantly more than the profit margin on almost any mainstream PC or consumer-electronics device.)
This isn't to say that Web advertising won't be successful in some form, someday. But banner ads as we know them today are pretty clearly inadequate. (The cynic in me says the Web is just not a medium that really allows ads in the forms we are familiar with them, because people mostly use the Web with a goal-oriented mentality rather than a "sit back and entertain me" frame of mind. Of course, that may not last forever either.)
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
... already has that.
Are there enough newbies out there to be convinced that the web is just a slow, more static version of television? What about the equivilent of channel surfing? Switching browser windows? These ads better be *Damn* fascinating to get lonely people to sit there and watch them.. Part of the attraction of TV is that you don't have to *do* anything, the web is more about making decisions, choosing a path, and I don't know a lot of people who *choose* to watch a lot of advertising unless it is 1)unique, 2)funny, 3)not been seen a thousand times before.
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
Does it work?
Well, I browse and surf the web for content. Not ads. I want to know more about, for example, gardening, how to make fountains, home repair, etc. Things that I do.
So it's a symbiotic approach. Corporate interests want me to be successful in these endeavors because it means I buy more, do more, spend more. If the various companies provide the sites and the info, while remaining branded or acknowledged, I get the info I want, and they get the presence they want.
So I don't see how this creates a problem. Coke, J&J, and John Deere hits their target audiences. The 'other' companies don't lose out; they just failed to advertise, but this metric of creating compelling sites with compelling content.
The Banner Ads only work where sites draw in viewers for people to see the Banner Ads. You can't advertise on non-existent sites, right?
The analogy to this is how tv ads sponsor and subsidize the tv shows that encapsulate and surround the ads. By making popular and successful tv shows, tv broadcasting can sell ads at high prices. By buying ads to link with popular tv shows, companies can create positive mindshare.
As per your thought that generic portals will win... it's all a matter of semantics between "portals" and generic portals. There is nothing that stops a Coke-web site from being a generic portal.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
You can change it now, with the advent of OS X!
You now have both a GUI and a command prompt =)
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Has no one realized yet how the web works?
Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.
If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!
*Grow* the market, and makes sure your name is attached to it! So create http://www.jdweb.com/Garden or http://www.jdweb.com/DIY, etc.
I think this can be expanded to *any* product. If you're Johnson and Johnson, create the home healthcare, health, and self improvement pages. Don't bother too heavily with product placement, I don't think, but when people start associating 'health' and 'wellness' with J&J, they've done good advertsing.
Let's try more esoteric examples: Coke, which sells a drink.
Actually, they sell a lifestyle, in which the drink is part of the image and the taste. Create something hip and free for people to visit; web boards, movie reviews, hiking, bike, and rollerblade info sites, etc. Sites where people can go do things, and while they are at it, drink Coke.
Safeway Foodstores could host cooking sites, with recipes. Activity sites, like Coke. BBQ sites, with hints, anecdotes, stories, and recipes. Whatever!
It's similar to how a portal works, but much more targeted.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Just like with TV, if you don't want it, don't turn it on. If you want the product then you put up with the full agreement. That's not evil, it's simply one way of paying for the product you recieve. Unlike spam, you have a choice not to enter in to the agreement.
The big difference is that only large companies can put out TV signals where as the web has a lot of amateurs that provide perfectly good content. The millionaire site is going to have to either offer something better* than what can be found already (in which case the users will think it is worth the cost) or advertising darwinism will take its toll.
*note: Better's a subjective term, the site may be dire but there're things like ease of discovery (as they'll move over from the tv show), large prizemoney, consistency, nice safe corporate branding, etc.
If anyone's played the game "Acrophobia" on Won.net now flipside.com I believe. The previous versions of the games included time out periods (commercial breaks?) where they'd play 3 or 4 15 second flash animation ads, then continue on with the game. It was rather impressive at the time, but annoying to say the least.
I imagine people using 56ks will ask themselves "Why get a better connection? I'll just be paying to download their ads faster"... it might stunt the growth of the internet... who knows?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
The article says that the "click-thru rate" for banner ads is very low, but how is this analogous to TV ads? Don't they measure TV ads by how many times it's shown, regardless of if there's action taken upon the viewer? In TV-Land, a "click-thru" would be someone actually paying attention to the commercial, which many people don't do anyhow. So, why do they measure web banner ad performance on how many clicks it receives? Isn't simply getting it out in somewhere in front of the viewer's nose the most important thing? The real measure would then be how many people buy your product after seeing your ad, not how many people PAY ATTENTION to it!! I agree with other posters, the web is not TV, no matter how they try to make it. Unfortunately the advertising media hasn't caught on to this fact yet.
All I saw/read was about contestant interactivity from home with Digital TV. I was really looking forward to reading the article on advertising methods as described in the article. Can I get my $.25 back?
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
As a matter of fact, if any page is stuck after about 20 seconds, I usually press "Stop" on my browser, and the ad that was trying to load appears as a broken GIF, while the entire text of the article I was trying to read appears like magic after I stop loading that sluggish ad.
Perhaps some of the more banner-ad-knowledgeable /.ers could comment on this phenomena..
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I think you might be right :).
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
As usual, the adult sector of the web has been doing this for years. Instead, their way of doing it is much more user and bandwidth friendly. They just interrupt the flow of HTML pages on their web sites with an occasional page that's entirely an ad. The user can get past it when they want to, and it doesn't use some crazy scheme that only works for high-bandwidth users.
none of it, I assure you. Most sites have 3rd party adserving, so they don't have control over this. It is just part of life on the web, using a slow connection. The first thing that is requested will come back first, usualy the banner at the top. Also, 3rd party adservers have very strict rules (targets?) on how long an ad serve takes, the top serving companies try to garuntee less than 2 seconds (the best do it in sub-second times).
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
"Any publicity is good publicity"
Bull, no ad campaign, no matter how great it is can make me buy a crap product more than once. I don't care how great the ad's are coke is just overpriced fizzy brown sugar water and it can stay in the drinks cooler. On the other hand an irritating or obtrusive ad campaign can and has led me to not buy the product being advertised and indeed anything made by that company.
internet advertising blew a hole in the "art" of advertising with its hard figures and cold statistics. the damage is permanent and no businessman wil take advertising agencies and marketing consultants etc seriously anymore. ..cons, all of them. die!
this gizmo will be the death blow to madison ave.
I've heard ... well, OK, I've passes a few idle hours on some web gambling sites and the (free) ones all use this method, quite effectively I'd say. Take, for example, lycos gaming, a free gambling service (free as in beer, as in you don't bet any money but you can win money), uses forced adds between games. I'd imagine they have a high rate of exposure and clickthrus since most gambling fools are just staring at the screen counter waiting for thier next fix. If you have a site with periodic content like this, forced ads are great.
*I deny sigs exist*
closed minded is as closed minded does
i'm kinda curious how one achives something like this. I don't want to advertise on my site, but I do want to display something on some pages while we're waiting for a rather lengthy query from elsewhere to arrive. I haven't really been able to find any docs/tutorials or anything on how you achieve something like this. So.. how about it?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
well, I don't know about everyone else, but maybe since we do allr realise the revenue model behind banner advertising, maybe we -should- do a few more clicks on ones that interest us. See, when I see a banner ad that does grab my attention (even if i'm not interested, if it does a good enough job to get my attention, someone deserves a click) i right-click open a new window for it. On a good long web-browsing session, I might have 8-10 windows open that i'm ignoring until after i'm done reading what i wanted to read, then i go through all the open windows and check out the links, or wherever the banner ads sent me. :-)
I hardly ever interrupt what I'm reading to begin with to go and check out a link [except when i'm at work, where opening a new window on a link is disabled], but i do always open a new browser window, wait for it to load to make sure i got something worth looking at.. and if i have time, i'll look ati t when i'm done, otherwise i bookmark it for later.
I'm also a person who tips pretty well at bars and restaurants too, not that I have a lot of money to throw around, but I understand how these people get paid, and unless their service sucks serious ass, at a bar i typically do $1/drink.. which is a lot heavier duty than most people in my area do, i think, since the bartenders/waitresses all know my name within a few visits and are all over me to serve me.
Buying influence.. works even in the small time.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
The other side of this is that the waitresses and bartenders that -do- know me, understand when i'm not so filled with money.
As a fellow programmer told me once, why save all your money till you're too old to spend it?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Many companies will frequently release the exact same product under a different name and advertise the two products seperatly to see what is more successful (I said MANY companies... I know most companies don't do this;) or market a product one way in one region of the country and differently in another region with similar characteristics.
The industry feels comfortable that advertising works - not as a leap of faith but due to experimentation. A lot of strategies in life can't be seen directly as successful that's why we have a controlled experiment procedure. I can't see antibiotics actually killing bacteria (maybe you can with the right equipment) but when I see the people that take antibiotics get better and those that don't tend not to get better I can start to come up with a theory. There are more things on earth than exist in your philosophy.
There is something along the lines of what you are talking about still online.
Goto http://www.popcap.com
It's called psychobable
http://logd.programgeeks.net/referral.php?r=lordv
You know, I always thought that when you have a slow loading web site (not like /. ) you would wnat to replace the stupid ...Please Wait... (i say stupid because they are already waiting) with ...sponsored by SomeBigCORP... in a span tag that disappears when the page displays. Hell, the user is staring at the screen, waiting, and there's nothing but white (or off gray) space on the screen, and the sponsor's name...
:)
And then, when the page does display, no ads
"Piter, too, is dead."
As interruption-based advertising gains popularity, we will start seeing browser plug-ins that can detect some sort of signature in the ads and mute them, maybe displaying some alternative content of your choice, while convincing the server that you have viewed the ads. I wonder on what grounds the advertising industry will sue the developers... copyright infringement? How about fraud? All they would have to do is stick a license agreement on the front of the content, which the muteware will be violating by lying to the server. Maybe we'll even get a DCIA (Digital Content Integrity Act) making it illegal to distribute software that alters content on the clent side.
Any bets?
People watch and remember the commercials whether they want to or not. Everyone remembers commercials no matter how irritating or stupid they are.
What type of beer the frogs keep saying? Maybe you'll recall the idiot on the front page of the newspaper that gets attached to the grill of the passing "Corr-oll-aaaahhhh?!!" Anyone remember what type of drink Britney Spears advertised? I'll bet even the ones who haven't seen it know. Perhaps, you know why the servers don't care about the merger?
If you change the station, walk away, or just attempt to ignore it, you've still seen the commercial. If a commercial gets under your skin it still works. Any publicity is good publicity. These ads will work and good advertising execs realize that click-throughs are only one way of measuring the success of an ad.
One of the basic issues this brings up is that it isn't easy to determine the impact of advertising. Aside from direct-purchase type ads (your K-Tel/Ronco variety) the internet is the first medium that routinely provides an avenue for direct response. It's inevitable that this leads to an assumption that you can guage the success of a banner ad by whether it provokes immediate response. This doesn't account for the fact that people want to keep looking at what they're looking at, not immediately go shopping for doodads. Often by the time you've browsed around a bit on the site you're on, even if you were interested in an ad it's gone, because most banners cycle. There are basically only two methods to determine whether advertising is working, and both are imperfect. One is to look for an increase in consumer response to a product. This is flawed because it doesn't establish a direct causal link between the advertising and increased sales. Still, in the absence of visible cofactors, the manufacturer will assume that a sales surge correlates to an advertising campaign. The bottom line is for whatever reason they got the effect they wanted. The second method is to pay someone to actually perform a more or less random (depending on how you define the group you wish to reach) survey of consumers to see if the ads had an impact on their attitudes/consumption habits. This could be performed before or after the fact. It's flawed becuase respondees tend to be to some degree self-selected, and becuase they're being prompted for response, meaning the response they give is not necessarily natural.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
on the one hand this is a far more effective way to advertise, and with the death of so many banner ad comanies in the last couple of months, I can't say i don't understand it.
However, I personally perfer going online, to watching TV precisly because I don't have to wait 2 out of every 15 mins for some crap to flash on my screen... personally i don't like it...
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
> none of it, I assure you.
None?
Assuredly?
You say that the advertisers demand fast banner loads; but of course the rest of the page has no such requirement. Then you imply that no webpage owner ever sat and thought "you know, I might be able to charge a little more if I can guarantee that the banner ad will be the only thing on the screen for a few seconds; if the click-through goes up a little because of the increased attention it gets; if I pin the viewer's eyeballs on the only shiny object in sight..."
N.B.: I always knew how it worked; that table loads are a pig, and ad-servers are usually the best connected sites on the web. But it's interesting that banner ads are frequently not in the same table as every other byte of foreground on the page. I think that tactical HTML design could be a marketable consulting specialty, now that we're done hiring HTML coders just because they can read a Dummies book.
--Blair
Have you ever noticed that the banner ad at the top of a page will load and then, 20 or 30 seconds later, the page content will load around it?
How much of that do you suppose is deliberate?
--Blair
The interesting thing about advertising in the UK is that since people pay a TV tax, commercials are viewed as an intrusion on people's time. So, the quality of commercials from the UK are generally higher than they are in the US.
Let's hope this same philosophy applies to these interstitials!
CNN's website already does this sort of thing. Before you can watch a video clip of theirs, they send a brief commercial. They also show a commercial (usually the same one) after the clip ends. It doesn't seem to make too many people unhappy, plus it helps CNN pay for the bandwidth I'm using and for the content. NBC has also been experimenting with web-broadcasting, which includes the commercials one would regularly see on TV anyways. It's a pretty fair way to go if you ask me.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Banner ads *could* work.
If I knew that when I clicked on a banner ad that it would lead me to a decently-designed web page that would:
a) Give me information about the product
b)Give me information to contact the company about/purchase the item
c) Not waste my time
Then I would be a banner ad clicking fool. The s/n on banner ads is too high. I click the banner ads here on slashdot because they tend to be of higher quality (ThinkGeek tops the list, in my mind)
If there were an industry created regulating body (eAdsSeal?) that put a stamp of approval on ads (in the right hand corner or something, think BetterBusinessBeaurau (I can never spell that word)) I would be more likely to click them, if that seal meant that the ad would satisfy my criteria stated above.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
.. simple filter scanning http stream and replacing N second refresh with 0 second one should do nicely. :)
3.243F6A8885A308D313
This isn't a wholly new idea. Marvel uses a similar tactic in their online comics. The comics are designed to work like a regular comic complete with full page advertisments. Unlike a regular comic, you can't just skip the page. It was inevitable, it's new technology adapting to old methods.
When you choose a web page link while using WebTV, you are sometimes presented with a banner-like ad while the new page is fetched. If you choose the ad, you're redirected to the ad's page, if not you continue to the new page as you originally intended.
I think this is a rather nice and unintrusive way to advertise, since I wouldn't otherwise be doing anything else while waiting for a page to load. Of course, this is taking advantage of a latency that I'd prefer to avoid in the first place...
Yes, they don't realize people don't want advertising. At the beginning of advertising, people complained, but the ads were not intrusive so it was ok. People just ignored them, and the click rate was very low.
Then the ads got bigger and went right in the middle of article. People complained again, and there wasn't much more clicking.
Now, they are going to force us into seeing the ads. I guess the result will be: more complains, no more clicking, and fewer hits.
Well will they understand?
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My real-life Karma is higher than my
but people have selective attention. They ignore extra information and only retain what they pay attention to. I have a free internet service, and I find that my eyes never drift to where the banner lies. If there is to be commercials online, people will just sit and wait, and not do anything until their original destination comes up.
I have seen several sights trying to just what 2nd Post! suggests. Most notably is the Jack Daniels web site which I am currently unable to access because I'm behind my company's stupid proxy server, I think http://www.jackdaniels.com. Cool contests, promotions, recipes, etc. Very effective in raising brand awareness.
...'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' deserve to watch commercials. Lots of commercials.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]
Acrophobia, an online acronynm game from the creators of You Dont Know Jack have done this for some time. The ads look almost shockwave based and appeared to be part of the initial download and the download before each game started. So they didnt actually interrupt your in game play. If you want a gander as to how this works, check out acrophobia: http://www.flipside.com/games/party/acro/
This isn't a new fancy idea at all. Anyone who has played You Dont Know Jack online, has seen this one... and I'm pretty sure that these projects are both headed up by the same people.
People are inherently stupid - I prefer computers.
I just surf slashdot during commercials.